Warhammer Fantasy Battle….'returns'??

[slayerofworldsParticipant 3449xp 6]

 

Is it just me, or is everyone just jumping way to far ahead of themselves.

It never says they are bringing back Warhammer Fantasy Battles, they never call what they plan to do WFB.  The only refer to the old world over and over; the lore of the old world, the heroes of the old lore, and etc.  Then they flash some square bases, and everyone just forgets everything else.

They never say they are bringing WFB, because they aren’t.  WFB is dead and buried.   What ever they come up with, will never be WFB.  It will be simplified, it will streamlined.   Most importantly it will be aimed directly at selling new models, not your old collections.   GW doesn’t care about your old WFB armies in the slightest.

They will just do what they did with AoS.  Here are some shit army lists for your legacy armies, and they always will be shit.  Your old armies will be just fine, but these new models/units…  wow look just how much better they are in comparison.  Oh, yeah… what comparison,  they will just be obviously better by leaps and bounds.

Seriously, this all reminds me of an abusive relationship.

They treat the WFB community like it doesnt matter.   Bleed them for new sales and the promise of a new edition.  Big things are coming, just not for you.  They blow up everything you hold dear, tell you it doesnt matter and just expect you to be okay with it, cause hey you can still use your models.

When you get angry, or build up confidence to just say screw it and walk away.   They dangle out legacy army lists and tell you bases don’t matter.  You can play any way you want.    Always doing the bare minimum to keep people around one moment and then dropping negative slights  to keep you down the next.   Here is your legacy army lists,  with stupid insulting joke rules…. haha…  cause you are children after all.

You hear for years that the idea “rank and file” wargames are dead, and that they will never be back.  No one wants to play that kind of a game anymore.   AoS is the future, its perfect.   Just play AoS, its the big shiny.

Oh, look… other companies are making money on rank and file games.   WTF.   Cant have that, hey we got one of those…. in a few years… maybe three or four…. possibly, sorta maybe.   I mean look…  Sisters of Battle are back, after only what…  forever.  So there look,  Im still good for you… just stay.   Let me show you I can change.

Games Workshop has never, and will never, change.  This is all about potential sales.   Look at games they have brought back in the last year, was that for the gamers…. or was that to cash in on an insanely high secondary market demand.  It wasn’t for gamers.   They did it cause it brought money.

What else will be happening in three years.  Oh, yeah they will be easily out of old IPs to bring back for new sales.   AoS will be on its downward spiral, as people stop buying as much…  once an army gets so big most players move on.   Ever old IP they have brought back, will have gone stale by then.  Because none of them are all that deep.

That’s all this is, a potential grab in the future,  which I guarantee will not be what anyone wants it to be or expects it to be.

Just saying, GW hasn’t changed.

 

 

 

[irredeemable 3742xp 7]

@slayerofworlds

Of course GW hasn’t changed. It’s been a business designed to make money from the day it started. WHFB was created to get people to buy units of minis rather than single playing pieces for RPGs. They set out to make money and they do that by selling minis. If they make your old armies perfectly viable you don’t buy new minis and they don’t make money.

If you want to use old armies, use old rules.

If GW had, in any way, thought they could make WHFB profitable with a 9th edition they would have done so. They didn’t kill it out of spite, they killed it because it was financially sinking into the mire. A community holding a game dear doesn’t keep it alive. Buying new releases does.

We don’t know if it’s actually getting a relaunch or in what shape it’ll arrive but maybe GW have realised that relaunching games that have been absent a while works pretty well.

When they announced Blood Bowl was going to be relaunched all the same salty arguments were made from old players that couldn’t tell enough people how they weren’t going to come back to the game and how 3rd party companies were now flying the flag and had better minis and GW had screwed up and blah blah blah..

Every new Blood Bowl release sees the cards, pitches and dice sell out within days. What a blunder.

I honestly can’t understand your anger at them bringing back old games. You say they’re only interested in sales as if that’s some evil masterplan, and not the entire point of the company since its inception. If GW sold ovens it wouldn’t be because they purely wanted to see people get hot meals…

[theamazingmrgParticipant 2703xp 0]

And the strip-mining of the past continues.

[elessar2590 18207xp 5]

[steelrainingParticipant 756xp 1]

How do you turn Fantasy Battles into The Horus Heresy? That story has been told in depth, up until the End Times. That was, in some way, the Old World’s equivalent of The Siege Of Terra. It’s a closed arc. So is this a retcon? Or just an excuse for some reprints of the old material.

Also, after hearing of a “high end mass battles game coming from Forge World” my wallet needed some CPR.

[zoidpinhead 12492xp 3]

It is as interesting to see the reaction to this news as much as the news itself. Predictably the Internet surpasses all other media in its ability to focus on the extremes of dichotomy.

As quite a few commenters above have pointed out this is actually a logical decision (and savvy bit of marketing) from a business that wants to tap into an income stream they haven’t paid any attention to recently. By allowing that particular game (Mass combat, ‘classic’ fantasy wargame set in their “historic” setting) to lie fallow the nature of our hobby will always either see the idea fade away totally or create market potential. They spotted that there is still significant positive nostalgia and that has developed the earning potential sufficiently for such a game to return.

Personally I enjoyed the Old World setting and would probably consider looking at this game when it eventually hits in a couple of years. That isn’t a guarantee that I’ll buy in though. I thought I’d be all-in on any new Star Wars mass combat game but just haven’t been inspired by Legion.

More choice is positive for the industry. Nobody is forcing anyone to game the GW way or makes you part with your money. These are choices and more choice feels more positive than negative to me.

[limburger 21704xp 4]

@steelraining they do it the same way comic books reboot their franchises over and over …

I’d argue that the reboot is going to be more like Total Warhammer and less like anything you might remember from the original series. I hope they learn a few things from KoW 3rd edition and other companies.

@slayerofworlds any company looks at what is profitable and tries to either create a new trend of follow the herd.
If GW were to react out of emotion then they would be doomed.

WFB was not profitable (enough) for them to want to continue. As such killing the franchise and switching to AoS made sense.

The same thing happened to their old specialist games. None of them were profitable enough in a time when they needed every penny. The reformed ‘specialist’ section has allowed them to experiment with limited editions of concepts that minimized risk to the rest of the company. I wouldn’t be surprised if this WFB reboot is the result of a successful experiment that has gained traction at upper management.

Companies never care about their customers, unless it is counter productive not to do so.

The free army lists were a stop gap to allow people a chance to try the new system without making investments.
The same thing with the Indexes released for 8th edition.

Given that they sell models first and rules second it shouldn’t have been a surprise that a lot of content that wasn’t making them any money got removed.

I only wish they had the guts to ditch all the web-only content as well … although that would reduce most codexes to half their size (or less) and it would make it obvious what 3 armies are their favourites.

 

[starminerParticipant 4127xp 1]

I think this might make my wife happy if they bring back Bretonnians. They were her army of choice, and she was severely disappointed when they killed off that range. I feel the same about Tomb Kings. The new Ossiarch range is OK, and thought it would scratch that itch, but it missed the mark slightly in my opinion.

I do miss the Old World, though I love the energy and direction of Age of Sigmar now that it’s been fleshed out for a few years.

 

 

[blastercaMember 234xp 0]

Yeah, *The Old World* is coming back. Probably with more Black Library support, as it’s to be to Age of Sigmar what the Horus Heresy is to Warhammer 40,000.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/11/15/old-world-new-warhammer/

 

Blaster was here… & doesn’t play either iteration of Warhammer Fantasy

 

[admiralandy 1647xp 0]

Its ok we have Warlord, Perrys, Victrix and Gripping Beast these days. Or Wargames Foundry and some old GW ranges still there, and Mantic.

[dragonbreathParticipant 1080xp 1]

Interesting. From their own website. The death of the Old World gave rise to the most successful fantasy game ever in Age of Sigmar so to celebrate in two, three or more years…once the families of the old neckbeards have sent them off on a pyre of their old gaming table dragged up from the basement where they keeled over, and the drooling WHFB grognards are rolling imaginary dice…then we will excavate the rotting corpse of OUR fantasy game and see if there really is a sucker, er, customer born every minute. I may have embellished that last part a little bit. Just a little.

[torros 23816xp 0]

@admiralandy    Plus many many more

[kiranamida 5791xp 2]

Queue repeating this thread in two to four years when they actually announce what it is and we know what it’ll cost.

[lawnor 25939xp 1]

DELETED – Accidental mispost meant for WAYPN.  Please ignore my stupidity.

[totsuzenheniParticipant 5651xp 0]

That’s a bit of a segue @lawnor. Did you mean to post that in this topic?

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