Yay! About time. Predicted this since 2015. There's money to be had from this wonderful IP, not least with its success in the virtual world. So anyone who said it's dead clearly wasn't paying attention to Creative Assembly, for instance - in any case headcanon reigns supreme at the end of the day. Count me among the crowd who shrugged at the End Times and ignored them as false alarm. Anyone who's seen me continue to write
Chaos Dwarf stories like nothing happened can attest.
Rountree has not only salvaged Age of Sigmar and made it a financial success, but is now getting round to re-releasing Warhammer Fantasy's Old World. Kirby's destructive legacy is healing at long last. Good to see. This is indeed a victory for you.
The reason for GW putting out this message 2-3 years in advance of a release is surely to gauge the community's reception, and allocate resources thereafter. And boy, what a reception! The news has gone like an electric jolt through the entire fantasy wargaming community. Old members are back, activating accounts and talking about it. People are staging 8th edition Christmas games to celebrate, in hobby groups that recently had lived a shrunk existence after End Times. And the Ninth Age forums are of course in something of an uproar. It's a riot, and people are damning that project's worse aspects and comparing it unfavourably to Warhammer.
A word of caution as regards T9A, though: It won't go away. There is a minority of players who are concerned with balance, especially tournament players. They've gone on for years without Games Workshop, and can easily continue to do so. It started with the Swedish Composition System following the Dark Elves-Daemons of Chaos-Vampire Counts tour de force in 7th edition. T9A will however shrink as its place in the sun of the void left by WFB will be filled by Games Workshop anew in some fashion. The days of rage and sorrow are over. T9A will have to swim or sink on its own merits.
This is especially true in its background department: If they manage to turn out quality illustrated background that have a broader appeal, and sports both more punch, darkness and wacky humour than at present, then there may yet be a future for the Ninth Age as a setting. They can after all potentially expand the world in detail with ever more fantasy cultures to a much greater degree than Games Workshop are ever likely to do, so there may yet be a future for T9A as the king of niches and generator of fantasy concepts that other settings, authors and artists in time may borrow from. It remains to be seen if they can rise to the challenge, or fall by the wayside as a redundant Warhammer clone. T9A was in any case never destined to be anything resembling mainstream, instead it was always obviously going to live a niche existence like so many community rule sets in historical wargaming.
Examples of fantasy cultures proposed for T9A by various artists.
There is too much invested in that community effort for it to die off quickly, or at all. Members of T9A team I've talked to takes this piece of news in stride (unlike many of their forum members, haha). It remains to be seen if they can step up their publication efforts and plant good memories about itself among players before the Old World returns in force, so that more may remember it and potentially check it out again in the future. Independent companies like Avatars of War will also continue to back the Ninth Age: They can't switch sides and instead support Mantic or GW, after all, and T9A is mainly a free news outlet for their new releases in any case. Any extra sales derived thereof are worth the little copy-paste hassle.
Anyhow, something I'm very curious about, is whether Games Workshop will take the chance to delve into more areas of the Warhammer World.
Albion, Vampire Coast or Cathay, for instance.
Nippon in the 1980s, not seen in miniature form ever since. This could be especially doable if the new Warhammer Fantasy take is more limited in scope than the vast army books of the past, with all their demands for miniature kits. The army book format in and of itself became a creative straitjacket for the GW studio. In the 1980s, they were free to release a handful of new figures whenever they felt like it, and thus explore Nippon, Halflings, Norsca, Fimir or a plethora of monsters with small investment of resources. In the 1990s-2000s, they were increasingly bound up in the demands of the army book threadmill. If they wanted to release something new, it had to either be a complete new army, or just something small on the spin-off side such as specialist games and Dreadfleet (for which the market wasn't good in those days, or at least marketing under Kirby wasn't up to the task) or summer campaign miniatures such as the Hellcannon, Middenheim and Albion miniatures delving into niche concepts.
Kislev during 6th edition: A mini-army, later unsupported. We did see Dogs of War and
Chaos Dwarfs as a small new army in the 1990s (unsupported after 5th edition up to 8th), and a small army for Kislev in 6th edition, unsupported thereafter. Warmaster sported Araby, but Warmaster was not a great hit. Ogre Kingdoms was the one new big army, or one of two if you count the Daemons of Chaos' expanded range, and it needed an entire miniature range.
Chaos Dwarfs: 1990s army, yet left out in the cold for most of Warhammer Fantasy. Then there were fun thematic armies in White Dwarf, such as Kemmler's Barrow legion, Vampire Coast, Clan Moulder and the Gnoblar Horde. Building on existing modelling ranges and often requiring conversions: Which was part of the fun, for sure, but ensured it stayed a tiny niche and opened up for small companies to produce models GW weren't. This problem of inviting in the small competition to open new niches was much exacerbated when studio designers during 7th edition introduced new units in army lists which did not yet sport official models, such as Forsaken.
Dreadfleet: One last exploratory hurrah before the End Times. This commercial bind ultimately put dampeners on Warhammer's creative potential: It is huge, and can be explored to much greater extent with a more limited setup than army book-threadmill WFB of old. But ultimately GW would want to produce models for anything peripheral they delve into, and that mean they may well shy away from introducing more things on the periphery of the background, to not give competitors possible bones to snatch.
Fimir: A weird 1980s creation because the CEO wanted Warhammer to have its very own fantasy race. Resurrected lately by Forgeworld after decades of hibernation. So there may be little in the way of brand new additions to the glorious setting, such as Inca Dwarfs in Lustria, fantasy Songhai and so on. And there may potentially also be little in the way of covering already existing periphery stuff such as Kureshi Nagas, Albion, Ind, Norsca and so on; this obviously depends on commercial success, how limited in scope the new game and miniature ranges will be, and on budget or will within the studio.
This is a long-standing limit to driving the creative potential of Games Workshop's own grimdark, historically based, classic fantasy smörgåsbord setting to the hilt. It remains to be seen if and how GW will tackle this obstacle.
And now, party!
Cheers