Tubis
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Posts: 228
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Post by Tubis on Sept 7, 2019 23:31:52 GMT
Soooo... have any of you guys listened through this? soundcloud.com/eye-of-horus-podcast/the-elector-counts-episode-11-matt-wardThe interview starts around 1:50 - warning, a lot of foul language as one of the hosts does his best to be incredibly obnoxious (which distracted me to no end). A couple of interesting takeaways: - By the time the End Times rolled out he was only responsible for the lore, not the rules writing. He participated in creating the narrative for the books together with Jeremy Vettock, Phil Kelly and someone else I didn't catch. - Although he chooses his words carefully (and he is obviously a well-spoken man), I could sense he wasn't thrilled with the Old World getting canned. He speaks a lot about being handed a super difficult task and trying to make the most of it. Literally just "killing it and turning the lights off". - His comments about Bretonnia and that "all they had discussed through the years was put into the Nagash book", made me realize GW had absolutely no clue what to do with them since the 6th ed book. That is way more depressing, than all the rumours about supposed development plans that got cancelled. - He did not seem to think that there was any point of pitching a cathay or an albion army to the management and that it would be very difficult to market. I think this reflects the overall mental attitude of GW's management during the 7th - 8th ed times. Come to think of it, they weren't really taking many risks by introducing new armies or products - just adding to the existing ranges or replacing metal units with plastic. Whereas the new GW has really made a 180 and is just basically exploring every bit of old fluff/idea they can find. Which I find much better, even though most of their products aren't for me anymore. - He did acknowledge that new army books had a lot of copy-paste fluff from previous editions, but that it was impossible to remove it as most players were pretty attached to it. It also wouldn't make sense, as this fluff was by this point the history of the world. This left very little room for pushing the narrative forward or just exploring some new ideas. - He also said that by the time he was leaving, the writing team has actually shrunk in comparison to 6th edition times, when he joined in. Well...that explains a lot! - There is also talk about his current work and his involvement in Vermintide. Anyways an interesting listen.
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Post by knoffles on Sept 8, 2019 9:05:43 GMT
It was a great listen. They've also interviewed Tuomas Pirinen (he who wrote 6th and Mordheim).
They do swear quite a bit but they are Aussies so it is to be expected. I think its the best podcast out there at present, mainly as it makes me laugh a lot, though I admit that am biased as I chat with Rene quite a bit.
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Tubis
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Posts: 228
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Post by Tubis on Sept 8, 2019 21:49:33 GMT
Oooh, now I'm gonna look for the Tuomas interview. What a legend!
I dunno why it irked me so much, normally I'm not against swearing. Just felt out of place here, with how their speaker acted and talked.
Is Rene the Tasmanian chap? He was cool.
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Post by knoffles on Sept 9, 2019 5:27:43 GMT
Yep he’s the Tasmanian chap.
There is also another current Podcast called: The Old World Lives made by some Swedish chaps. They are very much aimed at 6th edition but I mention them as Tuomas has also been interviewed by them.
I have to say with regards to Tuomas, he is fully active on most of the Warhammer Facebook pages and will often answer questions put to him around RAI or lore. The downside is he left GW before 8th so it’s pretty much only about 6th ed.
Also if you are on FB and like your middlehammer models, look for a page called: Trish Carden Miniatures and Design. This is Trish (as in Trish and Aly Morrison) who designed half of The Marauder Miniatures range and then went on to work for GW and Forgeworld until very recently. She’s been posting original sculpts of her models and talking about the design process.
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Post by mottdon on Sept 9, 2019 13:00:46 GMT
Now are we talking about our own imrillian here?
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Post by lordofskullpass on Sept 9, 2019 13:41:59 GMT
- His comments about Bretonnia and that "all they had discussed through the years was put into the Nagash book", made me realize GW had absolutely no clue what to do with them since the 6th ed book. That is way more depressing, than all the rumours about supposed development plans that got cancelled. That is certainly saddening to hear, especially as they kept on making the lore more and more Empire-centric. Honestly I have always felt that Bretonnia should have been the protagonist race because they were closer to being good guys than the Empire, who were still divided by city states and were always fighting amongst themselves for petty reasons, yet Bretonnia still had some grimdark stuff to them to avoid them becoming Stormcast. To see that GW abandoned them right since 6th Edition in favour of those fractious neo-Germans is just so infuriating. Whereas the new GW has really made a 180 and is just basically exploring every bit of old fluff/idea they can find. Which I find much better, even though most of their products aren't for me anymore. Just a pity that this new GW only arose after Fantasy had been killed off and the calamities that were Age of Sigmar First Edition and 40K 7th Edition had arisen. Just imagine what they could have done with Fantasy, given that the new GW brought back Genestealer Cults to 40K after they had been dropped all the way back in 3rd Edition. - He did acknowledge that new army books had a lot of copy-paste fluff from previous editions, but that it was impossible to remove it as most players were pretty attached to it. It also wouldn't make sense, as this fluff was by this point the history of the world. This left very little room for pushing the narrative forward or just exploring some new ideas. This makes sense, and to be honest I wasn't really bothered by this. I was more worried about what was happening to the game. - By the time the End Times rolled out he was only responsible for the lore, not the rules writing. He participated in creating the narrative for the books together with Jeremy Vettock, Phil Kelly and someone else I didn't catch. - Although he chooses his words carefully (and he is obviously a well-spoken man), I could sense he wasn't thrilled with the Old World getting canned. He speaks a lot about being handed a super difficult task and trying to make the most of it. Literally just "killing it and turning the lights off". - He also said that by the time he was leaving, the writing team has actually shrunk in comparison to 6th edition times, when he joined in. Well...that explains a lot! To be honest, I haven't really had many objections to Ward's work, despite the anger of many out there toward him, because I'm a big fan of the 5th Edition Necron rework that he did. The 3rd Edition Necrons did have grimdarkness aplenty and looked good, but the separate ideas of Egyptian aesthetics and Terminator rules names seemed to clash a bit in my view, and also there was no potential for named characters other than the C'Tan (who were themselves pretty small models for full-scale deities). The 5th Edition Space Tomb Kings version really fleshed them out a lot more, gave them named characters, allowed all these new units to really diversify their roster and made them good against the other 5th Edition armies (as in early 5th Edition Necrons stood alongside Dark Eldar as being the Bretonnia of 40K with their rules still dating from 3rd Edition). I personally feel more annoyed at how GW let Robin Cruddace's nerfing of other armies in favour of Imperial Guard go under their noses than Matt Ward's stuff, as that is a very underhanded thing to do and echoes the sins of a Napoleonic rules writer named Bruce Quarrie, who buffed the Russians to infinity because he liked Russians (even though the Russians were the horde army of the Napoleonic Wars with large numbers of individually awful troops). I'm pretty sure this is also how Warriors of Chaos became so overpowered by the latter editions of Fantasy. Therefore, this news of killing Warhammer Fantasy being the crime of the supreme management at GW HQ rather than the individual writers is pretty satisfying, as I think we should cut Mr. Ward some slack.
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Post by knoffles on Sept 9, 2019 14:37:21 GMT
Now are we talking about our own imrillian here? yep
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Post by mottdon on Sept 9, 2019 15:55:54 GMT
Now are we talking about our own imrillian here? yep Gotcha. I need to catch up. I just have to be careful that one of my kids doesn't overhear all the profanity. They're VERY MUCH in the "repeat whatever I hear" phase right now. Don't need them doing that in church (or anywhere for that matter).
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Post by knoffles on Sept 9, 2019 18:17:59 GMT
Gotcha. I need to catch up. I just have to be careful that one of my kids doesn't overhear all the profanity. They're VERY MUCH in the "repeat whatever I hear" phase right now. Don't need them doing that in church (or anywhere for that matter). I understand that. My daughter has started to say bugger. Can’t think where she picked that up from.
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Post by mottdon on Sept 9, 2019 19:46:17 GMT
It's scary to think about all of the influences they'll come into contact with, that we have no idea about. All we can do is set a good example, talk with them about what is acceptable and hope they make good choices when time comes.
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Tubis
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Posts: 228
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Post by Tubis on Sept 12, 2019 11:51:41 GMT
That is a shame and a great "what if"? It is true that back in the early 2010's they were supposedly bleeding money because of their Lotr venture. So maybe this also made them hold back on taking risks and trying new things. I am happy they have changed so much, even though their rules writing could still improve A LOT.
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Post by sedge on Sept 12, 2019 12:26:44 GMT
I'd thought LoTR had had a positive effect on GW's finances? It was massively popular when the films were coming out, and got them the revenue to really push on their plastics technology, funding large plastic models like the Balrog, Nazgul etc. that allowed WFB to benefit later on from the High Elf dragon onwards. Yes, by the 2010s, LoTR was waning massively, but I don't think it was holding them back - perhaps they'd just got complacent at how well it had done for them.
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Tubis
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Posts: 228
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Post by Tubis on Sept 12, 2019 13:31:47 GMT
I remember reading it ended up pretty bad. I imagine there was a steady decline in buyers, yet the range was pretty huge. I can't prove it in any way of course, it's just stuff I've read over forums ages ago.
I wonder how is Lotr doing after the new edition dropped.
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Post by lordofskullpass on Sept 17, 2019 9:20:17 GMT
I'd thought LoTR had had a positive effect on GW's finances? It was massively popular when the films were coming out, and got them the revenue to really push on their plastics technology, funding large plastic models like the Balrog, Nazgul etc. that allowed WFB to benefit later on from the High Elf dragon onwards. Yes, by the 2010s, LoTR was waning massively, but I don't think it was holding them back - perhaps they'd just got complacent at how well it had done for them. I blame it upon the changes they made to faction structure and the rules for army-building in the dreaded February 2012 update - originally you could have as many heroes and units you wanted as long as you had at least one hero as your general, but in this update they changed it so that you had to have a hero for every 'warband' of 12 non-hero models, to force people to buy more hero models. In the updated sourcebooks they also cut out all creativity from the Dwarf army lists (my personal grudge). In the latest edition it's a bit more flexible now, as if you have only Heroes of Legend you can have larger warbands of 18 models and thus need less heroes in the army, but the echoes of February 2012 still remain.
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Post by imrillion on Nov 5, 2019 2:34:05 GMT
shit, i need to get on here more often. We're gettin Matt back on the 16th of this month. Any one have any questions raised from the interview? I wont bombard the poor prick with a bunch of new ones, unless ppl RLY need answers for closure n shit
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