Firstly – the bad news for all Oldhammer players. The Old World is not a new Warhammer Fantasy Battles. It is not going to be like 6th, 7th or 8th. It is certainly not going to be 9th. For those of you who are imagining a return to Warhammer Fantasy battles, sorry guys, its not going to happen how you imagine it. (I play WFB too)
The evidence for this is fairly simple and has either been confirmed or officially released:
1. GW had major issues with the fanbase’s spending. Whether you agree or disagree doesn’t matter. Fact is, most of the fans had big armies and weren’t spending money. The buy in for Fantasy battles was huge. So you didn’t really have new blood coming in as younger players weren’t bothered or couldn’t afford it, or their parents wouldn’t, and most older players had armies they’d spent years on and weren’t investing time or money in new releases.
This was mainly due to one change they made in 8th Edition - the Horde rule, which encouraged people to buy more models to make these massive units of infantry. If they got rid of this in Warhammer: The Old World, and made infantry and cavalry about the same in power rather than cavalry being objectively weaker, this issue would be mitigated somewhat.
2. Plot holes. They’d spent decades building very traditional fantasy lore but it meant there was no real reason for High Elves to fight Tomb Kings, for example. Yes there are stories for it. But why would Teclis, who is in-canon over in place X, be fighting in place Y? In 40k they had the warp to explain that. For AoS they purposely created Realm Gates so any character, from any faction, could reasonably fight another.
2) Rubbish, the fluff has plenty of reasons for everyone to fight each other.
Agreed with
sedge . One faction could travel over the sea to fight the other. Perhaps the High Elves stole an artefact from a Tomb King's treasure hoard (you know what the Tomb Kings are like in wanting their stuff back), or the High Elves are searching for an Elven Waystone somewhere deep in Nehekhara and the Tomb Kings see this as a transgression. Anyone can make up a backstory for any engagement as long as they have a decent imagination.
4. There is already a Warhammer Fantasy Battles game. It’s called, Warhammer Fantasy Battles. GW are not going to make another game when there already is a game for that system
4) Wot? No, there's Age of Sigmar, a different game. There's no officially supported Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Next.
As
sedge says, Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition does still exist, but it's currently
unsupported. If GW had kept 8th Edition on the back-burner and occasionally released FAQs and updates for it, it would be daft for them to make a new one unless it was a full-on 9th Edition, but they're not.
5. Money. Warhammer Fantasy Battles was a rank and file game. However, you may have noticed that AoS’s scale has increased more to 32mm and with a HUGE focus on BIG minis (see what I did there?). GW’s profit margin on the bigger kits is much larger than the smaller rank and file. That’s why every faction gets big monsters, big terrain and so on. Warhammer Fantasy has 25mm small dudes. AoS, 40K has 32mm chaos warriors and marines and mounted heroes and now the new giants and knights etc. The kits are bigger, because profits are better.
5) Right, and WFB kits got bigger. They sold Putrid Blightkings for WFB, Demigryphs etc. And kits like Witch Elves at £35 for 10 they'll make plenty on.
Agreed, all they need to do is supply any remaining Warhammer Fantasy plastic kits that survive with both square and round bases like they did with Daemons of Chaos kits back in the old days, so that you can use them in either TOW or AoS. That wouldn't be much extra cost, and you'd be capitalising from both AoS and Fantasy players at once. That sounds profitable to me.
6. Rules. Warhammer Fantasy Rules had become very complex and deep. The fact is there isn’t a demand for this type of game now. GW are focused on creating skirmish games that can be played in 30-60mins, or larger games that are 1-2 hours. Not 4+. This is why Warcry, Aos, 40K all had rules released the way they did. It’s hard to sell a game when the rules alone cost £40, then buy a £30 codex. The desire people have for guessing ranges, complex movement – you aren’t going to get it this. GW is NOT looking backward.
Ultimately GW doesn’t believe it can win back the older players and as such will not waste months and a lot of money trying.
On the contrary, if they do what the old fanbase want (make TOW a Warhammer Fantasy 9th Edition with accessible plastic minis) they will win them back. If they don't, the old fanbase won't be won back. Simple as that.
Blood Bowl showed this with some of the fanbase reaction its release, with many players simply using their older teams and not buying new minis, or, reacting negatively to rules changes. That is why support for that game has slowed, drastically. GW fears the same reaction for any WFB releases and so isn’t going to do them. Period.
Honestly I think the reaction would be much worse if TOW was vastly different from Fantasy, because the old fanbase just wouldn't play it, and less of the new players inspired by the video games would play it because it would be too different from what they wanted as well.
So what IS the Old World?
Here’s what is known.
1. It is set in the time of the 3 Emperors civil war.
We knew this from the video GW shared with us on Warhammer Community. Most of the Warhammer Fantasy factions existed then, if not all of them, so there shouldn't be too much change. Next.
We were assuming this since that 'everything comes round again, even squares' slogan they put up on various media. Next.
From the above and speaking to my friends, here is known:
2. There will be a focus on strong, unique IP (so yes, some lore changes)
Hmm, messing with the lore is going to upset people. If GW want TOW to be a successful investment of their money, they can't afford to upset people. Look what happened when AoS First Edition came out and replaced 8th Edition Fantasy - GW had a worldwide mutiny on their hands.
I'd also be interested to hear who this chap's 'friends' are, whether they're just some blokes wishlisting what they want like this chap probably is, or if they are actual GW employees.
-The human factions of the Empire will all be explored in greater detail with each faction getting its own unique selling and gameplay facets. Humans will be the focus, with different regions getting unique rules and units.
-It will almost certainly be only Empire (at least to start).
This would be an absolutely horrendous way to go about making TOW. If people wanted to play Renaissance Germans vs more Renaissance Germans, what's to stop them going over to Warlord and starting Pike and Shotte? If GW really tried bringing back Warhammer Fantasy without including the actual fantasy aspect of it, I could only see it crashing and burning. Only a relatively small percentage of Warhammer Fantasy fans (probably about 10-20%) play the Empire (as opposed to 40K where about 50% or more of the playerbase play Imperium and Chaos armies because of GW upping the Imperium vs Chaos storyline in 7th and 8th), so a game that specifically revolves around the Empire with Bretonnian and Kislev guest stars won't be nearly as popular as The Horus Heresy (which is itself only popular with a fraction of the 40K Imperium vs Chaos playerbase), let alone Warhammer Fantasy Battles 8th Edition and earlier. I'm actually going to quote something I've said on Lustria Online with reference to TOW:
"Since GW first announced it, I've always seen TOW as being intended to appeal to two specific playerbases that their current range doesn't yet attract:
- Those players who started Fantasy in the Good Old Days and were repulsed from GW when the transition to AoS came round and have never come back, continuing to play their favourite edition of Fantasy at home and with mates in defiance
- Those people who have fallen in love with the Warhammer Fantasy world through Warhammer: Total War and were annoyed when they first went to GW and found that Warhammer Fantasy no longer existed as a game."
If GW really were stupid enough to mess with the setting and the factions too much, they would be shooting themselves in the foot big-time, because too many changes will repel too many individuals from Target Audience 1, 2 or both. They really need to be careful with how they do this because otherwise it will just be an opportunity wasted.
Personally I think they've already made quite a big mistake in relegating all new releases to Forge World, because not only will moulds for FW stuff arguably cost more to make than moulds for plastic minis, but also a lot of Target Audience 2 and some of Target Audience 1 are going to be put off by Forge World's especially crazy prices. Ultimately I don't think this strategy will help GW make enough money to justify the costs.
I'm hoping that GW might well do something like they did with Middle Earth and bring back all the plastic miniatures that existed at the end of Fantasy, as it's obvious they kept at least some of the moulds from Fantasy kits due to the Made to Order scheme releasing Finecast characters, it would be far cheaper to re-use existing moulds than create new ones for the same units, and it would invite players from both aforementioned Target Audiences to get stuck in with the more affordable prices, while they use Forge World to only make brand new units never seen before like the Kislev ones. This would certainly be an intelligent thing to do from both a business perspective and a customer perspective, but only time will tell.
-It will be what Horus Hersey 30k is to 40k.
We already knew this from that little video that they released near the end of one of their Warhammer Previews, which turned out to be TOW. Just because they intend it to be a prequel game like The Horus Heresy, surely it won't be as similarly devoid of variety as The Horus Heresy?
-Scale and size. Smaller 10-15mm has been discussed to allow for massed rank-and-file battles with tons of units per box. Also allows for siege towers and similar pieces on a table, with the potential of terrain being sold also. However GW makes bigger profit on bigger kits, and their priority is always the best miniatures with the most detail possible, which goes against smaller scales, so this is truly unknown at this time by anyone outside development.
-The other argument for smaller scale is there is no similar game system of this size. Only epic exists, but that hasn’t been supported for over a decade, and there is no competitor’s fantasy version.
Yes there is, Warmaster was made aeons ago, and surely if GW were going to bring that back again, they would have called it Warmaster: The Old World, not Warhammer: The Old World? Whoever wrote this doesn't know their Warhammer history as much as they think they do.
6) Horus Heresy continues with complex rules, all the new Specialist Games have complex campaign rules (Necromunda, Blood Bowl leagues etc.). "The fact is there isn’t a demand for this type of game now." - based off what?
Not to mention the fact that Horus Heresy's ruleset is the same as that of proper pre-8th Edition 40K, which has always been lauded as a complex game.
The rest of their stuff tells us nothing beyond what GW has already revealed, with the occasional guess thrown in. Trying to look knowledgeable by telling us what has already been confirmed.
tl;dr - remain optimistic. Warhammer Fantasy Battles is coming back.
As mentioned above, I am remaining cautiously optimistic about it. Cautiously because we had the Forge World bombshell, but I'm hoping GW do what they're doing for Middle Earth and bring back some of the newer plastic minis from the end of Fantasy to get players started, and then release brand new units and factions through Forge World. That'd be a compromise I'd settle for.