Age of Sigmar – my personal thoughts

When I look at the various postings and replies on the net about Games Workshop’s Age of Sigmar I can’t help but notice people tend to either like it or hate it. I have yet to encounter the people who are ‘just ok’ with it.

Today I noticed a Facebook post of someone who had written a positive article about the Stormcast Eternals. I have not read the article itself, but I did scrolled through the replies. Most of the people disagreed with the positive tone of the article and went on about how they hated the game and how much they wanted the old Warhammer Fantasy back. At a certain point there was a reply which struck me as very sensitive. It stated that no matter how much you hate Age of Sigmar and how much you want it to fail for Games Workshop, it will never bring back Warhammer Fantasy. And this is true I think. The setting of the Fantasy world was blown to bits, and although Games Workshop can always come up with an elaborate way of getting it back, the fact is that Warhammer Fantasy was not getting them enough money anymore. They will not likely return to it, even if Age of Sigmar will fail.

Now I am not someone who is close to the rumor mill, but as far as I can figure out Age of Sigmar is indeed not doing as well as they had hoped. The reboot was to be a way of getting more people interested in the Fantasy concept game, but so far it appears it does not make them better profits than Warhammer Fantasy did. I did hear that the game gets crucified in certain countries, whereas other counties have embraced it. But what I mostly see and hear is how many people dislike it. You could say that the internet is a brooding place for negative reactions (in general) so it is therefore not the best way of telling whether the game is a succes or not and the people with positive reactions are not the ones who usually fill the net with reactions. But when there are so many negative responses, the people who do love the game are bound to react and defend it. I do see that happening, just not that much. It makes me wonder if this is because the ones who have embraced the game are above all the negativity and do not bother to react, or, are there just not that many gamers who like and play the game? Although I have no answer to that question I do know how I feel about it.

When I started this hobby somewhere in the early nineties (a friend of mine showed me Skaven models) I was reading fantasy novels and started live role playing in fantasy settings. So I was immediately attracted to the Warhammer Fantasy game. For years I just collected and never played the actual game. I did buy all the rulebooks and such whenever I started to collect another army. I also read the White Dwarf and by just reading through all the pages of the books and magazine I still got a bit of an idea of how the game was played. All in all I actually played it for about five or six times, mostly fifth edition. When the End Times in 8th edition started I was mostly collecting and painting my Imperial Guard Tallarn amy. Fantasy, in general, did not appeal to me as much as it had done in previous years. I was tired of the same kind of storylines in the books and since The Lord of the Rings movies were released everybody was into fantasy all of a sudden. It became a hype, and as a consequence the quality of fantasy books and such went down. This slowly led me to the Warhammer 40.000 setting, which I had previously just ignored. I heard about the End Times in Warhammer Fantasy from time to time, but I had no real interest in it and thought it was just a sort of narrative campaign Games Workshop had made. So when Warhammer Fantasy got abandoned and Age of Sigmar was revealed to become the next incarnation of the game I was kind of surprised. But it also made me interested to see what Games Workshop would do with it.

When the first warscrolls and such popped up I was taken aback by silly rules that appeared here and there. Things to do with beards or wearing black clothing. Juvenile things in my opinion and likely to encourage rather strange behavior of players. When I play a game I do not like people shouting and getting agitated a lot. That is not to say I do not like to have fun and laugh during games (come and see us playing Legends of the High Seas, we do make a lot of noise), but when my opponent gets benefits for burping/shouting the loudest or any such thing I kind of lose interest.

The basic ruleset consisted of only 4 pages. Now, I know Warhammer Fantasy perhaps had to much basic rules, but to reboot it with only 4 pages seemed a bit ludicrous to me. But then again, Age of Sigmar appeared to be more of a skirmish game, rather than a game were vast armies would fight big battles. So a lot of rules for fighting and maneuvering with blocks of troops could be removed. But still, 4 pages? It somehow gave me the idea that Games Workshop wanted to reach a new kind of audience for this game, namely younger kids. Which, in itself, is fine. As far as a business strategy is concerned it is not a bad idea to see if you can find a new market when the old one failed you. But I can understand why so many Warhammer Fantasy players did not like this at all. The 4 pages of rules combined with the silly juvenile rules that could be found here and there resulted in a lot of negativity. And then there was the thing were point based armies was thrown overboard. Bring all you like and to hell with balance that seemed to say. And this would be in accordance with the (rumored) money greedy tactics of Games Workshop as well. The one who buys more models has a more likely chance to win the game. All these things combined made sure I had no interest in the game when it got released. And I can understand why a lot of other gamers felt/feel the same.

All this being said, I do not think I am the person to rely on when forming your own opinion about the game. I barely played Warhammer Fantasy and never actually tried Age of Sigmar. My knowledge of the game system is purely based on what rules/scrolls I have been able to read. This resulted in the fact that I had no interest to even try the game, which in itself could be seen as a bad way to promote the new rules system. But the fact remains that I am very much a fan of nice models, and my opinion of a great model is not corresponding to the models Games Workshop is making for Age of Sigmar (or in general for the last couple of years). They have a tendency to overdo the amount of ornate details and all models need to be bigger and grander than the ones who came before. The concept of ‘less is more’ has been completely thrown overboard and ‘more is more’ seems to be the thing now. I personally do not like the style and that alone gives me enough reason to ignore the game even more.

 

I just hope Games Workshop will not do the same for Warhammer 40.000. The futuristic game is flawed and unbalanced, yes, but if they will reboot it in the same way as Age of Sigmar I fear it will not be an improvement.

For those who are still very much hoping that Warhammer Fantasy will return there are plenty of alternatives I think. There are still people who play Warhammer Fantasy in various previous editions. A group of enthousiasts has made their own new upgrade; Warhammer 9th edition. And I hear Kings of War from Mantic Games http://www.manticgames.com/games/kings-of-war.html is a great alternative game system. They also made a supplement called Uncharted Empires which has rules for armies such as Skaven and Lizardmen. I have not played it myself, but some people at my gaming club use this game system and the supplement so they can still bring their old Warhammer Fantasy armies to the table. I for one will be trying this when I want to return to fantasy wargaming. I have collected enough armies over the years, all I need to do is paint the bloody things.

6 Comments

  1. WhRules!

    If AoS fail there’s a possibility to see Warhammer back, afterall check out what happened with New Coke and Warhammer wasn’t selling for GW fault not for game itself.

    Reply
    1. Patrick (Post author)

      The reason why Warhammer Fantasy was not lucrative anymore is something I do have opinions about, but I can not prove any of it because I am not in a position close enough to the action to know what was really at fault here. It could be the awful selling strategies of GW, it could be that people just lost interest in the game (mechanics). What I do understand is that GW wanted to change something in order to make profit again. So I do understand the reason why, I just do not agree with the how. But I can not see any future were GW would go back to producing a game that was not profitable anymore. Why would they return to pour money into developing and supporting a game that did not bring them results in the past?

      Reply
      1. WhRules!

        Yours is a bad PoV, it was not Warhammer that brought them bad results, it was GW that wasn’t able to make it profitable. It’s just easier to say blah blah Warhammer wasn’t selling instead of saying : ”We’re not able to sell it”. I can understand people liking aos afterall it needs no culture to understand the setting,rules and art.

        Reply
  2. SonOfDurthu

    Greetings,

    I’d like to share my thoughts as a player that started the hobby a couple of months ago. This means i never played Warhammer Fantasy and as such I’m not able to make any comparisons between the two games. I’ve been painting warhammer miniatures for over 8 years but never bothered to play while fantasy was around. My local hobbystore stopped selling GW models at some point and this forced me to go to a Warhammer store in a nearby city. The shopkeeper eventually convinced me to start playing and hoo boy, am I having fun with Age of Sigmar. The game seems to be getting more popular in this Warhammer store as well, as i see more and more people attending friday evenings and saturdays of gaming.

    As for the game itself, no doubt it’s more..’simple’ in comparison to Fantasy, atleast thats what ive been hearing everywhere. Stil, i think the game has lots of tactical depth to it! (this seemed to be a complaint of many gamers) The certain randomness of who gets the first turn each battleround means you’ve got to plan way ahead, for example. I see the four pages of rules as a good thing, it’s accesible, free and easy to understand. In my experience people that used to play a lot of 40k even enjoyed AoS as a breath of fresh air, mainly due to the rules being in one place instead of spread out over half a million codexes. And the juvenile rules you mentioned are.. strange, yes, and i dont really see the point of these bullshit parts like screaming WHAAAAAAAAGH off the top of your lungs but this is easily ignored as well, just use the rules without the ‘funny’ stuff, right? In the end, hardcore fans of every game will seldom like and accept change. Often a new direction is seen as the dead of ’the Good old days’, which i can understand. Still, I believe that with the right community and mindset, I think a lot of people could enjoy the game like I do.

    As far as the new miniatures go and if they look better or not will always be an opinion. I personally LOVE certain miniatures, Drycha Hamadreth is my absolute favorite, and I dislike others (stormcast eternals im looking at you). I agree some of them might have too much ornate details on them but for instance Alarielle, of whom you inculded a picture, deserves these ornaments, she’s the goddes of life after all!

    Reply
  3. Patrick (Post author)

    It is good to hear that you enjoy AoS. I think most people who dislike the game are the ones who used to play Warhammer Fantasy. And as you say, people do not like change that much.
    As for the models you are absolutely right to say it is a matter of taste and opinion. Luckily we are al entitled to our opinions and can have very different tastes and still be friends 🙂 So I hope you don’t mind me saying that I think the Alarielle model is way over the top for my taste.

    Reply
    1. WhRules!

      Some opinions are better than others!
      Aos is the stupidification of Warhammer, overall from art and background pov,now it’s a silly over the top american high fantasy that keeps using the iconic characters created by the original Warhammer (i.e: Gotrek). Warhammer was instead a historical based wargame both in rules and background, it’s clear that aos fans have not the same culture of Warhammer ones.

      Reply

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