Making Warhammer Fantasy's End Times "Better"

boy warhammer fantasies end time sure were a thing weren't they a totally valid interesting and respectful way to end a franchise that not only started the company but had also helped start and grow a massive market of gaming and had thousands upon thousands of fans yeah right even if you only know warhammer fantasy is that thing that total war started milking you've probably at least heard of the end times more specifically you might know that a the end times paved the way for age of sigmar and b it was quite possibly the foulest thing a company could do to its fans and consumers and yes i'm including disney axing 90 of star wars at least those stories still technically exist in their own little universe and the ending to 40 years of build up for them didn't finish with and then everybody died the end now you might have noticed the quotation marks around the word better in the video title to be honest that's because i don't know if anything i can come up with could make them good by the nature of getting rid of a 40 year old setting a lot of people are going to be unhappy and some controversial decisions are going to have to be made i mean warhammer fantasy isn't like 40k you can't just blow up the planet and move on there's only one planet for starters but i am confident i can point out a few things it could be fixed too if not make them good at least make them passable and give the heroes of the setting some dignity to their deaths is there a way to make everyone happy absolutely not also don't just expect me to say don't have them happen even though it's beginning was awful to say the least and the end times was a travesty age of sigmar does have some cool stuff in it also warhammer fantasy was hemorrhaging money like it had just been shot i mean the setting as a whole was selling less than some individual armies in 40k something had to change like it or not that ship was sinking as much as it sucks to have to admit it anyways no sense of getting all the complaining out at the start i gotta balance it out through the whole video but before i go on let me ask you something important do you do a lot of browsing online do you have anything important saved on your computer have you ever looked at the internet then have i got just the thing for you because this video was sponsored by nordvpn you've probably heard of them before in which case why don't you have nord do you hate your privacy and internet safety that much no i'm not so good with computers which is ironic because my current main source of income is exclusively gotten through computers but nord's benefits are so simple yet effective that even i could explain them in fact why don't i do that now first off for someone like me who gets scared when someone asks things like how much ram do you have or have you dusted your computer off yet this year nor does great because it's so easy to use you click the button that turns on the vpn and you're protected simple as that click another 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restricted in your nation just have your computer be in another nation and because your internet traffic is encrypted with nord that means your provider can't cut your streaming speed and you're safe from getting ddos if i haven't convinced you yet because you plugged your ears and ignored all these wonderful features maybe this will help if you use the link https colon slash nordvpn.com pancreas no work which is on screen right now or go down to the comment section where it will be pinned for your convenience you'll get a discount on a two-year plan and a whole month free of charge and if for some incomprehensible reason you aren't satisfied with nordvpn you've got a 30-day risk free trial so use that link of mine here once more on screen as well as the pin comment while you can keep yourself safe and entertained with nordvpn alright let's start the complain train but first some contacts for those who might be unfamiliar i'll keep it brief don't worry the end times was games workshop's response to the warhammer fantasy setting kind of sitting dead in the water for a few years fans wanted some lore events to actually happen for once and games workshop wanted to make money off a franchise that wasn't exactly setting the stock market on fire at the time so the writers came up with a revolutionary idea storm of chaos it was awful so they went back to the drawing boards and thought even harder on what to do and came up with the end times and somehow it was even worse countless major character deaths happened before the finale of the end times lore was calmly and methodically thrown into a dumpster and set on fire and by the time everything was finished not only was the setting gone but as of today several entire armies were just deleted from game's workshop history for every interesting or awesome thing like the skaven pulling the moon closer to the planet with magic before a different group of skaven decided to blow it up with a big cannon there was something like the gods of the setting just randomly fading away because otherwise they might actually do something to stop chaos from winning for every intelligent decision like getting rid of britonia they got rid of two actual armies such as the tomb kings and almost all of the high and dark elves chaos won victory after victory even before the skaven randomly decided to just join them to screw everyone else over that much more despite two of the strongest beings including the one who invented necromancy coming back to life none of it mattered because chaos was already destined to win the writers had demanded it in the end despite even sigmar himself coming back which on its own was a whole mess of bad writing but we'll get to that warhammer fantasy ends with archaean and him wrestling over gal maraz and falling into nothingness as the rest of the world is consumed by chaos roll credits thanks for coming everyone look forward to warhammer fantasy 9th edition never but we have space marines in fantasy now so it's all good right all of this is not even scratching the surface of the awful writing decisions made during the end times quite frankly making them good seems impossible so i won't be getting into every single little thing gw did wrong and how to fix it we'd be here for hours instead i'm going to be giving more of the broad strokes of things that should have been done differently and could be rewritten to make the whole thing feel less like it was a company spitting out its fan base for wanting to enjoy the setting they've grown attached to maybe one day i'll make another video just listing as many things possible wrong with the end times later that way we can wallow in bitterness together like a dwarf complaining that the book is too full of grudges we clear good let's get into fix number one the characters more specifically so many characters were completely mishandled i think the biggest case i can use is manfred von karstein who in all his boundless wisdom decided that the best time to betray the good guys was when they were performing the last ditch effort to save the world he saw balthasar gelt doing his damned to save the world had a good long think and decided that yes stabbing someone with an eighth of all magic coursing through them is a wonderful idea surely this cannot go wrong can't see a single downside to that now don't get me wrong manlet is a treacherous little weasel and shouldn't be trusted with watering someone's flowers but he isn't an idiot he knew that whatever the consequences of stabbing gelt in the back were they wouldn't be good or he would have known if the plot didn't demand he'd just shut off his brain for a moment a similar mishandling happened with high king of the dwarves thorgrim now up until his death he was rocking it he slaughtered a skaven special character all the while listing every single grudge that reddit earned throughout the beatdown that is the single most awesome and dwarf thing i could imagine but that skaven was quick headtaker which even if you don't know anything about him you can probably guess from the name he wasn't exactly a slouch in a fight so thorgam was you know a bit tired understandably and entered a secret escape passageway because by that point things were still going south for the dwarves unfortunately he made a crucial error he didn't shut the door behind him so a skaven assassin slipped in and killed him are you yanking my chain the king of a race of craftsmen so meticulous in their detailing that they will spend years constructing a single building a race so thorough in their work that technology less than five centuries old is still considered to be in the prototype stage at best died because he forgot to lock the door behind him who wrote this who decided that that was how they were killing this character off i'm also pretty sure he had runes on his armor specifically to prevent assassins from killing him like that but at this point that's hardly worth a mention don't think they only misused characters by making them look like idiots though sometimes they just forgot him entirely you know skarsnik warlord of eight peaks and the smartest goblin ever you know what he was doing during the final battle with the second prophet of the green gods contributed to the affair nothing the writers admitted they forgot about him and he was supposed to be in the final battle eating the greenskins one of the orc's special character's entire motivation was to find the prophet of gork and mork and then he realized that two gods get two prophets and yet no one remembered the second guy i mean i know grimgore was kind of stealing the show by putting archaeon's head firmly up his colon but still there were other things like this where characters just kind of put their brains on autopilot if they were even included but you probably get it by this point honestly i think this is a simpler fix i mean for one just remember to write the characters into the event but also rewrite some lore as to how the characters acted manfred for example could have and should have been defending the incarnates of the winds of magic but maybe in the rewritten version a demon throws up an illusion whereupon he blasts it with spooky vampire spells before he realizes oops i just hit gelt that is admittedly kind of stupid but one is better than what we got into what happened to sigmar and age of sigmar so if it can happen to a god it can happen to manlet problem and fix number two let the good guys win in some way so it doesn't feel pointless i know that by the nature of the end times the ending can only be rock's fall everything dies but it would least make the whole thing feel more interesting if the good guys were allowed some more victories by the time any of the people trying to keep the world in one piece achieve anything it's either far too late or it's so minor that it doesn't mean anything when sycamore spirit revived into everyone's favorite prince and emperor he pounded the nurgle followers that killed frenzy boy into the dirt then the three of them turned into the flies and nurgle put him in a jar which as an aside thank god it was nurgle who did that and not slanesh after all that fran's ascendant purified altdorf of all the nurgle bad vibes and made it a shining city of light sounds cool right well it would have been if keislovan half the empire hadn't already been burned to the ground and the other half was burning or when bellacor got trapped in a ruby by elariel for being a bit of a dick having the first chaos prince locked away sounds like a solid dubski except the elves plan b second world had been eaten by chaos negaron was raised to the ground and ulthwan had sunk into the ocean not exactly a fair trade two continents and an entire reality for one guy even if we know it's going to end in failure the forces of order should have still been allowed some kind of victory as it stood in the end times for every chaos army defeated and championed slain everyone else lost 5 armies and 10 heroes up until the very end of course then everyone started dying but by that point it hardly matters if nergal loses one of his favorite followers if the world is already exploding the fat man's already winning by that point the one guy you killed isn't going to make a difference again this is an easy fix as the forces of chaos are streaming into the world and multiple different times and places they are held back balthasar gelt set up a magical wall so high that no one could fly over it or break through it maybe after the magic supporting it was stopped it could still have held in some sections maybe even have it be noted as something that didn't completely fall until the world itself did now that point leads into two other ones that i have the first is that chaos in turn shouldn't have been so completely overpowered the skaven who shouldn't have been with cast to begin with but that's probably just my personal bias wiped out a major faction and half a dozen non-playable ones they got the lizardmen estalia talaya nippon they had a hand in cathay now i love my rats so the fact they wanted such a rampage is just great for me but for the setting as a whole it just makes it seem like cass could wipe out everyone with zero effort so why bother with the rest of the event if the comic relief rats can own zone a third of the world by themselves why should i care about the good guys struggle when it's so clearly one-sided if chaos didn't constantly win win and win some more maybe the event would have been just a bit more well-received the setting is gone sure but on its way out the elves dwarfs humans and orcs left a mark that wasn't going to heal on the chaos gods i mean the elven or human gods couldn't have done something beyond just dying off kane's biggest contribution to the setting was making the elves weaker which fair enough i guess he is a prick but when the only armies winning regularly are chaos and the only gods do anything productive are the four chaos gods in the horned rat it feels pointless it only adds to the general feeling of chaos as the only meaningful threat of the setting and everyone else is nothing i don't know about you but in a war game i feel like every faction should get at least somewhat equal billing one of them shouldn't be portrayed as being able to solo all the others with minimal effort funnily enough this hurts age of sigmar 2 because if chaos can so easily destroy one setting why should we care about the next because games workshop tells us that for realsies this time chaos isn't just going to win they burn that goodwill alongside fantasy the second point i was getting to is that something in the end times should have meaningfully affected age of sigmar because as it stands almost nothing the forces of order did had any impact on aos the incarnates of each of the winds of magic are the new gods of aos but before they were gods in aos they were just the incarnates they had this whole ritual going to prevent cass from overtaking the world one final magical hail mary to prevent total destruction where all the magic available was put to use to seal the chaos rift and you know how this caused the mortal realms to form it didn't they just kind of coalesced one day because otherwise there wouldn't be a fantasy warhammer setting and gw would lose that market we have the gods of aos because they each ate an eighth of all magic but even that feels like they had these characters and getting rid of them was a waste of perfectly good marketing material not because they earned it hell they didn't even use all the incarnations as the new gods grim gore just kind of disappeared and while gelt is a storm cast now he got downgraded in power compared to those like tyrion attackers who are gods now beyond that slash was put in horny jail by the new elf gods those two things are really all they carried over from fantasy in terms of what could be said to be a result of the actions of those not aligned with chaos nurgle corn and zeech weren't weakened none of the factions really had any kind of holdout or anything else that inspired the culture of aos there's nothing to show the fans of the old setting that it didn't die in vain the stormcast of turtles have a few characters that were heroes in the world it was but they didn't really earn it through specific actions or anything they earned it by being great heroes some dude who gets charged by a troll at the beginning of a battle could be considered a great hero for a sacrifice that doesn't mean he did anything noteworthy to earn it as it stands with the end times whether the heroes fought violently to their last breath or sat down in a chair to read the lusty slan made while the world collapsed around them the end result would have been the same if the end times were rewritten so that the final ritual directly led to the mortal realms forming or if the chaos gods were in some way explicitly said to be weaker in aos as a result of the effort of bringing down the old world maybe it wouldn't have felt like the entire setting of age of sigmar is just a participation trophy for the good guys maybe even just something small like mentioning how gore can work fused as a result of realizing they couldn't choke slam all of the chaos gods at once they had to put on the potara earrings so they could give the people's elbow twice as efficiently something like that next point it also could have gone down better if they didn't disregard all the lore they could have hey malekith how's it going finally managed to take othwan back that's pretty impressive sure it syncs about five minutes later but still good job you know what they say the 300th time's the charm wait a moment you were always supposed to be the rightful phoenix king and you just hesitated at the last moment so you got burned instead and all the phoenix kings after you are actually frauds cursed by a surya now that doesn't seem right that actually seems really really stupid it seems like someone pulled that plot point out of their rear to build fake drama and suspense at the cost of decades of established lore ironically aos actually retconned this away when marathi was up in slanesha's guts looking for phoenix king's souls but it was still stupid when it happened or how the skaven never allied with chaos before whenever there was a great threat like nagash they went to his enemies and helped take him down now they just gave up and were like guess we gotta help assist chaos now only way out they destroy half a dozen powerful nations but they can't stand against chaos yeah that makes sense to me threat levels definitely are being made up as we go along everything here is adding up nicely i'm being sarcastic if you can't tell they didn't just disregard old lore though all the fluff they built up in the end times was immediately ruined too it all gets its turn being put in the garbage bin carl franz didn't actually die in altdorf at first for example he said he didn't know it was empowering him when sigmar inhabited his body which would imply that sigmar didn't just use his body like a flesh puppet at first but then cut to the next book and turns out he was signaled the whole time maybe you don't really care about the lore being ignored because you know at the best of times warhammer lore is being mishandled in some way how about we talk about entire plot threads that were created in a way that didn't suggest they were going to burn the setting to the ground vlad von karstein became an elector count that could lead to a whole laundry list of cool conflicts and narrative threads and oh he's dead and so is the empire hey nagash is back and brought the two kings he didn't obliterate under his rule will any of them rebel how will the other factions react no they won't they all died all the elves are one faction now what will that mean in the future yeah you can probably guess where i'm going with this by now the lore issues are a bit harder to fix because it means the writers would have to come up with compelling plot threads and narratives that actually come to a conclusion rather than all being abandoned alongside the setting or at least don't write them in such a way that makes it seem like they're going somewhere before you pull the rug out from under us and also of course pay attention to the previous lore established which sounds easy on paper but warhammer is so abound with the retcons and contradictions that actually putting it into practice would take some more work another simple fix here they didn't need to wipe entire armies from existence toon kings are cool if i was into warhammer around the time of fantasy i'd still have gone for the skaven but i'd at least have picked up cetra he's a cool dude there's no reason to erase his model and indeed his entire faction from the gw webstore i know i would have grabbed some high alpha units even if only so i can proxy them into being eldar but guess what almost all of those are gone too no spearmen no special characters no more flying boat pulled by a bird the most glorious of models and to some extent i do get it a lot of these armies weren't selling well even by fantasy standards but there was no reason to get rid of them outright gw could have had them become specially made to order or hell just marked the price up warhammer players are used to being nickel and dimed i'm sure most of us wouldn't mind paying an extra 10 bucks that means the models could still exist and be purchasable the most baffling thing about this to me is that total warhammer released barely a year after the end times were all said and done gw didn't expect one of the most popular strategy game series of all time to drop some hype for their setting like nah no one's going to see this fun game and want to buy the models they're all based on people don't have several interests at once no one likes to play video games and buy miniatures this fix in the next one would have prevented so much bad press and opinions against gw which is all the more baffling because of how easy of a pitfall they were to avoid here's my final fix and i'll tell you a secret i lied in the beginning of the video my last point is indeed don't just blow up the world because they didn't have to do that or at least only do that one possible ending of fantasy that allows for age of sigmars indeed to wreck the whole place and start over with a new ip the ending to one timeline that is but there's another one another timeline that happened a few years before the end times and age of sigmar went down games workshop could have gone down the storm of chaos storyline i mentioned earlier so they could have their cake and eat it too you get one timeline where fantasy explodes and you can have all the ground marines your heart desires go [ __ ] wild and one timeline where the empire still stands strong archaeon is pushed back by an orc head-butting him in the junk and the world lives to fight another day i know i said storm of chaos was awful it was but a lot of why it was awful was because it was a campaign where gw said that the results of player battles would dictate how it went unfortunately for them chaos kept losing but since games workshop wanted them to win they just rewrote what happened so the chaos was actually winning and when i say cass was losing i mean cass couldn't break out of norska they do better than that in total war and the cast invasions of the first two games is nothing it's civ 5 barbarians as a lord and savior mandalore puts it people found out that gw was basically just ignoring the rules they themselves wrote and were a little bit unhappy about it understandably now for all the awfulness that storm of chaos was it does still offer a timeline where warhammer fantasy still exists if they continued the game in an alternate timeline people could still enjoy the setting of warhammer fantasy i can almost guarantee that people weren't fairly nearly as angry by the end times as they ended up being as i said before i'm not even touching them close to everything that was dumb about the end times the basement is always retreated like dirt and accomplished ultimately nothing which is funny because they were a chaos faction the ogres were just kind of there and didn't really do anything of note so much to talk about so much to complain about but hopefully this was a nice little thought exercise and how the end times could have been better not good but better up to like a 5 out of 10 instead of a zero out of a hundred there's only so much enemy can do to save it after all as always thank you to my wonderful channel members you are the gasoline to my that one guy who set his entire dark elf army on fire to protest the end times fueling my rage for more videos to come if you'd like to support the channel feel free to become a member or subscribe and either way thank you for watching and take care out there [Music] pour one out for my man atharian man marched up to a millennial magical lich and started slamming his head into a cauldron like he was batman no elf magic or anything like that just said square up and went to town on him shaymi got thanos for his troubles but at least he's shiny armor now no he doesn't have shiny armor he is shiny armor

Channel: PancreasNoWork

Views: 294,741

Keywords: Warhammer, Warhammer Fantasy, Fantasy, Games Workshop, Age of Sigmar, AoS, Warhammer AoS, Warhammer Fantasy End Times, The End Times, End Times, End Times Warhammer Fantasy, PancreasNoWork

Id: qsxyY06TIrY

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022