The HIDDEN GENIUS of Warhammer: The Old World

I'm going to be honest with you I've been very skeptical about Warhammer the old world's chances of success I have half a dozen scripts talking about Reviving The Old World setting in game and how I would have done it differently because I have literally nothing better to do than to fantasy book myself running a massive miniature wargaming company I secretly been very Vogal about this to anyone who is polite enough to listen at one point midwinter minis put up with me ranting about it for a long long time until he reminded me that I needed to leave his house because he had called the police so I quietly untied him put on my clothes and left I didn't go through with these scripts because my style doesn't really lend itself to reaction type videos that could easily age like milk especially as there was always a chance that Games Workshop would pull a hard pivot away from what I thought warham of the old world was gearing up to be when it was announced in 2019 and how the launch is going in the early days of 2024 and it's just as well I did because wouldn't you know they appear to have pulled it out of the bag and produced something that looks like a V iable product out of the shattered remains of the Warhammer world let's do a brief history session to catch everyone up to speed Warhammer fantasy battle was the premier war game of the ' 80s and 90s for many people until the juggernut of warmer 4000 came along and stole everyone's lunch money official support was killed off in 20145 with the end times books to pave the way for the age of Sigma then Along Came the Renaissance of Games Workshop with the true scale Space Marines and Warhammer Total War which was such a success that in late 2019 Games Workshop announced that they were going to bring back the Warhammer World After All a few months later people were buying and painting every Games Workshop model they could get their hands on after being sent home during the pandemic with pockets full of free government cheese at that time it seemed like Gams Workshop could do no wrong after all if you can get a plastic zap miniature to instantly sell out why not try and reboot Warhammer fantasy battle and once you're committed to that why not recreate the entire KL faction in plastic complete with war Bears of course a PC Gamer would buy this who wants to just have an army summoned up with a press of a few buttons after all what else are you going to do with all those Zoom meetings your work wants you to join it's like running the pork pie stand at salute the product was practically selling itself unfortunately a few years later The Hangover hit these days we live in a post pandemic world where people have found out exactly what 10% inflation looks like year onye and tubs of lur pack butter come with security tags it looks like somewhere along the line the scope for warham of the old world got scaled back usually when a YouTuber mentions things that might have happened at a Games Workshop internal company meeting it's framed in the same way to something that might have happened at Epstein Island however I put it to you that those meetings might very well have saved this game entirely because whoever was in charge of the old world release has managed to very cleverly list all the pain points in the original Warhammer fantasy battle and tried their best to mitigate or neutralize them so here are the five reasons I thought it would be a disaster followed by the true genius of this idea number one the use of 20 to 25-year-old plastic kits to bulk out the ini armies was going to make it a visually tough sell against the newer model kits of age of Sigma however the designers have cleverly picked the best kits and put them up for sale the mounted Squires and Grail PMS still look extremely characterful and the ever metal team has just about managed to get the ancient brettonia night kit looking good enough to be hidden in the background behind the new Pegasus Lord centerpiece and yes Olden demon will be hosting its yearly old Hammer painting competition and may again just putting that out there my contact details are in the description if the Games Workshop influencer team is watching I promise not to make jokes about how War Gamers all have erectile dysfunction and gout actually I can't promise that number two I thought that the focus on Tomb Kings and brettonian was misplaced as they typically have not been popular armies I witnessed multiple relaunches of the bronia range being met with apathy to the point that their last dedicated Army book came out in 2003 over a decade prior to the setting itself being shelved this might have been down to the sales of the game in the later years but it also could be that people just didn't want the them or the painting scheme was just too brutal for even a seasoned Warhammer player to handle and 2003 is the exact year the first Tomb Kings Army book came out sadly right in the middle of the massive rush for the Lord of the Rings Min game and around the time the company realized exactly how much money they could make if they focused on the stuff that's sold but what's happened is that the Warhammer team has advertised those brettonia Knights as six-man units so you don't need to worry about buying too many and introduced a new unified paint Scheme so you don't need to walk into a hobby shop and ask for one of every paint make an army plus the tomb Kings should be an ideal Prospect for using those contrast paints on I mean unless you had a plan to Edge highlight all 93 models in the box set number three age of Sigma has cannibalized a lot of really cool Warhammer fantasy units and reimagined them and well they have there's no getting around the fact that the big sellers in the fantasy line were ported over to the age of Sigma Universe almost immediately and the factions in the old world feel like you've turned up late to your restaurant dinner and found all the nice stuff is sold out the chef has gone home and the staff just want you gone by 10 p.m. when the Audy starts in the kitchen squeak Hoppers lizard men and silvano were big Sellers scaven and the reimagined undead and Chaos factions also have made a true home there where you can have wild miniature designs without needing them to rank up perfectly now let's make no mistake here a lot of these old models are Stone Cold Classics especially if we get the Perry sculpts for the Empire of man but if the factions had sold well they would have made the jump to age of sigar rather than getting left behind a 100 model strong army with a quarted paint Scheme is a tough pill to swap especially if the Empire of man as it's now known does not typically sell well and when stock doesn't sell it doesn't get reordered and when it doesn't get reordered it doesn't get produced and that's exactly how we started on the road to the end times in the first place Legacy factions will get free pdf releases so players who are still sitting on a square based Lizard Man scaven and vampire count Army will only be out of luck if they are one of the tiny fraction of players who have the burning need to play in an official Games Workshop tournament chaos dwarves are still lost in the wilderness chaos demons never really looked the right fit for Rank and flank battle systems Dark Elves are let's just say problematic in many areas and ogre kingdoms might either be seen as a little too far in the gray area of racial stereotypes that could cause future issues or might simply be queed up for an age of Sigma refresh sometime soon besides 17 factions was far far too many to support anyway number four centerpiece models sell armies people love them just looking at the results of miniature of the year you have a list of all the centerpiece models in the game when it comes to a public vote size and background beats a really nicely proportioned miniature any day of the week which is a shame for the lizard men and the cities of Sigma release and unfortunately warmer fantasy has never really been about truly large scale Miniatures for historical production reasons some old metal models will literally collapse under their own weight you also have to take base size into consideration and how the model fits into a giant combat without knocking every model around it over however it looks like we are getting large scale Cent Beast models anyway the Pegasus Lord and the necr Bone Dragon fit fit quite nicely in with the new base sizes so we can avoid a repeat of that period where large models had to contort themselves to fit on the smallest bases possible it looked like this time frame was set 500 years before when steam tanks were rolling around but thanks to some clever R cunning steam tanks will be much less rare on the battlefield no word on war wagons but we'll see how that plays out number five this hobby is mainly driven by The Cult of the new therefore does re-releasing old stuff generate the kind of buzz as a fresh new model kit it turns out I didn't realize how much of a success cast on demand has been my superhero Alias Jordan sorcery did an interview with Jim Butler who revealed that the old metal gakin kit made a quarter of a million in one week on May to order compared with about 800,000 when they're originally launched in 2003 there's that date again it shows how far Games Workshop has come and how much Nostalgia sells and that warquest troll Slayer model here reminded me of the award answer that won the last year's Olden demon painting competition that's the second plug in this video maybe I should plug the merch as well or maybe the kofu subscribers they're getting giveaways at the moment those lucky silver and gold tier Ducks is this too much plugging in one spot it feels like too much anyway the Real Genius here is that Games Workshop just reactivated a potentially huge IP to have in their back pocket do I want more Total War and verman Tide games absolutely but now Games Workshop is advertising and developing the old world on a regular basis more games companies should be interested in using it do I want Balor Gate 3 but Warhammer sure Hearts of Iron or some other Grand strategy game but Warhammer yes please Assassin's Creed said in a city of the Empire could be a good shout games companies have tried using the age of Sigma universe but it hasn't worked well so far because that universe is more of a Sandbox designed to accept new miniature ranges rather than the basis for any kind of traditional storytelling and therefore it's struggles to capture people's imaginations it's also going to be easier and by easier I mean cheaper to adapt TV shows to the Warhammer fantasy Universe than either age of Sigma or 40K pitching a show to a streaming service and using Game of Thrones or The Witcher as in example shouldn't be too hard find some Renaissance period clothes find a medieval country house or a small town in Europe and you're Off to the Races you have the setting for any story you want to tell around the age of the three Emperors either before or after Drells is also a good shout fight a Romanian or Austrian CLE book it out for a month or two and you've got yourself a great Gothic horror show while we're on this topic I'm going to point out the elephant in the room the quote Watchman here the Superman exist and he's American or rather the Superman exists and he's a 40K fan and together with we're getting a liveaction 40K show on Amazon well the trouble here is that Amazon have exactly one chance to get the first liveaction Space Marine on screen and if they pull a rings of power or Wheel of Time on us then that's going to be the last 40K TV show you'll see for a generation because getting good-looking Space Marines in a starties is one thing getting a liveaction Space Marine looking good is going to be prohibitively expensive and then incorporating them in a 10art TV show that stays true to the original Source material while telling a compelling story would stretch David Fincher or Christopher Nolan's abilities to the Max and if Amazon money can't get it right then no one else is going to want to touch that IP I am also available to write a brief plot outline if anyone is interested no okay fine meanwhile you just need a convincing dwarf costume and you've got the base for the entire grick and Felix series sorted ah grick and Felix both these models would work perfectly for old and Demon the painting competition in may just say however however however W of the old world could still fail the real issue is that the world of past Hobbies is typically seen through Rose tinted goggles and that's coming from a channel that is banking on trying to grab handfuls of the nebulous nostalgic nimbus cloud that is post-millennium wargaming sometimes the smell of opening up an old box or a magazine is a trigger that literally takes your breath away and sometimes that smell is just Asbestos and those chest pains need to be looked at by a doctor there are still big hurdles left to clear before we can all sit around mashing our square based regiments together and drinking penina coladas in the retirement compound people want to see what that mystical pass AG was like but sometimes when they've seen it once they don't want to see it a second time especially if it looks like £72 for a unit of six mounted Squires the smallest basic Army being 77 model strong and 15 to 20y Old kits being sold at 2024 prices but hey as with anything else Games Workshop related these days just buy two cor sets flug the spare W book and have fun assuming they come back in stock anytime soon I mean the real Joy here is going to be hunting through eBay to find bronzino's galloper gun to go with your exile prot Knight army or finding some long out of print sculpt to uses your Army's general or you can always buy Kings of war look Mantic has loads of stock of kings of war look at all those shelves I'm not sure that that's a good thing though if you want to see more of warmer fantasy tell me in the comments below so I can start covering it in more detail if not enjoy the rest of your day and I'll see you next time

Channel: Olden Demon

Views: 44,877

Keywords: #warhammer, #oldendemon, #oldhammer

Id: IKP4udMI4_0

Length: 11min 54sec (714 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024