The most recent Dev Diary made it clear that The Old World’s DNA is Warhammer. It put me in mind of a saying about eggs and baskets, but if you only own one basket…
Many folks have a favorite edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I am not a partizan for a particular edition, but I spent the most time playing 5th and 6th, and began falling off after the release of 7th. There are facebook groups and Reddit communities devoted to most of the editions, with 4th, 5th and 6th getting a lot of love. Some folks even find something to like in 7th and 8th!
That said, If I am being honest, I think all the old editions have been left in the dust by modern rule sets. There are a lot of mass combat games out there, and every edition of WFB looks clunky and dated by comparison. You can find WFB games being played with any edition’s rules on YouTube, for fun or competitively. They do not compare favorably to recent games that shake up the turn order and are designed to move along at a decent pace.
The Old World is GW’s chance to start fresh, but will they capitalize on it? When it was announced, I saw the revival of The Old World as a chance for GW to come up with something new. I should acknowledge that this may still happen. We might get a modern ruleset with slick design elements and novel ideas, but that is looking increasingly unlikely.
The most recent Dev Diary told us a (very little) bit about the ideas and design philosophy going into the new game, and if anything, it sounds regressive. The devs boast that they “regularly assembled to play games of every edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle… We wanted to identify which parts of a classic game we enjoyed the most, and which parts we felt could be improved upon.” So wait, you guys are just making house rules?
I acknowledge that a lot of folks think this is a good idea, but it hardly seems conducive to thinking outside the box. GW would never admit that anyone else’s games exist, except to sue them for copyright infringement, but my ideal Dev Diary would tell me that they regularly played games like Swordpoint, Never Mind the Billhooks and Oathmark. If you eat exclusively at one restaurant you won’t know about the Brazilian steak joint opening downtown, you will just count down the month until the McRib comes back. Yes, GW is McDonalds in this analogy, and I stand by it.
Credit where it is due, the rules that were teased are not bad, just not fresh. Eliminating the magic phase and adding a pushback mechanic to melee combat, rather than simple fight or flight, are both good things, but they are not new to mass combat games, only to Warhammer. I earnestly hope to be surprised by The Old World, but I no longer expect to be.
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