So, having had some time to cool down and get over the initial rage of confusion as to why they did what they did, I now understand why they did it or at least, my thoughts as to why they did it. Looking at the last few End Times reviews and the history of Games-Workshop releases, there is reason to their madness (even if I don’t agree with it). It simple, it’s to do with the number of army books they release.
Let me explain. The recent Elf release now has them force into a single army, so their future army book release will simply be Elves. The undead will either be Undead or Nagash and Chaos could itself be a single release. In doing this, it limits the number of army books the company has to make, thus allowing the books to keep up with new Editions of the rules. Wood Elves are a good example, having only recently got a new book after years of being ignored while both High Elves and Dark Elves got multiple releases. By merging them, these books are likely to get released soon after newer Editions are released. Undead will most likely follow this given that Settra isn’t likely to win anytime soon. Chaos I assume will be much harder then Elves to fuse together and I don’t think that will be happening soon, at least compared to some other groups.
So instead of having one release earlier in a year for High Elves, a late year release for Dark Elves and people complaining when the next Wood Elves release, the company just brings out Elves. Obviously for this to work, these new books would have to be very big and would have to contain enough units to satisfy players from all three sides. If not, players may take offense (if they haven’t already) and leave the hobby. It’s generally bad business practice to upset your customers and getting them to leave when it’s difficult enough trying to get new customers. Warhammer isn’t a cheap hobby to be part of to begin with, but a loyal customer will still spend money. Test their loyalty too much and you might find yourself in a bit of trouble.
There is only one problem to all this, the miniatures. With now all three factions of Elves united as one, you can only keep the imagery of their separate styles for so long before they must unite as a singular style. This means those with large armies of the old separate Elves may find most of their miniatures becoming useless unless the rule book contains a huge number of options, and the problem with that is that it may take too long to properly play test.
This is all speculation and we won't know anything until they release the next Edition next year and an appropriate army book. I’m not going to go into explaining Games-Workshops history of bad discussions (that’s a post for another time), but I feel this is an adequate explanation of what is going on from a non-fluff point of view. As a fan of the product, I disagree with this decision, but given their rules release history and customer satisfaction with it (Bretonnia hasn’t had a book release for the last few Editions), it does make sense to go down this path.
No comments:
Post a Comment