Star Wars Armada is dead …… Sort of …..so what about X-wing and Legion ?

[redscopeParticipant 2718xp 2]

I have only recently got into the Star Wars licensed games in the last few months. I have been following the switch of license to create figures from Fantasy Flight to Atomic Mass games with interest. Unlike perhaps older and wiser heads I thought this might be good news as the focus on more figures might be in the works. Even when Eddy Luke William the key game designer who moved across to Atomic Mass Games from FF was fire last month I still consider this without the doom and gloom a lot of players had.

However the concern that Atomic Mass Games had added nothing of note to their website 6 months after the transfer was starting to make me wonder what was going on. While X-wing and Legion did get some models they had been on the path of productions of FF. Still nothing from Atomic Mass Games …

Well yesterday we had the news that Star Wars Armada is dead. Well sort of no game really dies if you have the rule and models they dont send people around stopping from playing it. It does seem the kits for Armada will remain in production for now at least you have to wonder how long for.

You also have wonder the fate of X-wing and Legion based on this ? It seems odd to transfer a license to a different developer and then after 6 months they sack both the leader designer and kill off one of the games. Not trying to suggest they will do the same for X-wing or Legion but it feels like the games have been sent into limbo with Atomic Mass games rather than an exciting new reboot or production of new models.

 

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 2]

‘We are excited to continue support for Star Wars Armada’ seems to me like that’s the opposite of ‘the game is dead’, mate. That sounds much more like ‘we got the license, it’s the middle of a pandemic, Brexit has caused chaos, and the world is a little on fire, so we haven’t planned anything new, but we’ll keep reprinting the old stuff so you guys can get it and we’ll make sure tournaments are supported’. That’s a company trying to maintain interest during a product drought, not someone throwing a game to the aether.

[sundancer 42974xp 1]

Being an optimist here maybe they just don’t have enough staff to fuel 4 games at once and need to concentrate on SW:L, X-Wing and Marvel…

[limburger 21704xp 5]

“We are excited to continue support for Star Wars Armada” is corporate lingo for : we’re excited to get free money for little effort by telling you lot that we will be supporing it while we wait for the right time to take ol’ yeller out of the back door and shoot him while you’re distracted.

I think Armada didn’t perform as well as FFG/AMG wanted it to.
And they’re using the transition from FFG to AMG to re-evaluate the system.
They’re not going to tell you that they’re going to kill it, because that would make it impossible to shift what stock (and production orders) they still are under contract to produce and sell

Remember : production is planned months in advance … and it’s not like you can simply cancel a production order.
Well you can, but there’s bound to be a clause stating that there’s a cost …

I suspect that Crisis protocol is getting all the love and care, because that stuff is selling .. Legion probably is safe for the same reason. Xwing had a bit of a dip as a result of the v2 release, which may have been big enough for the bean counters to re-evaluate its existence. Armada ? I’m not sure if it ever was popular …so they might be on thin ice.

 

 

 

[hobbyhubParticipant 4169xp 1]

@limburger – It also helps Marvel that it is AMG’s baby, where all the others are the step-kids they got in the divorce of FFG, so probably not the flavour of the month.

Armada has gone to the same boarding school that Imperial Assault was sent to.  That game is reportedly still selling quite well, in some places.  Both are cheap money for whichever division of Asmodee is responsible for them as no developers, designers, editors and playtesters, are currently involved.

If they are going to do a big push on X-Wing, I’d expect that around the time when the SW: Rogue Squadron film by Patty Jenkins comes out, currently planned to be Christmas 2023. That would feature the craft and crews from that film, and would be developed and produced along side the movie, like The Force Awakens.

[hairybrains 12990xp 0]

I’m not going to lie, disappointed. Really liked Armada, the shoot first mechanic was always something I liked in the game. It always seemed to have a slower release pace than X-wing or Legion and I suspected it was something they only developed when they didn’t have anything else to do, I had guess I had better try and get what I am missing before they go an pull it completely (I’m looking at you SSD).

[limburger 21704xp 0]

@hobbyhub ooh definitely. The “not developed here” mentality is something that affects any transition whether that is a hostile or friendly takeover or just a shift inside a company.

The ‘new managers’ always have to prove that they are ‘better’ by making changes to a product just so they show that they did stuff. Or they just kill a product with a big sledgehammer to the family jewels  …

I think the best we can hope for is that they do spend time and resources to make sure it gets a fresh relaunch. However I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to kill it, because it may not have been making enough money ..

[collins 16358xp 0]

Ha!, I’ve been round this loop before with Imperial Assault. I still believe it is one of the best games I’ve played (it has flaws but I love it and I’ll fight you if you disagree with me….40 points, skirmish, obviously)

If the fans really love it they’ll pick it up and fix all the cock ups the company made (Spectre Cell!) and continue to add more content (eg Imperial Assault Continuity Project).

if you really love armada then do the same yourself. 3D print the ships (check thingiverse). fix the cards that are OP or UP and also whilst you’re at it find a way to make it a game that can deal with a proper fleet size rather than 1 star destroyer and a few ties etc and not take 4 hours to play a game.

[ced1106Participant 6224xp 0]

Even before the pandemic, I was reading opinions on various game forums that Armada wasn’t as popular as X-Wing and was too similar. X-Wing’s problem, though, seems to be saturation of the vehicle types, and customers unhappy with buying the upgrade cards.

My gut reaction to Legion is that Imperial Assault won’t go away because of it. IA is a boardgame and Legion is a miniatures game. As a customer base, boardgamers can support more boardgames than wargamers can support wargames, which are sometimes “lifestyle” games. Speaking of “lifestyle” game, IA is also not a “lifestyle” game, which, I think, was a reason for FFG dropping the Star Wars Destiny collectible (or whatever) dice game. Of course, if FFG decides to put out a new version of IA, like they did Arkham…

[templar007 52376xp 3]

I’m going to take the “glass half full” attitude.  I’ve been building up my forces both Rebel and the Might Magnificent Empire and it has been very hard to get some of the ships I want.  If AMG does focus on current designs then maybe many of us can BUILD the fleets we’ve been planning for a while but not wanting to pay scalper prices have held off.  This could be the equalizer players need to play the still they want to try.

 

Personally, I’ve been wondering why they keep producing new designs when they can’t print enough models of the already made designs.  Seriously, how do you expect to get MORE people into a game if you can’t print enough game items from the current crowd that want them.

 

I know, my attitude can be seen as very naive.  Time may very well show me wrong but I’ll just keep on hoping for the game to grow in player numbers rather than size of total model design count.

[limburger 21704xp 2]

@templar007 that’s the one thing that ‘annoyed’/dissappointed me with Xwing too.
I only know Tie-fighters/bombers, X-wings, Y-wings and the Falcon …
As soon as they added ‘weird’ designs I wasn’t sure what they wanted the game to be.
The random nature of the releases didn’t help either. Net result was that I never bought any additional models, because none of them made sense to me.

I suspect Armada followed the same pattern.
Letting players replay the big battles from the movies should have been the perfect hook to sell this game.

Even with Legion the releases were and still are completely random. Maybe I’m not enough of a starwars geek to make sense of them, but I suspect that even fans have a hard time understanding why certain units get released.
If the supply hadn’t been so atrocious that had to pre-order to get stuff I might have finished my droid army. Instead I lost interest and motivation to continue. I will finish both eventually if AMG can be bothered to sell stuff, but I’m not optimistic.
Heck. I probably will use what I have to play Stargrave or something similar instead.

[jamescutts 6924xp 0]

Aside from the “We are excited to continue support for Star Wars Armada”  being the usual corporate speel, it doesn’t sound like they plan on “killing” it off, in fact, reprints will probably solve the biggest problem Armada has which is actually getting the ships as like anything previously FFG stock management wasn’t a phrase that they knew existed.

The impression I get is that they want to work out what to do with it and meanwhile will reprint the existing product lines, which seems sensible. The game probably wasn’t as popular as expected, certainly compared to X-Wing so never saw as many releases anyway. Now, will the community fall for the “Armada is Dead” line that YouTubers will start bashing out is another question.

In all honesty, I don’t think Armada has a need for a huge amount of releases, outside of them finishing the clone Wars lineup. The rebellion era already has a nice selection of ships and variations in them to make the game is self interesting, adding more designs just makes the stock harder to manage (sorry fanboys who want X ship from Y obscure reference). Simply pumping out more ship designs feels like one of the problems X-Wing created for its self.

They might just leave it similar to Imperial Assault, a game that continues with reprints and doesn’t really need new releases. The fact that there are no new releases doesn’t make a game any less fun or “dead”, I know ill still enjoy getting my ships out and enjoying a game.

What I would like to see

• carry on reprinting the game
• another wave or two of clone wars era releases to round out the range
• some new rebellion era faction starter sets (repacks) similar to the newer clone wars ones
• maybe a V2 of the rules though I’m not sure it needs it? And if so that would depend if they avoid the X-Wing debacle of needing new cards for everything.

[soulsorcererParticipant 1079xp 0]

Leaving 2 entire factions…that were just coming out…short of necessary stuff that should have been in development long ago is a clear sign that this game is DEAD. Sad…but true 🙁

[hobbyhubParticipant 4169xp 0]

Armada may be dead to some folks, but not all, and perhaps not the majority.

Crabbok is the only YouTuber that I follow on Armada and Legion. He has run demos at big US gaming conventions in the US for FFG and they seemed to have a good relationship, but not so much with AMG.

He very recently, ie like in the last 24 hours, did a YT livestream about his approach to the news.  He mentions the 7 stages of grief, all whilst wearing an “Armada’s  NOT  dead” t-shirt, available from his merch store.  The Armada coverage is the first 33 minutes plus change.

 

[limburger 21704xp 1]

We do have to be careful with creating a ‘death spiral’ for a game by hammering on the ‘x is dead because there is no new stuff’ line of thought.

However that is the eternal question for games in general isn’t it ?
How much ‘new’ stuff does a game need to be considered ‘alive’ ?
What do we need from a company to grow the community ?

Bloodbowl was kept alive because the fans were passionate about it.
Maybe Armada / Xwing / Legion / Imperial Assault aren’t as passionate ?

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