Weekender XLBS: The End Of Warhammer Fantasy As We Know It?
November 30, 2014 by dracs
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Happy Sunday!!!!
XLBS before work, nice 😀
Still agreeing with @dignity comment on the regular weekender about backstagers getting first chance on coming to the new studio, you know what with us making it all possible 😉
Backstagers will get first refusal on all events 🙂
Woop of joy 😀
With preference given too backstage members from Bangladesh ?
Solidarity with the Bangladesh backstagers!
Yes we owe them that! 😉
I bet if you carried out a poll of all the players of WHF, the percentage of them who only play it totally as written by the gods of GW, they would be in the minority! I haven’t played it for over 20 years, but everyone I know who still do regularly, play a club house rules version, and they are many!
Besides which, we have Kings of War 2nd edition romping home on a kickstarter. Take a real hard look GW!!!
Well, if you call your latest fantasy product `End Times you pretty much have to go for a post apocalyptic game after that. No more big armies running around, just small bands of desperate survivors.
GW going back to their roots, first edition was mostly skirmish with unit play as an option
A very valid hypothesis, fits in with the old adage ‘what goes around comes around’ ; )
That’s my guess too. They need to design an entry point for the game. A bit like Mantic does. It could be cool if they were to bring back the small skirmish games and allow the use of characters and troops from the bigger format. It would even allow us to start small and then add to our collection up to the point where we have enough models to play bigger games.
(I hope that’s what they also do with 40k as I don’t play Fantasy Battle.) 😉
Would be super-keen for a GW fantasy skirmish game, or better yet, a return of Mordheim. Am starting to worry though that the High Elves i’ve been paining since 5th ed may never actually see the tabletop in full scale battles…
Like Warren indicated, whatever GW do in the future, should have little or no bearing on you enjoying playing your elves, whose game is it?, yours or forever GW’s? In the words of the great Ed Texeira, ‘just play the game’ ; )
I’m pretty sure mr Renton won’t mind you getting a copy of his rules to play with your GW toys 🙂
What I’d like to see: Entry point for WFB = Mordheim. Entry point for 40k = Space Hulk. 😉
I don’t know if Space Hulk would make a good entry point for 40k. It’s a fun boardgame, but the choice of factions is pretty limited, as are the troop choices. A 40k smirmish game of some kind would be better, small warbands could lead directly into collecting bigger armies.
No more WFB? Fair enough, but this’ll start edition wars to which edition we use for our tournie dates. Good to see the interactively options for KoW, and with a progressive team who are looking in how to embrace technology. If GW employed a similar strategy, the possibilities would be staggering.
There have been many statistical studies carried out concerning randomness. One which springs to mind is when they took two groups of people, one group was given the task of flipping a coin 100 times and recording the results, the other group were given the task of virtually flipping a coin and recording the results. The two sets of data were then compared. The virtual coin flip group recorded a significantly more random grouping of results. There were sequences of up to 9 consecutive results produced in the actual coin flip group, not as random as expected! Of course given enough coin flips, this would produce nearer the expected 50/50 chance predicted statistically! Interesting? I was involved in a game of Spartacus at my local club last Thursday night and during one gladiator engagement, 3 dice were rolled by one player scoring 1, 1, 2, three times in succession, the same dice, later on were producing series of 5’s and 6’s. Conclusion: actual randomness is not so random!
That’s been our thoughts behind the shuffling algorithm, there are so many factors that affect randomness in real life that true randomness is almost impossible. If you always roll your dice on the same type of table, if you always flip a coin starting with heads facing up etc. It’ll be interesting to see what people think of the Deadzone App.
It is most certainly the reason that, in the new year, I will be itching to get started with Mantic products. Thus far, I have only bought the basic starter box of two armies on eBay, had it over 18 months, but as yet not done anything with it, I will now though! Look forward to more Mantic coverage on BoW.
Virtual randomness also completely relies on the random number generator, how the generator is seeded and so forth. This is why for machine learning that I make use of, we have to run training a lot, because fitting data relies heavily on the random setting of the initial parameters. Computers just don’t feel random for a lot reasons.
Is this Deadzone App out yet? And when they say, do they actually mean iOS app, or a real app that’s available for other platforms?
Nvm, actually listened and heard the answer. Early next month.
It’s going to be available next month for iOS and Android and if you follow @prplgrla on twitter you might be able to get early access.
No love for Windows with the Mantic Digital stuff. 🙁
@jodain there is a growing demand for Windows versions and it’s something that we’re discussing and trying to figure out at the moment.
For shooting live shows guys, you are going to need a vision mixer, and a couple people behind the scene. A live mixing editor, someone on your assets, which should be prepped before broadcast, hopefully a director and floor manager too!
I reckon you can do it!
I reckon we’ll give it a bloody good go! 😉
I really enjoyed Interstellar. Thought it was a beautifully made film.
As a longtime advocate of GW ditching WFB as a mass battle game and replacing it with a large-scale skirmish game that uses a cardgame model to keep sales up whilst not requiring a lot of minis on the table at one time, I’m cautiously optimistic. I do think that realistically the mass battle game will die out beyond some small pockets of people. At the time 8th ed was getting me down I tried to go back to 6th ed and couldn’t get a game. 3rd ed is taking off but I couldn’t even get a game of that. It’s a lot easier said than done. I don’t see why GW couldn’t make a mass battle set of rules available for anyone who wanted to keep playing that way. They did it with War of the Ring.
At 42:45, a word not in the GW dictionary, ‘FREE’ !!!! I’m just an old cynic at heart! ; )
The inquisitorial department excommunicated the word “FREE” when the chaos marines rebelled.
A GREAT! GREAT! GREAT! Show guys. Remember the new Mantra for 2015 will not be whatever GW decide to rename their stores, but most definitely: ‘MANTIC, MANTIC, MANTIC!’ Like a breath of fresh air to the gaming world. Love it!
P.S., be bold Sam, don’t let Warren talk over you mate! ; )
But he’s bigger than me
The bigger they are the larger the dent in the floor when they drop! ; )
Well presented young Sam, onwards and upwards to greater glory brother!
Happy Sunday.
I would love to see mordheim come back, it was the game that got me into fantasy. Although I am old and jaded now, and no longer play/own any gw stuff I think a mordheim reboot would actually bring me back.
However the issue is now that mordheim/necromunda have been abandoned, other companies have since made similar games that are better?
I think they have. Which is not a slight on those games. Just an acknowledgement that they were “of their time”. Keeping them the same would be like re-booting an old video game franchise but not changing the gameplay or graphics.
Yeah Im ok if they go the way of skirmish for WFB. Theres only one thing I would appreciate knowing before I continue on with my Daemon/Beastmen army… round or square bases?
Round or square, expect them to be of a new size that no one currently owns any of! 🙂
Oh on a more important topic, Im a massive yes for a DB weekend with BoW. DB got me back into gameing. I went big on the KS. Thered be a few at the club thatd love to head up for that too.
Can you get the non backstage video content to work without flash please, I can choose html5 for backstage but have to go YouTube or misout for anything else
Sorry interstellar was superb
So GW, as I’ve been banging on for a few years on a number of forums:it is possible for a TT game company to have a sensible digital strategy that enhances the physical products!
Well done Mantic, great investment that will draw new people in.
I really like videogames, and maybe I’m alone in this, but I have zero interest in seeing you guys play them. I don’t come to BoW for videogames.
That being said, I’d love if you played a tabletop Mordheim campaing.
If Warhammer turned into a skirmish game I’m sure I’d play it (if I could find opponents) but I would be seriously upset if I can’t continue to use most of my models. Hard to see the need for 30+ skeletons at once in a skirmish game (etc.).
As for continuing to play 8th after it is supported: yes its a nice theory but in practice the player base would inevitably drop, making it harder to play games. Its already a struggle to find opponents now with so many other games competing for people’s time. Even if people did continue to play, after a year or so with no new army books or updates the game would grow stale and people would drift away.
Agreed. I’ve seen it happen too many times with other games not to be realistic about what will happen.
If the community moved to a still supported game, such as Kings of War, there would be nothing stopping you from continuing to use your minis in that system, especially as a lot of the Mantic minis are almost direct copies of GW minis. However it would be nice to see them include a unit or army builder system into their game, that way we could take advantage of all those models they don’t have rules for.
as Ronnie said ‘make it so’ yes to dreadball being the first with a side show of X wing
The only downside with steam is that technically you don’t own the games you buy!
Why would you want to own them anyway, the resale value is never very much, as the market moves on so rapidly the game you may have played to death in 6-9 months is ‘well old’ (using modern vernacular). You purchase the rights to use the software in the way it has been designed to be used, so really you only own the DVD and cover, not the software! I’ve only just been made aware of Steam from this clip, looking it up, I see that the price of the games compared to outright buying it on DVD is very reasonable and highly marketable I would imagine?
Still own every game I’ve ever bought, so resale value has never crossed my mind and I’ve always preferred having a copy to stick on my shelf.
thanks to you guys im now a backstager and father Christmas has got me armoured fury
great episode, btw im a vintage player who stills prefer the paperwork, and also his rosters and similars, will be great a livesesions of games of saga or Dreadball like a campaing or season, haha.
The army/roster lists would be great if they could produce a PDF to print out.
Dreadball day!!!!
Really like the idea of hosted events.
my understanding is new warhammer game entry point to be skirmish based that scales up to standard size 2000+ point games with the advanced rules section .which would be a smart move if true lowers entry point for new gamers cost wise
A game that offers a very low entry point but then encourages continual purchases is definitely the way to go. I’m not sure that offering a skirmish game and the trad mass battle game in the same book is the way to do that. It doesn’t solve any of the problems with the mass battle game and runs the risk of most people playing it as a low mini-count skirmish game, which is the worst of both worlds. That would be better than the worst of one world like they have now (assuming there isn’t an exodus of current mass battle players to the skirmish game, which would be a disaster).
If it’s the case that they’ll be promoting a skirmish game with an incentive to buy lots of minis as the “main game”, with the mass battle rules included if people want to play it, that would be a better route to take.
“I’m not sure that offering a skirmish game and the trad mass battle game in the same book is the way to do that”
I should probably expand on that. I mean that the mass battle game shouldn’t be where the skirmish game leads to. It should be an option for people who want to play it, but the skirmish game itself needs to scale up whilst remaining a skirmish game. I’m talking about the difference between a skirmish game where you’re fielding 6-10 minis and only need as much again to have all the options you need, and a one in which you field 30 minis and can realistically own upwards of a 100 to give yourself a variety of options. The latter will generate the money needed to keep Warhammer alive, whilst still remaining an accessible skirmish game.
Point being, even if GW did all that and more, people are still going to bitch and moan, simply because it’s GW.
I have to say it’s great to see the direction Ronnie and Mantic are taking the digital side, it’s going to make running campaigns and leagues a hell of a lot easier in my opinion
Happy Sunday. Another show watched in my jammies.
I loved Interstellar, give it a watch… don’t trust a man with hair like that 😉
Dug out my 3rd and 6th edition rule books not so long ago, was totally up for a nostalgia game. If it goes skirmish perhaps it gives them a chance to modernise the rule system. These days my mates and I only play games that can be done in a couple of hours… epic 10 hour dungeon crawls took their toll on our enthusiasm (and livers)
Speaking of which, were you Arya Stark’s body double, @dracs?
It would explain the haircut
My thoughts too
The mantic mapp(!) stuff looks very interesting. A persistent tabletop world where players could fight battles that affect the ongoing world map and story could be epic. Players could take on fights highlighted by the app with a given number of points each so desperate last stands could be fought out and objectives would actually have some meaning, and the results fed back to the games company to update the world, move frontlines, activate story elements and so on.
Well worth £3.79
i know people who play 1st and 2nd edition of WHF – The attitude of ‘you have to play the current rule books’ seems to stem from tournament players and tournament organisers. This seems to be the current finger of blame is at the tournament scene. I don’t know if this is true or not.
It’s not an attitude, it’s a reality. Once a game is no longer available, most people drift away. It becomes very difficult to get a game in so more people drift away. As players leave, new ones aren’t generated to replace them. Very quickly the game either dies out completely or has only the occasional small oasis of players still playing it.
Great gaming background on movers and shakers in the industry. Although re End Times Warhammer Malarky, if GW don’t wish to alienate an entire fan base who pay their wages after all, whatever they do will have to make use of the £100 single Hero Fantasy models they’ve been doing recently.
Rumors about skirmish maybe inside GW sources speculating with Mordhiem just released on PC. So to hook players in might well be a relaunch coming on the back of the PC game.
Without knowing the sources and how close to the Boardroom they are its hard to know how informed the rumors are.
One thing I can’t stand about the Privateer Press apps is the scaling. My HTC One M8 has a 1080p screen and everything in an app that has not been scaled properly is TINY. I have fairly small hands and my close range vision is fine but it’s still incredibly difficult to use due to the size.
Also it’s interesting that people are becoming so interested in the fluff behind Mantic’s games. I used to see Mantic as the “generic” equivalent to the “name-brand” companies and I kinda figured a lot of the fluff was just generic fantasy, fill it out on your own, etc, etc. I just got in on the KoW 2.0 kickstarter though and I’m really excited to read about the lore! That’s what I really love about WFB and has somewhat kept me out of KoW but I’m ready for my mind to be changed!
Great show love the new studio! The growth in the last year is tremendous, keep it up.
Get on steam and enjoy Shadowrun, there are a couple of games and they are fun. Started with the 4th edition pen and paper ( now running 5th set in the 2050 era) and found the games on steam. This is a rich world with over twenty years of writing.
YES!!! Warren needs to play some horror games!
I have to say that this XLBS disappointed me: short, and most of it taken up with Mantic talking about Mantic digital. I love Mantic, but would rather have had no XLBS this week than a Mantic piece labelled as XLBS.
I’ll go back in my cave now.
Adding: please, no video game videos!
I loved Interstellar myself, but then I don’t like many films in the least, especially not SF so it is rare I like one even a little, so I was happy something came out that had the sort of things I liked…but hey, each to their own eh? 🙂
The whole WHFB End Times if they go through with it for real – remind me for the first game reboot I came across many moos ago when TSR who then own (A)D&D and the game setting of Dragonlance got desperate enough to try something radical – and came out with a new setting / new game while killing of the old one – and as the record show they did not win out by it and where bought up by a card maker. Personally I have not returned to (A)D&D since then …
I do still enjoy WHFB – but should they invalidate my armies I have a lot of other systems I might be able to talk the local WHFB into KoW among them
Dragonlance was awesome.
go go ronny
new dreadball, kings of war 2, warpath to take on 40k,
new digital media. Mantic to take over the world….
It’s just a pity the Warpath fluff is so terrible.
I’m realy geting interested in Mantic after watching this weekend ‘ s videos. Both saturday and sunday videos were great by the way! Keep up the great work!
Yes, dreadball is a perfect game for a weekend, fun, easy to teach, you don’t need a lot of space and matches are rather quick so can do even a league.
I’m fairly relaxed about the rumoured death of WFB. With this in mind I’ve bought the kits I need to finish my 8th ed Empire army and will continue with that.
Do your worst GW; I’ll continue with 8th if Future Warhammer is crap 😉
great show
The Refbot app isn’t perfect yet but it’s really handy – especially the stats for MVPs. While you tend to know your own team’s stats, MVPs are a relative unknown. It’s handy having all the stuff in one place for MVP auctions and in games. Looking forward to seeing it progress.
Is it wrong that working for BoW would be a dream job? You guys are looking like your having a lot of fun! Keep up the amazing work guys!!!
I don’t think most of us would get much work done 🙂
The direction mantic digital is going in sounds great. What the have planeed seems to be similar to what gw had planned for the 13th black crusade campaign but never seemed to pan out.
Good one.
the mantic world war thing sounds great will there be updates during the campaign’s to represent (runners) saying to leaders how the ebb & flow on borders of kingdoms so players can impede the advances of their enemies.
dreadball as first tournament please!
how about mantic to take on the Great Martian War?
Wow. I got excited when Sam mentioned WH40K: Armageddon, but was INSTANTLY turned off with the voice actor chosen for the trailer. Really? What a whiny, nasally git! Hardly what I’d expect from an Imperial. Plus he mumbled. Nope. no sale now for me.
Please please please keep Ronnie Renton off the show. Same goes for @warzan, especially with Ronnie. I love what you are doing, but those two have too much passion for things. And its not the kind of passion that makes you step away quietly from the weirdos, its the kind of passion that sucks you in. Honestly guys, you two should sell bloody timeshares or start a pyramid scheme, you’d make millions.
I am falling more and more for Mantic as time goes by. Their business ethic and how they conduct themselves is top notch, a company GW could learn from. They’re not perfect, but they seem humble and genuine about their faults. Where GW wants you to try a game they want you to buy a set. If one of their staff was caught saying “just use any models you have!” they’d be fired. But I’ve heard Ronnie say that dozens of times, and it seems like a company that is confident in it’s products ability to perform and not a company that’s sell at all costs!
Oh, please don’t do computer games, its hard to find good tabletop content and you guess keep going from strength to strength, but dedicated gamers releasing gameplay videos are 10 a penny, and a lot of them are really good because they dedicate their entire video time to one or two games. You wont be able to keep up and you will be wasting your talent!
The one thing about steam though is, that it does NOT guarantie that it works. There is no moderation for Steam at all. Which is it’s biggest problem right now. And on the topic of old games, you should check out http://gog.com/ because they do moderate the games and make sure they work.
I’ve bought several old games from steam, 2 of my faves in a sale, Fallout and Fallout 2. I got 2 working after aboutman hour of downloads and tinkering after reading forums, fallout 1 I never got working. You really have to check old games before buying.
Getting them working is not the problem. Being required to is. They sell those games as if they work right out, when all they do is copy the old CDs and put them up for download. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Steam, but when it comes to old titles it sucks.
I would say getting them working is a problem. I’m relatively ok on a computer, nothing fancy, and there are a few games that I have tried for hours to get running but have never been able to! That is not on. I don’t want to have to be a computer science degree holder to get a game running.
Ronnie, you had me in the weekender, the backstage is just extraneous foreplay now; yes! I do! I choo-choo-choose you, Mantic!
Also, on movie sets there are two types of body doubles; dialogue fill-ins and the kind that prevent J-Lo from having to powder her ass for the camera…. Are we sure we know which one @dracs was? I heard someone mention Arya Stark, how similar is sam’s backside to that of Maisie Williams? Or maybe they needed a pre-pubescent Arya considering the youth of the character vs Maisie’s maturation… Was it a full frontal sub-in? Obviously with some digital re-mastery to change, you know… The face ;).
Good on you though Sam, that’s pretty awesome, I mean you literally got to receive lines from the actors, watch the sausage being made from the fun part of the set – I’m highly jealous!
Like what I hear of what Mantic is doing.
Ronnie…itchy? Allergies are a common problem among nerds. Antihistamines can help with that.
Just my honest opinion of the show – Too much Mantic talk and Sam should’ve gone more into detail about the wargaming video games.
I hate this player! It crashes and crashes and crashes. Since you guys use this player for XLBS I´m having troubles with the videos. Every 4-5 minutes I have to restart my browser because some plugin-container crashes and my screen goes black. And it only happens with backstage videos
Happy Sun…Monday!
When is the DR coming back for some full game play videos? 🙂
Noooooo! I just got into Fantasy and am currently building the Empire starter army. The game is good but overall overly complicated. Already using some house rules to make things run smother but the models are amazing (yet overpriced)…..says Crazie German. Cheers!
Hi guys, great show as always, the new studios are looking awsome! I think Mantic are going places and I think it is their great attitude that is getting them there. It’s great to see a company that is moving with the times and using new technology to help the age old world of games move into new and exciting areas, can’t wait to see where this ultimately goes.
Personally I don’t mind some video game coverage if it is direct crossover stuff, but wouldn’t like to see general game coverage becoming the norm even if some of us might play them now occasionally.
Okay. At about 28:2, there’s a definite sound of a belch. Warren is talking and the camera is on him, so it wasn’t him. So, which of the Mantic guys had a burrito grande for breakfast?