Warhammer: The Old World – With Scant Details, Continues To Baffle Us All
I love Warhammer Fantasy. I really want to believe in the Old World, but it’s getting hard.
I love Warhammer Fantasy Battles. During its active run, it was an amazing game, and without it, we would not have GW or 40K. The day it was discontinued in favor of Age of Sigmar was a dark day for me. So I was incredibly excited when GW announced Warhammer: The Old World. Though I’d made my peace with AoS, and enjoyed it, here was hope for a return to the classic days of WFB, with some nice updates. However, years later I remain completely baffled by the game, and the latest announcements out of Warhammer Fest have not improved this. Let’s take a look at why I’m befuddled.
A Baffling Lack Of Information
In mid November of 2019, GW announced that the World That Was would return with Warhammer: The Old World. At the time, they were quite clear that the game was some time off, three or more years away. Well, it’s now three and half years later… and we still know relatively little about the game. GW has released an incredibly small trickle of information over the past three years. We don’t have any clear idea of what the rules or the scale, other than it will be in 28mm. We have a rough idea of the timeframe the game is set in, and some of the factions have been confirmed. Some bits of artwork have come out. It’s incredibly little information for a game they announced so long ago.
Now it’s likely that the Pandemic and shutdowns delayed the game a bit. But it’s increasingly hard to get super excited about a game when we have so little info on it. Is it mostly new models or old ones? Is it based on classic 7th Edition or the controversial 8th Edition of Warhammer Fantasy? Or is it a whole new rule set? More akin to AoS? Who knows. Getting concrete info on the game has been almost impossible, and for a company trying to ramp up hype that’s baffling.
The Models
Aside from the rules, the models were another massive question. Is this a mainline plastic game? Just something from mostly ForgeWorld? Old models or new? GW did tease some 3d renders of new models, so it seems like we would be getting new ones. Then a couple of weeks ago in early April for the first time in over three units they showed off full models for the Old World. And they were just repaints of existing Bertonnian models. Sure these models are no longer in production, and this implies that they are coming back, which is cool. But after this long we kind of wanted something real and new and meaty. But of course, Warhammer Fest was coming up, and surely they would have something real!
Well, Warhammer Fest did give us the first new models for the game, so that’s exciting to a degree. However, the models shown off were just plain baffling. What we got was a new Tomb King and a Paladin. Both on foot.
Now these are both new models, and good ones, but they are also models for units that existed in WFB. They are not anything “new” for this game. They are also a bit boring, being single foot-based character models. Even more confusing they are resin models. Remember that resin is a medium that GW has seemingly been working very hard to move away from. All in all, these feel more like limited edition anniversary models, than ones for a new game. Anniversary models, at least would be in plastic. And that leads us to another confusing tidbit.
What Are Old World Models Going To Made Out Of?
Releasing new resin models is a strange choice, but the only other information GW put out in the sparse Fest announcement was this:
“New models for the game will be released in Citadel plastic and Forge World resin, and they’ll join a whole range of resurrected and revitalised miniatures from prior editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battles – in plastic, resin, and metal – to make satisfyingly varied armies.”
Wait, Metal?!
Now… maybe I’m misinterpreting this bit, but is GW bringing back metal models? GW has done its hardest to get out of the metal model industry for the last decade at least. In fact it worked extremely hard to move everything to plastic. All it’s newer games are in plastic. AoS is all plastic. They’ve been working to move the FW Horus Heresy models over into plastic. They just announced that Cerastus Knight was moving over from resin to plastic. And now the brand “new” Old World is going to be a mix of metal, resin and plastic? I mean this is one way to bring back the actual feel of old WFB I guess.
We can assume, and hope, that if there are metal models they will be old ones and not brand new metal models. This is likely a way to just spin up the old line without having to update some classic metal models. But it’s still a bit crazy. Isn’t this the perfect time to modernize those and change things up? Or maybe that’s what they mean by revitalized? It’s quite confusing. It also really makes me question how many resources GW is putting into this game. It’s been three and a half years, and we still know next to nothing about it really. The soonest it could come out is next summer. Now it seems like they aren’t even committing to give it the all new plastics treatment that other core games are getting. I really want to have faith in this game. As they used to say on the X-Files, I want to belive. But it’s getting harder.
Let us know what you think of the Old World so far, down in the comments!
