3.0: failed or not?

[Nagashsnee]

15 hours ago, Orodhen said:

I think it's safe to say that Alan Bligh was a big reason early Heresy was like that. You could tell there was a lot of love and passion put into them. They weren't perfect or balanced, but they were very enjoyable books.

 

Without him, it's returning to normal corpo-slop content.

But why? He had a team, his method brought results, the fans loved it and the game sold well enough in resin to tranfer it to plastic. Why immidiatly start distancing away from the clearly working model?

 

Alan was great at his job, but they could surely hire/promote to cover the gap and carry on what was working. I will never understand the mindset of 'the game has gone great, a community has formed, sales are so high we have began casting sprues in plastic, now lets move AWAY from the system so far and do what ALL OUR OTHER GAMES ALREADY DO''.

 

Even today the black book re sale price is insane, while the 2edition books...well they are still worth something at least.  They had a winning formula why run away from it?

 

I wont belive no one else has passion, or they are fundamentaly incapable of doing it. I would just like to know the actual reason? Cost/profit? Suits couldnt be bothered? Part of taking FW apart?

Edited Friday at 10:05 AM by Nagashsnee

[Brofist]

Its hard to say for sure without working there. That said, if its anything like the digital games business, its because GW is run by suits. Business decisions don't have to make sense. It just has to make sense to the people in charge. People at that level making those decisions rarely even touch the products they manage, let alone play games.

[Pacific81]

After playing a few games (and enough to form an opinion) I would say a strong, central project manager or designer is exactly what the edition is missing. It's impossible to say for sure as GW no longer credits its creatives, but the evidence for me is in how many contradictory styles of mechanics are in the game. As an example, some areas are extremely abstract - the terrain rules, damage & casualty management, all designed to speed up play. But then on the other hand you have incredibly crunchy & complex systems more at home in a skirmish game (I had one melee combat with challenge that took almost 30 minutes to complete because of mixed weapon loadouts), things like the split psychology stats and reactions, which for me are absolutely nuts in a mass combat game.

So I would say you had probably 2 or 3 designers pulling in different directions, too many cooks, they compromised and then you are left with a bit of a stew. It needed a 'Gordon Ramsay' to tell people to F-off! 

Edited Friday at 11:17 AM by Pacific81
Typo

[Irate Khornate]

That lines up with most of the sentiment. This game edition was cobbled together from 3 separate designers and had no central oversight other than to run the book through an ai program to check the grammar.

 

From my understanding 30k isn't the only victim of the suits. AOS I believe is in the same boat and losing popularity as a result. Could be wrong though, but I know the local community has pretty much died as well. 

[Brother Sutek]

Losing focus can usually be attributed to a new boss with either the want to make their own mark, appease the powers that be or incompetence.  At a job I used to have it was due to a senior manager leaving for greener pastures and a newer manager being promoted to his position.  The senior has enough clout to be able to fight for his programs and plans but the new one was unable to leverage the ideas that they had. Also the new one really wanted to make her mark and not just be our old bosses shadow. It didn't turn out well for us and I left the job for greener pastures as well. Alan wasn't perfect but without the strong arm on the rudder we got a diluted game IMO.  

[DuskRaider]

It’s the 40kification of 30K. They wanted all lines to share a similar design style, from layout to gameplay. It happened to Fantasy, it happened with 40K from 8th Edition on and 30K was dragged down into it as well from 2nd edition to current. GW was in dire straits financially at this point and made some drastic changes which, if we’re being honest, saved the company. It also ended up streamlining the game systems to a high degree, push out a lot of old players and actively recruit new younger players.
 

I don’t need to tell anyone my thoughts on 8th and on, I’ve stated it before many many times. Seeing my beloved 30K suffer the same fate has been demoralizing, to say the least. 

Edited Saturday at 11:22 PM by DuskRaider
Spelling

[MARK0SIAN]

It feels like a lot of my gripes with the change to 3.0 can generally be summed up with:

 

“but who was asking for this?”

 

I don’t hate all the changes by any means but some stuff just seems like it was trying to solve a problem that wasn’t really a problem or was just introducing something that no one was asking for. 
 

They talked, for example, about how no one was taking regular centurions before and that was generally true. But was that honestly a problem? The plethora of wargear choices meant that even if you had made and painted an awesome centurion model it could easily stand in for almost any other HQ.

 

People weren’t using pistols? Again, was that really an issue? Most models weren’t equipped with anything interesting in terms of pistols anyway. It certainly didn’t warrant adding in a second shooting phase to the game so people would use them. 
 

Challenges certainly had issues but that was largely down to being able to play silly games with chosen warriors/sergeants and the fact wounds didn’t spill out of challenges. I don’t think I ever heard anyone ask for the challenge phase to be turned into such a complex and time consuming mini game. 

I’ve already made my thoughts on the army building system clear but honestly, who was asking for this current system? 
 

It just feels like, although the designers did identify lots of areas that needed improvement, they also seem to have plucked some out of some fever dream they had.

[Razorblade]

There's also a clear "throw everything at the game and see what sticks"-approach at play here. 

Which is perfectly fine for a first draft that is going to get proof-read and playtested, but that obviously didn't happen here.