Chapter 1: 8th Edition Warhammer 40,00: The Edition With Big Promises and No Substance

Harsh? Sure, but I'd say its the real secret behind 8th's success.

Ah yes, New 40k™. It's been an interesting experience, I'll give it that. Although, I never thought I'd be concluding at long last “Right, this is where I get off” regarding the rollercoaster ride that is 40k when it is actually a herald of (trivially minor) improvement. Sadly the words “obvious improvement” are not quite the same as “competently written ruleset”, and 8th Edition definitely demonstrates this discrepancy. In fact that's probably the only thing it does in a manner that is above average. But loads of people say this game is great right, so why don't I agree? Well my core argument here is pretty simple: GW can easily big up 8th Edition as an improvement over 7th Edition because, fundamentally, that wasn't a challenge. It doesn't really take much effort to improve on a game written by halfwits with a hostile attitude to their own audience. So when the actual fear GW has of said audience rises from the realisation that this attitude so obviously affected sales to such a noticeable extent that it has single-handedly driven a reactionary counter-narrative all centred around appeasing that beast, is it any wonder that this fear overshadows any potential the game could have had by pandering to an idea of safeness and an off-handing of responsibility to succeed onto the audience itself; because fundamentally, that appears to be easier for them than actually doing their fucking job. And they still likely think that's all your fault for expecting the game to be something other than their low effort meal-ticket. 8th Edition's biggest sin is not the lack of trying: it's the astounding lack of improvement. 

Now sure, “improvement” is to some extent a subjective term, but when the very idea of rules being “simplified” becomes an accepted agenda all to itself, there is already a very selective metric of goalpost shifting in play. The idea of simplicity itself gets a free pass, because of course it's an improvement, it always is (I hope your sarcasm detector is switched on, because if you didn't hear a ding there, you need one. Or the clown hiding under your bed just came). But this is precisely the driving force behind the 8th Edition narrative. It's simpler. This itself seems to be a point of celebration, as is often the case on the internet. Sadly, this rather ignores the more pressing issues, such as the fact that this “simpler” ruleset is, deep down, essentially the same beast as its predecessor (i.e. a jerky FAQ-reliant cyclejerk). The rules themselves fall flat. They remove pretty much all depth, and throw 40k into the quick beer and pretzel style game type, sharing the stage with games such as Fast and Dirty, FUBAR, and 1-Page. This simplicity is poorly constructed (as evidenced by the huge amount of FAQ and Errata) and not actually that simple when you add in the complicating factors of the faction rules, with their clunky interactions and inconsistent wording.

8th Edition is an attempt at an Abstract ruleset, but only half-committed to, with FAQs frequently undermining it, showing that they just hadn't even thought it through. I mean sure, we all make mistakes, but you can't afford to make them at this level, especially when your public interaction wing is being so arrogant about how good your new game is, and the prices on your rulebooks; rules supplements; campaign books; supplement faction books and related rules accessories collectively cost nearly 5 times more than even the competing “Geek Trap” (i.e. Fantasy, Steampunk and Sci-Fi Synergy Wargames) in rules alone. This is not even counting the huge investment of money and time the rest of the package requires. 8th Edition is trying to grab all of your attention, to be your sole hobby, and needs hours of investment learning synergies and stratagems. Yet the ruleset itself brings no depth with it, nothing to stimulate any mind expected to devote itself to it. 8th Edition is the edition that put the Boutique fancifulness GW has had of itself for over a decade into absolute overdrive, and systematically demonstrates that you can indeed polish a turd if your audience doesn't need to think.

Since 8th Edition launched, the biggest promise, and, indeed, the keyword has been balance. GW, and specifically Warhammer Community have been throwing that word around with wanton abandon. GW has led the charge with countless articles about balance with self-congratulatory tones of “best yet” and such. But, as I alluded to in the introduction, is it any effort to make something appear balanced to an audience that didn't mind 7th Edition? Although ironically, if they'd been as silent to the masses as they were in their bad old days, perhaps less critics would have noticed the astounding failure of this bold claim. Of course, there's still time for this fabled “balance” to occur, but so far, the results are far from conclusive. Just into the new edition, I took part in an apocalypse game. It was the most one-sided game I have ever been involved in: the xenos side were annihilated by the Imperials, who mostly didn't move at all, and shot us off the board, after going second. In a mere turn, we'd lost all our super heavies and they'd lost none. They took the flyers off out of “generosity” and let us put our super-heavies back on. A turn later they'd took all our super-heavies out again. 16 points to nothing. It highlighted to me obvious inequalities in the basic factions, especially on the top end, just showing the destructive powers that imperials have, with easy hit rolls (and easy access to re-rolls). Whereas Xenos, mostly Ork, albeit, with some Pansee to help, were shrugged off the board without any effort at all. My own kill tally was a Landspeeder and a Culexus Assassin. With about 4k worth of points. Easily the worst game I have ever played. (Dim From The Future: As an aside, I'm still right. We've had basically a year of Knight/Guard/Custode soup being dominant and NOTHING has changed there, missing SEVERAL opportunities to address it. The balance claim, is bullshit. End of. Also, Apocalypse needing to now be a gimmicky movement tray spin-off also enhances my point. We are looking at a set of core rules so utterly fragile and inflexible that something that has merely needed a small patch for years has had to become a separate game entirely. Still so sure 8th Ed is better?)

In regular games of 40k, my experience has been dominated by two words: Alpha Strike. There are loads of almost brainlessly easy lists. 40K isn't a game that's balanced to suit a variety of playstyles: it's balanced around people who know how to abuse power lists. This is literally the problem 40k has had for the past decade or so, and 8th Edition hasn't only done nothing to address this problem, they're reinforced it as the principle defining aspect of the game! The only thing they've done to change matters is remove most of the obvious inequality-driven faction-selling bullshit, and that's not really an achievement (given that this stuff should never have existed in the first place if their staff even had half an idea of how a wargame works). This ability for list shenanigans is summed up best via “Command Points”, where players can min-max to the point where they can easily grant themselves a re-roll for virtually every crucial roll in the game, or take spam lists and hardly notice a downside. The scenario rules still favour the better destructive force, meaning that once you've realised which army list is the strongest, it's probably pointless continuing to play, because thanks to this stripped down, moronic system, there is nowhere for you to hide, outmanoeuvre or otherwise outplay a superior force. You're there, largely, to roll dice and remove models. Movement merely gives you the illusion that you're trying to achieve something, and against a lot of Imperial lists, they'll not be doing much moving, given that they'll eliminate you far more easily by just sitting there and leaf-blowering you off the board. When you get down to it, this all there is to the game: it's an algorithm of your list's damage output and literally nothing else. You're being lulled by a promise of “balance” that mostly centres around points tweaking and FAQ nerfs that will be driven primarily from GW's contact with the UK and US tournament scenes, as if things couldn't be more disgusting already.

This game feels very “by committee” and that's not surprising. GW is still the same dumbass corporate company that forced itself into the position of needing to pretend to give a fuck about you just so you'll go back to buying a few things every now and then. Of course, you don't realise that this is all your fault. You guys have standards, so GW now needs you to tell them how to do everything, and this is why they've served up two wargames with no actual features, so you can tell them how to make them not suck, seeing as they don't seem to have anyone with half a clue how to fix them without you. Much like Forging the Narrative, GW continues with the onus on player responsibility. Now not only do you have to make the best of a situation and suck it up if you want to actually enjoy a game, you now also have to help them run a beta that they're selling as a completed product and essentially do most of the design work. Unpaid. Once again, GW hides behind the easy positives. Opening up to feedback is one thing, but when the people giving the feedback are doing pretty much all of the work to make this game function, be balanced, and even to stop exploits printed into Codices that they charge £30-50 for, it's evident that the improvement is threadbare and not substantive. 8th Edition is effectively a blank canvas for us to fill in: a blank canvas that costs £40 plus supplements.

So what's so wrong with it? Why is simpler bad? Simpler isn't always bad. It's simply a matter of execution. 8th Edition's core has much less to it, meaning it has to do more with less, or needs to turn its back on a lot of features but offer a better experience: 8th Edition fails at both of these outcomes. Let's do a rundown of a few of the problems. Movement values are varied again for the first time since 2nd Edition, but the game as a whole makes movement largely pointless (heavy weapon types outright discourage movement, many armies wont need to move at all and your opponent will likely alpha strike with most things that they would move anyway) so the nuance of variable movement types merely creates inequalities for no real point. Shooting is overly dominant, to the point of brainless saturation: leaf-blower builds are astoundingly easy, overwatch is automatic in every sense (particularly when it doesn't make any), and the oversimplification (i.e. neutering) of cover has rendered shooting as the easy solution to most problems apart from alpha strike, and sometimes even also that. The removal of initiative was entirely unnecessary and has mostly just created a game that makes large scale games of any size a headache when it comes to the assault phase, removing a useful stat that offered multiple in-game features in favour of a gimmick with a definite tolerance ceiling (and a tendency for creating rules clunk, inequalities and daft rules fixes later down the line). Morale may speed the game up, but it essentially just rewards outright offence and list power (like everything else in this game) and removes a lot of nuance from the game. Scenarios, whilst better than they have been in about 3 editions, still basically favour list power and killing ability. Any 40k game is still basically playing slayer mode with a few options to move that you simply don't opt to do and eliminate your opponent from the board via targeted alpha strike or static leaf-blower fire. And that's not even an exhaustive list of core failings.

Besides, it's not just what features the game has, but also what it lacks (which is pretty much everything). The removal of Unit Types is already demonstratively a problem: removing much nuance, consistency and adaptability from the core, meaning that you have a deluge of slightly varied similar rules that add nothing to the game aside from more to read in army books, usually during games. Whilst not a necessity, it's more of a sideways movement for the game. As stated above, the lack of cover as an interesting or nuanced feature has helped render movement and positioning as largely pointless. Movement and positioning are supposed to be a key feature of any good wargame, but in 40k's case they are merely an issue of weapon or charge range, and barely anything else. The game also lacks a lot of consistency, such as failing to remain consistently an abstract style game: having no ceiling for wounding but perplexingly having one for hitting and so on (this is before multiple FAQ entries break the abstract style with exceptions no one could logically conclude from what the rules provide). The removal of templates takes away a tactile element of the game that helped break up all the dice rolling and they replaced them with... more dice rolling. But the main thing they removed from the game was the application of skill. Most of that is gone. Positioning doesn't matter (except for basic things any wargame, or tabletop strategy game such a Draughts or Go provides, making such a feature not even worth mentioning), very basic tactics are basically all you need to succeed if your list is basically better than the opponents' which will often be the case if you're vaguely a powergamer. There's essentially nothing you can do wrong, unless you're really going out of your way to lose (or you're unlucky with dice rolls), and the average 40k tactics seen in-game plays out like some of Mat Ward's battle fluff: your army attacks directly and superior might equates victory. As wargaming goes, it can't get any more basic or less satisfying than this.

40k's design is ultimately conservative. It's a product of borrowing from Age of Sigmar's also stripped down style (note that a simpler ruleset is first and foremost quicker to write, which is likely the only reason they opted for that style), but in spite of this conservatism, mostly fuelled by “mathshammer” and hollow promises, the game is heavily flawed. This is why I am so frequently critical of simplified rulesets. The fact is, that if you let less rules dominate the majority of your game, you absolutely have to make sure that those functions work flawlessly and that the minimalist words used do as much work as possible. It is absolutely fundamentally crucial that your approach remains consistent, and that game functions support each other. Writing a simplified ruleset well requires more skill than writing a comprehensive larger ruleset, and it is an entirely different skill-set. GW have demonstrated with both games that use this new style, that GW are incapable of even anticipating the most obvious of flaws and the problems that will stem from merely core rules alone. All the while GW enter (much like with Finecast) into a completely new aspect of the industry (quickplay simplified rulesets) and demonstrate out of the door that they fundamentally lack even the most basic capacity to do it well, all whilst charging boutique prices, as if they've fucking mastered it. Neither AoS, nor 40k 8th Edition as Core Rules alone are remotely as refined as other rulesets, such as Fast and Dirty and FUBAR, rulesets that are either significantly cheaper or just free entirely. If you actually want to play a game of 40k as GW intends you to, that means paying a minimum of £105 to play one game (Rulebook, Open War Cards, 1 Codex, Chapter Approved [Future Dim: Ignoring that you've had to buy yet another one even shittier than the first and Campaign Supplements so sparse of content related to campaigns that it needed to ransom new units, relics and formations just to get people to buy it) on top of the very expensive prices they are charging for their models, with a new aesthetic that out of the door isn't too far divorced from the shit you'll find in Toys R Us (Future Dim: whatever that is). Do remember that you're paying boutique prices for this game that is basically a beta (and plays like an alpha].

The sad thing is that Warhammer 40,000 is, at least in terms of balance, better than it has been in a long time but given the absolutely pathetic ante-upping dross it followed (an edition of the game that GW could have struggled to make worse than it was), that's really not difficult at all. Once you get over the fact that 8th Edition (most likely briefly) called time on the worst of the sales stimulus nonsense that the last 3 Editions had blatantly served up (with the editions merely reducing the amount of effort they could be bothered to summon up to hide that fact), it doesn't take much effort to see that there is basically nothing else to this game other than an effort to create at least the pretence of a slightly more stable meta whilst removing as much work from their writing duties as possible. But that wasn't achieved without a cost, and that cost was draining virtually all of the game's character and style to achieve it. Moreover, it fails to solve any of the issues that has plagued the game for over a decade, aside of trying to insist to fans that the days of sales-based inequality are over (which is very unlikely). There are only two major features to this game: it's simpler to play and it's not as bad as 7th. And frankly, anyone, even an outright amateur with no experience in this industry could have managed that, and a great many people would have easily done it better and not charged £40 for the core plus supplements. Frankly, this game is mediocre at best, and serves to highlight that even now, GW are clueless in their own industry but act like they're the best. If this is the best they have to offer, I'm utterly bewildered that they think this pretty underwhelming bare bones game is worth the decade or more of open indifference and/or hostility its own fanbase experienced during the Kirby Era. If this is supposed to be the Revolution, I for one do not feel emancipated. I feel indifference.