Games Workshop is the veritable Nintendo of the Wargaming world, with their own poster boy standing as a particular example of their success. Nintendo has Mario, the tirelessly boot stomping plumber; Games Workshop has the space marines. If you asked a GW fan to name a memorable symbol that best defines their products, you could safely bet that most would (reluctantly or not) say the Space Marines.
It is truly hard not to. As Halo has determined (surely developed from the idea of the Space Marines themselves) that a well armoured, otherwise quite uncharacteristic warrior with a deadly automatic weapon embodies enough inflated badassment to sell itself with very little effort. It is quite ironic that Space Marines are held as a rather innovative and original invention, considering that really, GW just took their Warhammer Fantasy system and plonked all their races (including armoured questing knights) into a (still rather magical and mystical) futuristic universe.
GW are not entirely unaware of this tendency, and their Space Dwarfs (well, Dwarves – The Squats as they were known) took a rather speedy exit just to avoid the blatant comparison; although retaining Space Marines (Knights), Space Orks (Orcs and Goblins – with a hint of Skaven innovation), Necrons (Undead and Tomb Kings), Imperial Guard (Empire with modern warfare thrown in), Eldar, Dark Eldar and the Harlequins (pretty much all of the Elves) and of course Chaos. The edition of the blatantly Anime Tau Empire and the disturbingly Aliens/Cthuluesque Tyrannids (who in my opinion share the Skaven theme with Orks) don’t necessarily hide GW’s fondness for taking as much popular and geek culture conventions as they can into their gaming settings.
The question is, does this matter? My answer is a perplexing mix of yes and no. Yes, because you cannot even look at a sentence in any GW work without reeling from an overdose of the cliché, finding it very easy to draw cultural and literary connections to other works. This would not be so bad if not for the utterly staggering amount of it that they have fitted into it of the many decades they’ve had to do it. If you spend your life in a vain search to locate ‘original’ material, you’ll find it hard pressed to do it at Games Workshop.
GW’s success however highlights one simple thing. People like the cliché. I know I do, because that is how stories work. The more you know before you approach something, makes it all the more easy to understand and communicate. What GW has done is make a living out of giving us, essentially, what we all want. Besides, it would be wholly unfair to say that GW hasn’t even attempted to spin their own yarns from it. In almost all of their games, they have. 40k more than any others has a vastly deep and interesting narrative. If there was one thing I’d say that was outstanding about Warhammer 40,000, it is the setting and the narrative attached to it.
The far-flung universe of Warhammer 40,000 is a dark and cynical time. Endless war, and a rogue’s gallery of demented races all entirely determined to wipe humanity off the face of the galaxy: just to show they truly care. Humanity’s ultimate weapon is of course the Space Marines, but that hasn’t stopped the foul Gods of chaos perverting some of their own to chuck back at them.
One of the unfortunate aspects of the 40k universe is that you literally cannot breathe for Space Marines. In the 40k section of any Games Worshop store they take up a majority of the shelf space, and if one of their staff is going to try and peddle something to you, it’ll be their power armoured poster boys. GW it seems quickly hit on the coolness factor of Space Marines and quickly realised they are 40k’s main selling point.
Unfortunately, it is disgustingly true. Everyone who plays 40k plays because of Space Marines. Perhaps because when they started up and first got hooked to the game, they started up playing space marines, because ‘they’re easy to use’, or simply through the course of playing fell in love with those inflated stats and highly resistant armour saves; or because they utterly hate the much-adored Space Marines so much that they spend most of their gaming life trying to destroy them, or working up schemes to destroy them. A lot of the older gamers (such as myself) have been through more than one of these phases, if not all of them. These days I am vehemently in the latter category.
As I have mentioned previously, the reason for their popularity is fairly obvious. Aside of most of the romantic and heroic storylines of the setting being devoted to them, on the gaming table they are bloody ferocious, ridiculously hard to kill, and annoyingly easy to use. Unfortunately, the background of Warhammer 40,000 shows that there is nowhere near as many Space Marines in the fictional universe as what you will see on the gaming table. Every marine death is a tragedy because in the story background, they are ridiculously difficult to replace with new troops as these super-human warriors take decades of genetic and biological manipulation and training to get to the stage where they are battle-ready.
The spotlight does tend to take its toll on the gaming experience. The marines have enough of their own codices (Codex Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Daemonhunters and the Marine Chapter Specifics: Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Dark Angels and Black Templars) that they can (and invariably do) alternate between Codex releases of non-marine factions and marine factions consistently.
With GW’s way of working, the newest Codex does tend to have a number of edges over the previous releases, and often this isn’t simply the fact that they are ‘new’. 40k (and WHFB as well) is being developed mid-release, so ideas are being taken further with subsequent releases. I assume the idea is to keep the system innovative between lengthy rulebook updates (which come around every 5 years), but the side-effect is leaving older codices behind, including books supposedly written for the same edition of the rulebook.
Imperial Guard and the loyalist Space Marines in particular have really broke away from some of the earlier books that will probably stay for most if not all of 5th Edition. The Chaos players are virtually catatonic (but more on that in a future entry), and the differences are rather noticeable. Fortunately the mutual points limit is a half-decent balancing factor, but some of the differences are utterly blatant. It is really hard to encounter a Space Marine army without a number of special characters in it, who are blatantly cheap and good for what they bring to the army, getting players screaming ‘cheese’ and ‘broken’ with such frequency that it has over-shrouded the outrage that many players muttered about the recent Ork update, that is already starting to be outclassed.
Of course some of the older books in particular are looking very, very outdated. The Dark Eldar Codex in particular is now 12 years old, and has seen 3 edition changes, and has been around since pretty much the first month of the release of the first edition it witnessed, 3rd Edition 40k (with only a slight expansion on their Wargear Section and some Vehicle Upgrades to show for all the time the Dark Eldar players have waited).
Of recent times, 5th Edition has made Dark Eldar competitive again, but you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who plays them, to an even lesser degree than of the Orks (before the new codex came out) even back when they were released. The few remaining Dark Eldar players are naturally terrified that they will be the next Squats, and make a rather blatant exit explained by a dramatic fluff event in a vain attempt to hide the fact that like the Squats, they had character, but didn’t sell very well.
You will hear some of the Squat players at this point mutter something about the Demierg that appeared in Battlefleet Gothic as an effort to suggest that the Squats weren’t entirely annihilated. But those players should bear in mind that all this means is that they were indeed annihilated, and that GW made their point clear about them with a catastrophically bad attempt at a comeback.
This brings me on to the main gaming system. Warhammer 40,000 5th Edition was warmly welcomed by most of its fans (hardly surprising, I did call GW the Nintendo of wargames providers), although some army’s players were noticeably dismayed. The easiest way to convey the main factions’ disappointment is with this picture:
There is one thing that Games Workshop attracts more than money spent on space marines, it is moaning. 5th Edition in particular has attracted a lot of it, and a considerable amount just from people like me on online forums. There is a lot of merit to this however, but before I point attention to the smelly parts of the ruleset, I will first say that I feel GW is far closer than they were at balancing than in 4th Edition, and that some of the changes has encouraged some use of actual tactics for a change.
Right when 5th Edition was released, you could find a picture of some bloke looking down upon the battlefield to demonstrate how the new line of sight system worked (a picture I have saved for prosperity, which I shall add when I remember where the hell I put it). That’s right, you look. True Line of Sight (or TLOS) is now the new way you select targets and determine how you see them in 40k. Before 5th Edition, the rules were a lot clunkier in that you had to determine how deep into cover the unit was, and there’d be a lot of arguments over what the cover was, and whether it could be seen (at least that’s the running argument on it).
Incidentally a number of games I have seen and took part in since 5th Edition have featured even more arguments over LOS than ever. It is hardly surprising. Not only will everyone second-guess what you can see, you have a subjective system that is certainly quicker but a lot less efficient. With the system of cover saves as it is there is very little intuitive about the system. What you have is a gimmicky system, based on the idea of getting you more immersed and trying to keep things ‘simple’.
“And with the new line of sight rules, like I said earlier, the whole perception of how you play your games has changed. You no longer stand aloof above proceedings; you get involved at a model's eye level, participating in every shot fired. It works, but above all it is fun.” (Warhammer 40,000 Design Notes)
The reason it doesn’t work is best emphasised by shooting-heavy forces such as Orks with lots of Shootas and Lootas, Tau and Imperial Guard. The majority of 40k terrain is built with accommodating miniatures in mind, making it easier for them to move through. It is almost impossible to fully hide a whole unit anymore, and what’s more is that any shots thrown their way are not hampered by difficulties to accuracy, but merely provide a ‘cover save’. Thus you can pepper armies with fire, and let them take whatever save they want, knowing any 2s and 1s are usually going to be bad.
TLOS isn’t necessarily bad. Other skirmish gaming systems use it, but it requires innovative rules design to be anything more than a gimmick. GW has not accomplished that. The disadvantage of cover is handed to the recipient of shooting attacks, not the other way around. Cover should prevent successful hits, not allow more and give a trivial save that most wont use. The only real advantage from it is ‘Go To Ground’ which is only really effective if you are sitting a unit on an objective and you don’t intend to use them.
What is truly sad is that a slight tightening of the 4th Edition cover rules would be overall a much fairer way of determining cover without having to change the 40k system to make new ideas work. What is truly ironic is that GW decided to scrap this and go with a new approach without bothering to change the 40k system to make the new ideas work. Something for another edition no doubt, the cynic would surely be forgiven for assuming they planned it that way.
The new missions are at least interesting, although it doesn’t take a huge genius to realise most of the credit goes to the designers of Dawn of War, and were merely fitted into the 40k system probably as an afterthought. They do however encourage actual tactics, such as actually moving your units. Running means combat armies are a little better than they used to be, and in many ways, the changes have worked to make the game at least more balanced (ignoring Codex Creep anyway).
Probably aside of TLOS, the main failure in the system is Wound Allocation. For a game trying to streamline things, it has attached a rather large breezeblock to the front. The system is just far too clunky to work. It also encourages the rolling ‘buckets of dice’ approach to gaming that tends to be a common argument as to why 40k is about as tactical as a game of snakes and ladders. Plus, it has led to a huge exploit, where multi-wound units can chuck wounds around for ages without dying so long as they are all uniquely equipped. This has made Ork Nobs in particular a much nastier unit than perhaps intended.
The main failing of GW’s release system is constantly faffing around with their games. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to balance it out or move towards something refined. It just seems a bit like jumbling up the elements every now and then to sell something with the same name as something a bit different. 40k is on the verge improvement, but every time it takes a step forward, it takes several back. We are far away from some cohesive proof as to why Warhammer 40,000 is one of the most popular Wargames on the planet.
This is longer than I wanted it to be, and probably old news to most of you. However as this blog is new, I’m playing catch-up, and I will be getting to newer, juicier issues soon, hopefully less verbosely.
Thanks for reading.
TWC.
Forget the power of the consumer and common sense, for so much has been removed, never to be returned. Forget the promise of progress and innovative game design, for in the grim dark game dev’s office there is only profit. There is no peace among the staff, only an eternity of faffing about and disaster, and the laughter of inferior men, living off the genius of long-departed gods.
In the future, there is only worse.
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