Warhammer 40K: What Happens When The Final 9th Edition Codex Comes Out
We’re getting close to the final batch of 40k codexes. What’s going to happen when 9th Edition is finished?
Games Workshop is getting close to completing all the codexes for Warhammer 40,000 9th Edition. There are still a few out in the wild along with some wildcards (looking at you World Eaters and Leagues of Votann). However, once we get the Chaos Space Marine book, we’re really just missing the Chaos Daemons and Astra Militarum.
There’s only a few more left…
That’s really not that many books left! We aren’t quite sure what the pace will be for these final few books either. It’s possible that GW could just hammer them out and we could be “done” by the end of the year. Or this might be a slower release to extend it into next year. No one really knows outside of GW. That brings up another question and the point of this article: What’s going to happen at the end of 9th?
End of 9th Edition?
It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago when Games Workshop was promoting a new edition of the game — the current edition! They touted a bunch of the new changes and folks were really excited. It was a bigger shift in the game mechanics than we had seen in a few editions. It wasn’t a bad thing by any means. But thinking back to when 8th edition wrapped up and the launch of 9th, I vaguely remember ideas that this edition would be the “forever edition” of 40k.
Maybe the plan was just to release more and more updates to the core and codexes. And perhaps that’s still the plan! The way I see it GW really has two options to choose from
- Release 2.0 versions of all the 9th edition codexes with updates and compilations and extend 9th edition for another cycle.
OR
- Launch a 10th edition of the game.
9th Edition 2.0
A 9th Edition 2.0 option could work. There’s been a TON of update released with more and more coming thanks to the Balance Dataslates. We also have a bunch of Armies of Renowned and various other rules from White Dwarf and also the War Zone books, too. A compilation of those rules into newer 2.0 books wouldn’t be a bad thing. It could actually help players consolidate down and alleviate the need to carry 3-4 books with them to play a single army.
One more book to carry to the tabletop
Space Marines would technically be on a 3.0 version, too. So maybe this would be the chance for GW to give everyone else a 2.0 version to help rebalance some things. I can’t recall a previous edition of the game that went this route — not counting the Index era. Still, if this is supposed to be the “forever” edition of 40k, a 2.0 codex release seem like the logical option. But speaking of indexes…
Launching 10th Edition
What could happen with a 10th edition of the game. Would it just be 9th edition…but more? To be blunt, 9th edition is already beyond too much. A 10th edition that’s just more seems like a bad idea. And at that point, wouldn’t it just be 9th with 2.0 codexes (see above).
Then again, a new edition launch means a clean slate. If 10th is built on the bones of 9th then the old codexes would be fine to work with. Otherwise, if the core rules get a massive rework, then GW would have to do something to get every army up and running for 10th. Could we go back to an Index-era? It’s possible!
Honestly, when everyone was on the same footing with Indexes the game felt the most balanced. It wasn’t until we got the first round of codexes that we started to notice the jump in army performance. And then there was the fuzzy era when you could use either your Codex or Index (or sometimes both). Those weren’t the best times…but we got through that!
I don’t know what’s going to happen at the end of 9th. Will there be a 10th edition? Will we have a new round of Codexes or Indexes? Maybe GW will announce the game is complete and it will just go into maintenance mode for the next couple years and we’ll all keep playing 9th for a while. Or maybe GW will cook up another way to sell us all a new edition of Codexes. We’ll have to wait and find out!
What do you think will happen when the “final” 9th edition codex lands?
