Brent: 7th Edition Skyfall
Well, here we go again. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, GW is preparing to release the seventh edition of Warhammer 40K come the end of May. What you may not know…
…is this is actually my fault. Darn it all, I just now bought the Battle Markers for the main rulebook. In fact, I was just starting to use the psychic cards, which I never really felt like I’ve gotten any sort of use out of! But I faithfully purchased the main set of psychic power cards, along with every additional set GW has ever published. Faithfully. Read that again: faithfully.
Darn silly of me. Turns out, Games Workshop is a business. Their new business model seems to be opening wide the water hose of products, spraying it full blast and doing their level best to aim right for our collective, stupid grin. “This is what you wanted right? Suck it, sucker!” They want to squeeze out every single dollar, euro, yen, franc, pound, rupee, dinar, and peso they possibly can.
I’m okay with all that. I am a bit worried their new model is “written by a collective,” but maybe that’s the way it had to be. (I suppose it marks the end of the Church of Kelly.)
Listen, I’m going to come clean. I’ll tell you something you already know, which is my opinion on the subject means squat. I don’t know any more than you do. In fact, I’m probably less informed than most of you reading this. What I do know is this, GW’s policy of keeping a tight lid on information control may be a bit frustrating to most of us but it is clearly what they want. Sites like Bell of Lost Souls work on a business model of feeding you, the faithful reader, the most current gaming information news and rumors possible. “It wasn’t that long ago,” as I’m fond of saying, we knew months in advance what GW was going to be doing with its games, models, and schedules. We even had a general idea of why they might being doing it. No longer. The informed opinion is Games Workshop had to tighten up its leaky ship when it made a deal with New Line Cinema to use the IP to make models for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but while that might have been the catalyst it’s hard to say GW was ever really very chatty.
These days, while there are good sources for generalist information, such as, “There is a big kit in production and it may be a Knight but it might be a 3-up or just a blob I saw from a distance.” That’s great (yawn) but more interesting is a question like, “What can we expect with 7th Edition and the planned future releases of the ruleset?”
Where do you go for that? Not GW; they’d go a long way to stabilizing their customer base by being a bit more free with basic information. No, I don’t need to know what surprises you’re working on for the new Demiurge book but I’d like to know if you plan to release a new edition of 40K every three years now.
So we’re left with speculation. Here’s mine.
The new 7th Edition will be an update to 6th, which is obviously fairly broken. There are good things there, but 6th also introduced new concepts like allies and fortifications and allies and flyers and allies and escalation – and, of course, allies. Of course it’s broken! Really, could even good play testers have predicted how easily characters would band together to abuse insane combinations of Universal Special Rules? Games Workshop is giving us what we want here, a fix to a broken game.
Sounds grand to me. The sky, it is not falling.
Again.
That’s it from me, your Terrible Tuesday host-in-chief. Thoughts? Comments? Hugs and 7th Edition gropings?
