Following a months-long online marketing campaign, featuring some cheeky levity at the outset and clouds of "leaks" - the officially arranged sort and the incidental sort - the brand new "Saturnin" edition of the Horus Heresy rules has arrived - and by "arrived", I mean, has arrived outside the bubble of GW's studio and its small ecosystem of connected fellow travellers and irritating online "hobby influencers". The new box set and rule books are now circulating in the hands of actual people who play the game and love the setting, but don't do it for a living :)
This post is...well, it's late! I don't move in hobby-influencer circles, and nobody at GW is worried about what I think to the extent that they would send me stuff in advance, right?
Come on GW...I'm biddable!
Anyway, even though I'm late, I want to share my thoughts on the new edition - the rules, the lists, the models...all from the humble perspective of who someone who has loved the setting for decades, even if I haven't loved all the rules that have come with it.
But for this first post, I wanted to reflect on an aspect that is not found in the box set or the new books at all - at least not directly - but rather take a look at the quite bumpy run-up to the launch of the new edition last month. At one level, it was just "a bunch of online grousing" and "people always hate change" etc, sure, but I think it was more than that, and worth a look....
The Bumpy Run Up
I'm not certain the rollout of the new edition went quite the way GW hoped. It is hard to tell - the signal to noise ratio of GW's official marketing communications to players is always set for confusion. Certainly it is difficult to credit the things GW says about its own products or intentions in these circumstances with any good faith.
The anxiety in the 30k community was palpable during the run up to the release, and as the leaks started to reveal that certain units had vanished (like Destroyers) and that a variety of wargear combos were no more, the anxiety and nerd anger really built. Because the whole pre-launch marketing effort was leak-driven, GW's efforts to manage this online concern (to extent they even tried) were, at best, clunky. It was hard to tell if these removals were a false rumor, a mistaken leak, part of GW's tongue-in-cheek "Horus Hearsay" effort, were part of a plan to shape the new rules and adjust the model range, or simply errors due to incompetence (like the "no power fists for Tartaros Terminators" fiasco). The vibe online really felt negative, and long-time fans feared treasured units, carefully converted character figures or even big parts of their collections were about to be nerfed into oblivion.
To the extent GW appeared to acknowledge any concerns by actual players during this period, it was to assure everyone there would be a "Legacies of the Age of Darkness" PDF that would contain rules for all of the units and wargear combinations that were otherwise removed from the new edition.
Like, if you were willing to do that, then why remove them in the first place? But I digress.
GW then missed the date they had promised to issue this new PDF (by, like, a couple of days or whatever, but still, this did not build confidence). There was also a slightly hilarious release of an FAQ/Errata document immediately prior to the actual formal release of the new edition - again, better that GW did this than did not, but it did not build confidence in the product or process around the product we were about to receive.
All of this before any regular gamer even had a physical copy of any new books or models...yikes, I know as geeks we have strong views (I sure do!) but even by these standards, it looked like quite the mini-mess online!
IT'S MORE NARRATIVE.
As I said above, the volume of angst was in many cases dismissed as "wargamers always hate change" and "you always hear the angriest people online"-type reactions. These are lazy "takes". The anger/concern was legit in my view. To understand it, I think it is important to back up for a moment consider the "why" of Age of Darkness 3.0 - as in, "why do they think we must have a new edition at all?" What is the studio was doing, or at least claiming it is trying to do, with this new version of the Horus Heresy rules?
Well, we know "the answer". More money. After all, we all understand the actual reason for the new edition: it's business my friends! GW is a business, they want to stimulate and drive sales through the Horus Heresy product channel. A new edition is a sure and certain way to accomplish this.
But the studio would never openly concede commercial motives. That's just poor form! I have seen new editions of rules appear in other games. Those writers and publishers operate for a profit, yet, but they also seek a higher purpose with newer rules editions - to capture new players, refresh and update rules process, correct mistakes and address oversights from the previous publication. Sometimes a rules writer has been completely overtaken by whole new ideas on how to play a period/setting, and the new edition is a bold departure from the previous attempt!
GW's corporate overlords want profit, but the GW studio people...they want to assure you they, too, seek to refresh the Horus Heresy rules toward a higher purpose. This purpose? MORE NARRATIVE. This idea was at the core of the almost all of the marketing newspeak exercise of the run up to the official release of the new edition. Whatever else this game was going to be, version 3.0 was going to be "MORE NARRATIVE". You got that? This will be "NARRATIVE DRIVEN".
But...like...that can mean a lot. "MORE NARRATIVE." "NARRATIVE DRIVEN."
So, like, in what way?
"WELL, YOU KNOW, LIKE THE BLACK LIBRARY BOOKS."
Ok, but...in what sense...?
Narrative Hogwash
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| YOUR NARRATIVE ENJOYMENT IS NOW AUTHORIZED |
There are a number of changes to the game between edition 2.0 and 3.0 of the Age of Darkness. I'll touch on some of them in later posts (and you've probably already read at least the official explanations for many of them at the generally-tolerable Warhammer Community site). But for the purposes of this initial reflection, I just make the point that the new Tactical Status, Challenge Phase, the tie to officers and slots in army selection...this is all meant to be "more narrative". So I return to the question - what do they mean by that? Is the new game that different?
You will find it has a LOT of changes, but it is still not a very different experience. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it holds up if you just zoom out and compare the overall game structure.
Horus Heresy 2.0 was, at its base, an IGOUGO-mediated contest between painted collections of miniatures, using forces matched via a points system, with the winner determined via the accumulation of victory points derived from varied but almost always abstract circumstances on the table. Some fairly simple rules lie at the core of the game, but they are wrapped in a thick plankton of various and sundry special rules which are used to achieve a measure of nuanced difference, creating a fairly complex gaming experience overall.
Did the GW studio attempt any actual radical changes for 3.0? Did they bring in d10s? Did they expand the reaction options, or even blow up IGOUGO? Did they change the turn sequence? Did they do away with templates? No. Not even close.
Horus Heresy 3.0 is rather...an IGOUGO-mediated contest between painted collections of miniatures, using forces matched via a points system, with the winner determined via the accumulation of victory points derived from varied but almost always abstract circumstances on the table. Some fairly simple rules lie at the core of the game, but they are wrapped in a thick plankton of various and sundry special rules which are used to achieve a measure of nuanced difference, creating a fairly complex gaming experience overall.
And edition 3.0 is no more "narrative driven" than any of the other editions have been. But this not mean 3.0 will be bad. I generally liked playing Horus Heresy 2.0, after all, and amid the endless small tweaks made to the rules I think Horus Heresy 3.0 will be worth a try.
But spare me the "MORE NARRATIVE". "Narrative driven" gaming doesn't occur in the wake of rules saying they are such. The creation of the story behind a game, the belief in/engagement with that story is up to the players. The lore, the setting, the books - that all helps a great deal, of course. But I have never enjoyed a "narrative" game because a rulebook told me do, and I find it kind of funny that the GW studio thought this concept could be a marketing and design concept cornerstone for the book.
It is also sad.
Because it cuts to what I see as really lying at the heart of all the online angst: the 40k-ification of the Horus Heresy, and the loss of the unsaid/unwritten spirit of what had previously set the 30k apart in the minds of so many players. Yeah, people are mad about losing their destroyer units (I'll miss mine) but what is really driving the frustration is the direction of travel in the studio towards the 40k-style of hobby. And that sucks.
40K-ification of the Horus Heresy (aka "Enshittification Of Wargaming Rules)
Writer Cory Doctorow developed the idea of "enshittification" to describe the pattern of decay he sees in online platforms and services over time. I see 40k-ification as the tabletop gaming rules equivalent of "enshittifcation".
Face it - there are a lot of reasons people love the Horus Heresy setting and Age of Darkness gaming. We love the story. We love the miniatures. But there is also a cornerstone feeling of watching the "evolution" of 40k and saying quietly "Thank God that is not happening to my game". But the sad fact is that 340k players longer this luxury. The blowup of online angst prior to the release of this edition is, to me, a recognition of this fact.
Oh sure, you can look at Age of Darkness 3.0 and point to the many, many, many ways in which it is still different from the 40k game in important ways. But there are a great number of signs that show the direction of travel clearly. The changes made to the reaction mechanic (one of the best aspects of Horus Heresy 2.0) tilt the game towards the 40k feel. Vehicles have wounds now - wait, sorry, I guess they are still "structure points" - but they are wounds in all but name. These are small things, but they point to how the GW studio's 40k rule making tendencies have now leached into the 30k space.
But my argument is not only tied to these specific, seemingly minor, mechanical rule changes. The whole 3.0 process itself in the clearest evidence. The turgid, almost unreadable circular language that makes reading the new rules to be an exhausting process. The presentation of rules as "simple", when they are in fact surrounded by a galaxy of complicated special rules. The addition of very chonky new Saturnine models to the lineup carries the whiff of "Primaris" about it.
And most of all...the release of a new edition for no real reason, full of changes that are mostly cosmetic and don't actually change the gaming experience, wrapped in a leak-led and online-influencer mediated gaslighting exercise of shouting "MORE NARRATIVE" to pretend otherwise. This, to me, is pure 40k-ification.
As I said, I will give Age of Darkness 3.0 a try. I may even come to like it! But an era is over. The Horus Heresy game is now clearly within the sights and desires of the sorts of design types who rendered 40k into what it is today - a baffling wargaming experience, such that I cannot even pretend to follow what is happening on a 40k gaming table (other than to recognize it by the presence of a bunch of dumb circles which are generally not part of the terrain). And around it all the endless Codex Creep, the cringe-inducing "meta" chasing. Our 30k rules are not yet THAT bad, but as I said, the direction of travel is clear, and when edition 4.0 comes along in a couple of years, the 30k community will have much, much more to be concerned about, I fear...
But anyway, at least there are some totally nice new figures coming out! We'll move on to that, and some thoughts on some of the rules changes, in future posts!
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