this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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Games Workshop. Fans will argue over which franchise the company owns is the best, instead of looking to other games/IPs. You cannot have any meaningful discussions about game mechanics or alternative models. GW does produce some of the best kits on the market, but they are stupidly overpriced. Especially when compared to Bandai or Perry, two manufacturers of equal caliber doing the same shit as GW for a fraction of the price.
The Perry brothers are notable because they've done sculpts for GW before and they operate basically out of their house. They make miniatures for around $0.50~1.00 each, while GW is producing the same for $5~8 on average. When GW makes a $500 kit, it comes with low quality resin that's warped and has mold lines everywhere. When Bandai makes a $300 kit, it comes with die-cast metal, motorized parts, LEDs, and will have zero flash.
The games GW produces have gotten worse as the years have gone by. Rules have always been a mess, but after 40 years, GW hasn't fixed that. They're still making books that require week 1 errata due to balance problems.
I could go on. It's just frustrating to be in this hobby now for decades and see so much enshittification done, especially when GW almost died in the 2010s.
I tried to get back into 40K after about fifteen years away and I bounced off the current rules so hard. IDK if it's because my standards have increased with age or if the game has genuinely gotten worse but I used to play that shit every weekend and I can't stand it now.
What have they changed? I haven't played since 5e and haven't looked at the rules since 6e.
Some of it's good, a lot of it is bad. They gave units different movement values like in Second Edition, as well as armor saves being reduced (rather than binary). They removed armor facings, templates, and units falling back when morale is broken.
I could tolerate the above changes. What I don't like are stratagems and apocalypse units, special characters, and flyers being allowed in normal games. You can have titans, primarchs, and aircraft in 2,000 point games. Stratagems are special abilities that use command points, generated at the start of the turn. Rather than a unit always having access to an ability (like Exarch powers), units have access to multiple special abilities based on how many command points you have. This leads to combo chains and "gotcha!" mechanics, making it feel more like a card game and defeating the purpose of tabletop wargames (i.e. WYSIWYG).
The Space Marine army list is a cluster fuck of new Primaris Marines and their vehicles mixed with first born. They didn't simply upscale SM like they did with Chaos. Instead, they tried to get people to essentially buy a second SM army while moving classic units (like Razorbacks and Dreadnoughts) to "legacy" status. They haven't done this to other armies, but it's been alarming to see GW willing to do it to their most popular model line.
Errata is more frequent, as well. I wasn't kidding about week 1 errata. When the Leagues of Votann (squats!) were released, they were stupidly overpowered. What happened was they playtested mainly against Tyranids right before Tyranids got serious nerfs, then released the book after the changes were made. One of the playtesters caused a fiasco when he said he didn't understand the complaints because he played eight games. Not in a week. Not in a month. Eight games total.
So out comes a codex playtested eight games against a different overpowered army that no longer existed. They made it something like five days before issuing point changes, stat nerfs, etc. which meant anyone who bought the codex and summary cards on the first day of release didn't have the right rules. This isn't the first or last time this has happened.
If you've played any time between 3rd. and 4th., you're probably familiar with changes not occurring for years. While there was a lot to be desired, rules were more rigorously playtested. I remember when the Chapter Approved rules for Inquisitors and their retinues was published in White Dwarf. They were early experiments for what eventually became Codex: Demonhunters quite a bit later. That doesn't happen today because they update rules for the sake of getting people to buy unsold product.
It's an example of fiduciary responsibility and making line go up at all costs creeping its way in. But you point out how capitalism destroys everything it touches and game*s come to GW's rescue. "Just my poor, smol bean international multi-billion dollar company holding up the entire British economy! They need to enshittificate everything to keep the lights on!"
What the fuck. Like I remember flyers being given normal rules in 6e, but the rest sounds wild. Do the superheavies still have X strength attacks or did they at least get reigned in?
5e was when I started, but that was all true then too. Extremely slow to update things, with a lot of army lists being one or two editions old at that point. I remember hearing relatively positive buzz about them starting to issue updated army lists in 6e, but never really got back into it.
Strength and toughness are no longer capped at 10, so yes titans don't just have strength "instant kill whatever is hit." They'll have stuff like strength 20 main guns and vehicles themselves often have high toughness (a Land Raider is t12). The system is more streamlined, too. Your strength is either half or less of the target's toughness, less than, equal to, greater than, or double. Rolls of 1 always fail and rolls of 6 always succeed.
It's more an issue of scale. Games get really cluttered when you're trying to fit a Stompa onto a 4'x6' table. You'll see things deployed in corners practically on top of one another behind cover with vehicles facing every which way.
They have toughness instead of armor now? I'm recoiling in disgust. I liked 5e's vehicles.
I remember it being a simple equation even in 5e, something like 3+T-S, capped at one and six IIRC.
All of this sounds so much worse. I mean I've always hated every TTRPG or wargame edition change from one I was already familiar with, except for Pathfinder 1e to 2e which was great, but this sounds particularly bad. It's like when I looked at Magic the Gathering 15 years ago after having last played it in the 90s and just hated every change they'd made.
Yeah it really takes away from the strategy of every edition before 8th. when vehicles don't have armor facings. They have video game HP instead of working like real AFVs. A Bradley, for example, is going to deflect everything you throw at it. Unless it gets shot in the rear by a rocket, then it's going up in a ball of fire. The early designers of 40k understood this.
And yah it was double your strength + 1 and you couldn't hurt it, every point higher than your strength increased the roll needed, and every point lower decreased the roll needed, with 1s always failing. Pretty easy to remember the chart. But this means you can't have a 40 wound model with toughness 11, because it's never going to die. Gotta have those big numbers with big numbers of dice being rolled to set off players' undiagnosed gambling addiction.
Yeah lmao, it's the only game I've played that gives Shadowrun a run for its money there.