I've been playing Warhammer long enough to have experienced the Ravening Hordes switch that came with the 6th edition of the game. And I see a lot of similarities to that moment in what has been swirling in the rumors mill.
Warhammer has technically done the Ravening Hordes thing twice... I'm talking about the one one on the right.
The essence of the Ravening Hordes 6th edition moment was that the game had swollen considerably. There were rules in all sorts of sources, there were different boxes you needed to buy (the Magic box as a good example) to even play the game. People were running lists that were cobbled together from different sources, and there was admittedly (I think) kind of a barrier to entry for newer players.
It was also a time when they were changing the way they did their miniature production--switching to the plastic sets that most everyone loves (I still adore the old metals at times though). That meant a move to finally being able to field bigger units, as opposed to the prior edition where 21 really was the maximum size you saw of almost anything on the field: as many units you had to buy in a pack of 2 models for the rank-and-file, and a blister of 3 command.
And so with the 6th edition, they put out a Ravening Hordes booklet bundled with an issue of White Dwarf magazine. This condensed and clarified every list. It gave unified profiles. It allowed a switch in the magic phase. It represented a change in the game that persisted for multiple editions. And it invalidated a whole lot of stuff.
Most of all these glorious bastards: the Chaos Dwarfs
The list took a lot of the "oomph" out of many armies, and notably cut out all the silly: especially from Orcs and Goblins and Dwarfs. Things were pared down, the rarer metal models were removed from general play (Dragon Ogres anyone?). It was a dramatic change. But what it did do was left everyone a basic scheme to be able to play the game in the current form. No matter what your army (again, except for Chaos Dwarfs), you could at least set some version of it on the table and run the game.
And then what happened? Well, the game expanded back out. Undead got split into two books: Vampire Counts at first, and later Tomb Kings. Most of the models that were "left out" of prior books eventually got a home--screaming skull catapults and skeleton chariots for instance. They took favorite older models and gave them their own lists even (e.g. Ogres--seems like everyone had their one unit of Ogre Mercenaries). Yes, some stuff got cut and never came back. But on the whole most found its way back into the game, which is honestly better than it has ever been. 8th edition of Warhammer really is the greatest version of the game I've played. But it took the convulsions of 6th edition and Ravening Hordes, that moment when we were all screaming that our favorite bits got removed/lumped together/made too bland.
I'm feeling like 9th edition will be something similar. The rumors continue to say "9th is 90% similar to 8th, but mainly with a change in fluff." I'm thinking that there will be a change in books--in where our favorite units are conceptually placed. I'm playing Dwarfs and Skaven right now, so I expect to experience both. Everything points to Skaven being mostly unchanged: they'll likely still be a faction and likely still generally solitary. And the rumors suggest that Dwarfs might be merged with other stuff--combined into unified "Forces of Light" or who knows what. So I'll see both sides of the switch. But then, I did back with Ravening Hordes too. I was playing Skaven and Undead then. One book remained the same. And one book got blown up, with models scattering to different spots and only returning after a long time.
I think if we could remember ourselves at Ravening Hordes, or think about how we'll be a few years after 9th edition when they've had time to "re-populate" the game with supplements, we'll likely have a different view than this moment of crisis. Doesn't mean that I'm already accepting 9th as better than 8th, as sometimes change is bad (cough cough Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons cough).
Like really, really bad. Soul-crushingly, quit-the-game, ruined because it was competing with a non-competitor (MMORPGs) bad.
But I'm accepting that a refocus is understandable, particularly when changing notions about production. We're at the final death of metal miniatures for Games Workshop, and finecast/finecrap is gone too. And thus, an edition that connects with that switch in production makes sense from a global view: exactly what Ravening Hordes was. We survived that, because 6th remained a good game at its core. And 9th can be the same, as long as the core is solid. So I for one am banking on the "90% the same" narrative while waiting to see what's coming.
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