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Supaglue: What I do have a problem with is GW's suspect gaming worlds...
Phox: ...they've been dumbed down and lost a lot of what made them great.
I agree with you two, and it's worth remembering that back in the day there were no clearly defined "good guys" in terms of armies. The only really sympathetic characters as I remember were the sort of basic grunts who had to endure the horror of it all.
In terms of dumbing down, The Eldar are a case in point (assumes geek posture). At first they were "Space Elves"- a silly name but not that bad of a concept. Most of them lived on huge planet-sized spacecraft called craftworlds. They were cleverer, wiser and faster than humans with far better tech, and they were a dying race, having been royally fucked over by Slaanesh in the past.
But they weren't just your standard "good" elves, they could be really capricious and inscrutable and would happily destroy a human colony for no apparent reason because it suited their long-term plans. They had nasty weapons that shot mono-filament wire inside your body where it span around and "reduced the opponent to the consistency of soup". There were weird sects like the Harlequins mentioned above, and pirates who were split off from the main and went around murdering and killing.
But...by the 2nd edition they'd become rather generic good guys. Yes, they had interesting stuff, but they'd lost a lot of bite. GW fucked this up even more though with the introduction of the new "Dark Eldar" with the 3rd edition, not coincidentally the point where they went straight for the 11-12 age-range. These were supposed to be the dark, piratical version of the Eldar, but they released a load of rubbish. It was like every Sandman/bondage/torture clichè you could imagine, and so what you had were essentially two boring races.
And just generally...if you look at the older artwork/designs and the written backgrounds, it really is distinctive and wierd. I'd say the warhammer stuff/40k rivalled, perhaps not Doctor Who, but definitely 2000 AD in the arena of idiosyncratic British fantasy. It was like Dungeons and Dragons and Lovecraft and Alien and Dune but filtered through Salvador Dali's long lost cousin Colin who lived in Croydon and liked magic mushrooms.
Whereas now, although it's more "proffessional", consistent and unified, it mostly looks like rip-off anime/american video game. A lot of the genuinely odd, disturbing ideas seem to be missing- remember the psychic Orks who went round in special mechanical towers and vomited on people and summoned giant green feet to stamp on them? Or any of the chaos stuff? Now they seem to be just guys in black armour with a couple of skulls here and there. Dreadnaughts, which started out as giant stomping Catholic relics, a dead hero's soul tied to a big mech and surrounded by incense and decoration, are now just, well, big mechs. |
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