P.S. All these games will be unlockable via Warhammer 40,000 in Battlegrounds and my intention is to go through all of them in one way or another. There's more drama coming because rumors are that GW is planning to "soft reboot" the setting, but I am saving those rumors for later posting, once we've played the game a bit and digested the following background.
Marshal Bohemond | Space Marine Vtuber @HMBohemond wrote:I'll break down the full history:
WHFB = Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the original Warhammer fantasy tabletop game. Currently represented via the Total War: Warhammer game series.
AOS = Age of Sigmar, the current "main" fantasy game that replaced WHFB. It's a weird sequel via total universe collapse/reconstruction.
TOW = The Old World, the current OG WHFB tabletop game, a kind of prequel to the general events of WHFB.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle was doing poorly due to rules bloat, army size bloat, and poor model/rules support. Rather than fix the game, Games Workshop completely retconned the ending of a player-driven campaign called Storm of Chaos and created the End Times. This ended in Chaos destroying the world and Sigmar (mankind's God) rebuilding it. The Age of Sigmar setting was born.
Age of Sigmar had no lore. That was the intended design. No lore, no story, nothing. It was designed to be "cool fantasy models" with nothing but the most basic story treatment to justify it. Also they killed Slaanesh off-screen. It flopped horribly.
WHFB fans hated it because their game died needlessly to prop it up with GW boasting about AOS sales vs. WHFB sales. Which was based on the fact WHFB was discontinued. So of course AOS would sell better that year than a game that didn't exist anymore.
New players never showed up because it was lame. Turns out you need a setting and lore to actually justify why all your models are fighting. Also the rules were absolutely juvenile. There was a rule for one character that said the player with the biggest beard auto-wins. I'm not kidding.
AOS was sent back to the drawing board and its second edition came with an actual setting and lore. A lame setting and lore that feels like a dark and edgy korean mobile MMO with similar model designs, but lore none the less. Also Slaanesh is no longer dead, just in cosmic horny jail and slowly breaking free.
AOS is not a good game. Not even close. The lore is bad but the game is worse. It's limped along for four editions now. It's looking like their fifth edition will be another big setting reboot in a desperate bid to save it.
Total War: Warhammer came out not long after AOS first released. Just one year later. It's made more money than AOS did and it unironically made the Warhammer Fantasy Battle setting more well-known. GW kind of shit their pants because they realized how bad they fucked up nuking WHFB for AOS. So they rereleased it, old minis and all, in 2024 as Warhammer: The Old World. A prequel to the original WHFB. The Old World is objectively the better, more popular game.
There's huge animosity between the three. WHFB players resent AOS for being an unwanted cashgrab replacement for their game which GW never really put any effort into. AOS fans are bitter because AOS never caught on like 40K, perpetually in last place even compared to specialist games, and hate that WHFB is once again getting more love via TOW. TOW players are mostly WHFB oldheads and new players coming from Total War who don't give a fuck about AOS.
This leads to AOS players being bitter, spiteful, and jealous of 40K and WHFB/TOW. They try to force what 40K and WHFB/TOW have built organically in terms of player appreciation.
