Vom TGA Forum, wo jemand bei Open Day war:
So, I was fortunate enough to be at the New Year Open day on Saturday and sat in the Specialist Games seminar. Somebody did ask the question about The Old World and there was a small bit of conversation about it. Nothing was actually revealed, so the following is my own impression of what I'd call the "current thinking".
Only a few things are cast in stone. From a project perspective, other than being given the green light by GW management, they're still discussing the design brief.
The reason behind the project is that Games Workshop is most well known for Warhammer, which is synonymous with huge armies and battlefields where you have ranked units fighting against each other. It was felt that Age of Sigmar is now well established enough that now was a good time to do something that related to GW's ancestral roots.
Square bases are indeed one of the things that is 100% confirmed.
The Old World isn't going to change the setting & history of Warhammer, the End Times happened and ultimately led way to Age of Sigmar. However there are a few thousand years worth of events to explore. This reinforces my thinking that we're may have a basic ruleset and then campaign style books that introduce races and specific battles and historic events.
It appears that it will be treated in the same manner as one of the other Specialist Games - so given a small team of people including a rules writer, sculptor etc. To my mind this means we need to be realistic in our expectations, so something more in line with Adeptus Titanicus rather than what we originally got when Age of Darkness (Horus Heresy) came out. It certainly isn't going to have release schedule of Age of Sigmar in either models or rules.
I didn't get the impression we were looking at Warmaster scale (6mm if memory serves) for the game, however there was no indication exactly what we would be looking at. Talking about huge armies may mean we go back to classic 25mm scale (AoS is 28 heroic), or alternatively we could see something like 15mm or 10mm (which is what AT is). I'm not even sure this decision has been made. In all honesty even if they do drop in scale there's no reason we couldn't use the rules with our old collections and tweak ranges. Annoyingly I should have asked the question on scale (I'm blaming a 4.30am start for my brain not firing on all cylinders).
I got the distinct impression that the game system wasn't simply going to be a clone of 8th edition with tweaks. The people looking at The Old World are people who have played Warhammer all their lives so I could see something that is a hybrid of lots of systems, whilst maintaining a faithful link to the Warhammer game system that we all know. One interesting point that Andy Hoare has said before is that the brain is a fickle thing and when we remember playing games as children we only remember the good bits. If we went to play that rule system as an adult we'd be a lot more aware of when things didn't work very smoothly.
Although it will pay homage to the various iterations of Warhammer, it's not being done to compete with Age of Sigmar.
One point I think is worth highlighting is that it's important to remember that the people who work within Specialist Games enjoy the narrative and lore aspect of gaming. If you look at all of the games they currently produce there are numerous instances where certain teams/gangs/forces are rarely going to be winning most of their games - if you take Bloodbowl as an example, Halflings are probably one of the weakest teams going and that was a very deliberate design choice. That's not to say there isn't a competitive aspect to those game systems, but that is rarely going to be the focus of those games and certain forces do have a definitive edge.
As an addition, I was in the Age of Sigmar seminar earlier and Ben Johnson confirmed that there isn't any form of formal discussion between the Specialist Games and AoS studios (I'm meaning interdepartmental discussion here, not that they've fallen out with each other). This is deliberate and as Ben pointed out makes The Old World really exciting for players such as him that have played classic fantasy battle. What that means is it's no use pestering him (or other people within the AoS studio) for information - they have exactly the same amount of knowledge that we have!
