What went wrong?

What went wrong?

5th Edition forward and Black Library writers taking themselves and their stories seriously.

Nothing. This was the perfect book.

The following edition.

First they lost their sense of fun and parody in 3rd ed, they started taking themselves seriously. That wasn't too bad when BL was still decent, adn 3rd/4th did what wanted to do extremely well, but as time went on the fluff just got worse and worse as a trend. Then the horus heresy series started getting really popular so GW decided what people wanted was herohammer, so have made serious steps with 8th edition to make 40K a higher stakes 30K. So at the moment 99% of the fluff is dead serious, 75% of it is pretty bad and now they're back making models with abacuses because they rediscovered fun, but it's lead to a huge tonal disconnect.
Give it another ten years. We'll either be in 4th ed 2.0, or it'll be 2nd ed 2.0

It was around 4th and 5th edition that I started to notice the beginning of the end. I stopped playing regularly at the end of 3rd so I don't know exactly what the decline of 40k was caused by.

It's sad though. I picture a board room meeting at GW - one exec says "Genetlemen, the brand has gone stale. We haven't had a good idea in years", then some other guy says "how about we make new space marines that are 10 feet tall?". The guy then promptly is hailed as a genius and receives a promotion and pay raise.

The first mention of Grey Knights was the moment it started turning downwards.

I mean, they're a great concept, psychic warrior-monks trained specifically to deal with the most prominent of demonic incursions, a specialised chapter to deal with the demons unspecialised ones cannot. But then yeah, they're mary sue as shit, absolut incorruptable 100% draigo carve name into mortarion heart spiritual liege
It's just the quality of the writers. Ward became a meme for a reason, he was on the forefront of turning the damn good 3rd/4th ed lore into complete dogshit.

I'm pretty sure there are rogue trader GK models so I think theyve been around from the start.

>The first mention of Grey Knights was the moment it started turning downwards.

Y... you mean First Edition?

Lack of frogs.

>roll for gear
oh first edition, you so wacky

To be fair the Grey Knights in 1st edition, introduced in Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness, are a pretty fucking far cry away from the ones that came after. They're still special snowflakes, but not anywhere near as much. For example, they don't have any special snowflake geneseed, they have almost no psykers to prevent daemonic contaminant, and rather than having special snowflake exclusive gear that relies on them all being psykers, they just have the best normal equipment available before anyone else gets them.

Growth. Business growth makes people greedy. Then you need to push new models into each army each 2 years. To push new models you make them stronger, inducing general powercreep, justified in lore with worse fluff.. This shit affect almost every game.
For 40k there are specific challenges:
>As space marines are the default faction, the "baseline" trooper are referenced at S4 T4. No army beyond chaos and necron should have "basic troops" with that kind of stats (which would be equivalent to low superpowered heroes, cinematic captain murrican n shit). Well scaled and balanced armies would sell a lot less, so fuck all.
>Matt Ward. I've read several "fan codices" with better fluff by several orders of magnitude. This is an example of a person who got too much responsability for his skill, shitty fluff, generally broken rules. But he made several superseller codcies (SM,BA,GK).
>Retarded creative direction -> bloodlance, blood boil, blood talons, bloodstrike missiles... Same shit in wolf version: a wolf lord, riding a thunderwolf, armed with a wolfclaw, with a wolf guard unit, with fenrisian wolves as pets, a lone wolf fuckin around, and some fuckin wolven howling to the moon.... for christ sake, they were suppossed to be VIKINGS, NOT FUCKIN FURRIES

This.

Look at the picture in OP's post. Its fun and lighthearted. Maybe a sign of times changing in the post-9/11 world, but 40k was just more fun. The good guys were fascist bad guys, but it didn't matter because the whole thing was more tongue-in-cheek.

I think that style is going to come back though. The grittiness has come to seem goofy since the supposed "realism" never holds up to a snuff test.

I'd put money on a lighthearted minis game getting huge in the next 5 years

this desu

Needs more Squats.

Dan Abbnett is a god amongst men tbqh fammi.

GW making the anniversary reprint available at Forgeworld only.

>Actually mentioned in this edition.

They've been mentioned in every edition since 6e.

GW sold out to the man.

The company was floated on the stock exchange. Things went to shit shortly afterwards.

3rd edition.

Guys why don't we just go back to 2nd edition. If you weren't an asshole it worked fine. Necromunda is pretty much the proof of this. If you want play big battles, stop being a puss and play Epic or Gothic.

>tfw they're not as endangered as people think