The Rat Race Pt1: codexes
(or how to keep a pretty big bunch of players buying on and on)
Summer is coming our way and the first months of the year gave us a lot of new minis and great stuff players have been waiting for for a long time: Dark Eldars escaped their 70s style time stasis, Grey Knights reversed to the SM template and the BA received a big red vacuum cleaner on wings.
Now the gaming audience is waiting to see who arrives first – Necrons or Nuns from Outer Space - so let's pause to reflect on the directions taken by our hobby.
Press Start to Play
To make it easy for new players to get into 40k and save headaches to aficionados, armies have been "trimmed down": they have become easier to grasp and quicker to implement on the board. The first Codex that fell to this onslaught was SMC: few options, few specific rules but generic rules instead. A lot of SMC players have put away their minis, waiting for the next codex to come and for a gaming style akin to what's been done before.
True enough, all those specific options were complex to master: army lists mistakes were quite common if you weren't careful enough but the level of play was logically high.
Since that time and V5, codexes have gained in clarity but have lost in versatility. Such complexity required seasoned skills when somoeone chose armies such as Inquisition, Necrons, DE.
Nowadays, an army list is done very quickly and follows archetypes put forward by the GW designers - whoever they may be.
Stone, Paper, scissors
In order to attract the "young" audience (teenagers and adults up to 25) or the occasional players, W40K had to change to counter its most direct opponent: online gaming. In the same way that such hobby defines clear-cut and somehow limited roles – I fight, I cast a spell, I shoot, I heal – armies have done the same: they now follow two or three gaming styles and revolve around efficient but rather sad archetypes. Hordes have become more "hordish", shooters inflicts a deadly rain of bullets all over the gaming table and "elite" armies have become "top elite".
Of course, someone can try no to follow such archetypes when building a list but what's the worth ? They can be too complicated to put together, useless, laughed at in tournaments and so on. However they represent a challenge for seasoned players who have done nothing new for some time.
In the end, three or four archetypes hold the floor, each one being weak or strong depending upon the opposing army and this situation is accepted by most actual players. Each new codex outguns the previous one and gamers wait eagerly the next one to "adopt or adapt".
Flavour of the month
Thanks to "leaks" or informations "supposedly" being secret, GW maintains the pressure weeks after weeks to boost the sales of the next codex - which is quite normal when you're a company that has to give its shareholders a good slice of the "gaming cake". What's rather annoying in this rat race is that more and more players succumb to the lure of the "codex of the month" in order to stay competitive in a environment that changes every two or three months (metagaming has become the norm). The act of being attached to an army, to some specific miniatures or to a background is slowly losing ground in favor of an "automatized" behavior people adopt online when a game they play is "out" or their friends switch to another game. Such attachment is put to agony when the basics of an army can be summed up in one or two sentences.
The question is simple: do you too want to run this rat race or to adopt a "reasoned" approach to our - quite expensive – hobby ?