The fifth edition of Warhammer 40k came out last week, and I’ve finally read through the new rulebook sufficiently to comment on it. I have the fancy expensive Collector’s Edition, which contains the exact same material as the regular version, but is fancy and expensive. You can’t get one anymore (well, not straight from Games Workshop, anyway — you can try eBay, but there aren’t a lot there as of this writing, and you shouldn’t expect to pay a reasonable price there anyhow), but don’t worry about it — you’re not missing out on any content if you get the regular edition, just a bit of style.
The rules haven’t really changed very much since fourth edition; if this were a computer game, it would be version 4.1 (if not 3.6; fourth edition wasn’t massively different from third either). On the bright side, that means there’s no compatibility break — fourth-edition-compatible codices and supplements will work fine with the new rules with only minor tweaks; you can get the errata here, and it’s something on the order of two pages of errata per codex (and that’s cumulative errata going back to the first printing of the current version of each codex), which should give you an indication of how few major changes there really are. Why would Games Workshop cut a whole new rulebook for such minor changes? I’m sure I have no idea.
That said, what is changed is mostly good. Fourth edition’s peculiar mixed-armour-types resolution rules were downright bizarre, and that’s been cleaned up dramatically. We’ve gone back to a second-edition-style model’s-eye-view for LOS, instead of the weird "height classification" system. Vehicle rules are slightly more detailed without going back to the 2E/3E super-complicated style. The biggest rules change, though, is that there’s no longer any penalty for not shooting at the nearest enemy target — you’re free to shoot at whatever you can see and reach (noting that enemy models block LOS, so you can’t just ignore that big pile of Termagants standing between you and that irritating Zoanthrope). In addition to this, it’s now possible to "go to ground," sacrificing any chance to act in favour of improving survivability, and all units can now run and gain extra move if they don’t wish to attack.
There are no new factions added yet — those right-minded folks who play Imperium still have their choice of Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Witch Hunters, and Daemonhunters, and all those misguided xenophiles out there still have the choice of Space Elfs, Scary Space Elfs, Orks, Tyranids, Chaos Marines, Chaos Daemons, Necrons, and Tau. One of the nice new additions to the 5E rulebook is a set of reference charts in the back listing stats for all units and weapons in all armies, which makes it much easier to use the allies rules, and helps those of us, say, who run a Chimera with a multilaser, whose Witch Hunters codex is oddly missing the data for multilasers, and who lost our 3E Imperial Guard codex.
The book itself is organised the same was as the 4E book, with the first third consisting of the rules, the middle third the lore, and the back third the modeling and hobby material. The lore section ("Dark Millennium") goes into more practical detail and less theoretical detail than the 4E section of the same name, and the hobby section is less focused on the details of modeling and talks more about the hobby as a whole (tournaments and such have their own chapter, and it even includes a few White Dwarf-style battle reports). Everything except the rules section is in full colour, too, and there are lots of pictures of models and armies along with lots of artwork. There’s no photocopyable army roster this time around, but that’s fine, since it’s a pain in the balls to copy it out of a hardcover book anyhow, and a 40k army roster hardly has the complexity of a D&D character sheet. Regular lined paper works fine.
The 5E starter set isn’t available yet (or if it is I can’t find it; Games Workshop’s web site is kind of ass), but I’m told the armies involved will be Space Marines and Orks (just like the old days!), and it will come with a rather tremendous number of models. If it follows the 4E model, it will come with a paperback rulebook that has the entire "rules" section from the main book but none of the rest. If you’re not a 40k player, the 5E starter set is probably a great way to get into the game; the new rules are quite accessible and very well-laid-out, and it’ll provide you with a great core for a Marines or Orks army. Or, you know, both, if you’re in to that sort of thing. I’ve been playing since the ancient days before the invention of time (back then, there were no Necrons, no Tau, no Witch Hunters, no Daemonhunters, and no Spoooooky Elfs, the Tyranids were the hot new thing, and the next army to be released was supposedly going to be Squats — whatever happened to them?), and I have to say, while I wasn’t a big fan of 3E when it came out, 4E really fixed a lot of its issues (close-combat and vehicles), and 5E is a bit more polish. I do like where they’re going with the game.
In short, if you tried 40k back in 2E or 3E (there was technically a first edition, but it was sort of a completely different game) and the slowness and the complexity put you off, you should consider giving it another look. It’s a lot more playable now.
July 25th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Warhammer 40k |
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When I get bored, I download demos from Steam. Why do I do this? Bored. Also, hey, every once in a while I run into something fun. Mostly it’s crap, but every once in a while something good. So here’s the rundown on the demos I played this week:
The Longest Journey — So Steam’s classification system isn’t all it could be; I found this in the "action" listings, and it’s one of the most inactive and listless titles of all time. This is because it’s really an adventure game — and it’s not just any adventure game, it’s an adventure game with full voice acting and a heroine who walks extremely slowly. The voice acting is bad, which probably goes without saying, and it’s more annoying here than it is usually because adventure games don’t have enough gameplay to carry them across the room, so they really lean on the bullshit to keep you interested. And when the bullshit’s as annoying as the gameplay, you get a little bit pissed at what you thought was an action game with a Metacritic score of 91.
Gish — I really wanted to like this game. It’s a sort of zany 2D platformer where you play as this ball of tar and ooze your way through tunnels. You can stick to things and flow down drains and such, which is pretty cool. The problem is that you can jump. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not one of those realism fags who get really annoyed when their sentient ball of tar with eyes can jump even though it doesn’t have legs. I get more annoyed when the jumping controls are really really twitchy and hard to use. That’s sort of a deal-breaker in a platformer.
The Wonderful End of the World — I have had a vision of the end of days, and, lo, it is strangely similar to Katamari Damacy. The game has a really cute aesthetic and a catchy theme song (though the in-level music isn’t as good), and the levels are clever, but it’s really really easy. I think I got five minutes of playtime out of the demo, and I got an A+ on both of its levels, so I wasn’t just scraping by. The retail version has only fifteen levels, so I reckon it’ll come in around an hour if it gets harder and you have to play some of the levels multiple times to beat them.
Audiosurf — The whole internet went queer for this game a few months ago, but I wasn’t very impressed. My main problem with it is that I thought it was surprisingly non-interactive — to wit, the title screen draws, and there are some buttons on it, but they sure don’t do anything when I click on them. So I never actually managed to play the game. The little X on the frame works fine, though, so that’s a selling point. For all I know, all those dudes who thought it was badass played the retail version, which maybe actually does start. But for all I know it doesn’t, and everybody was riveted by the installation process.
Chaos Theory — This is a promising little game about bouncing particles toward a particle catcher, but the level design doesn’t live up to the concept. Too many of the levels are just "grinding" until you find the right sequence of portals to shoot the particles through to get the the end, or the exact right angle to fire your particle at. I believe only one of the levels in the demo actually involved any proper figure-it-out puzzle solving, whereas there were a few that just required you to click on things rapidly and in the right sequence. All this emphasis on speed-mousing makes it that much more annoying that you’re forced to use a very slow mouse speed, since the game both ignores your Windows settings and doesn’t have its own.
Eets — Eets is a cute little puzzler; sort of a cross between Lemmings and The Incredible Machine. Eets himself is this little white monster dude who drops into the level and then walks and jumps on his own. You can’t control Eets directly, but there are several elements of the world that you can alter by clicking on them, and levels may start you with some elements that you can put in place while the game is stopped. If Eets dies or you press the "stop" button, the flow of the level is reset, but any pieces you placed stay where you put them, so you can see what effect you’ve had on the world and make changes. But you can’t add, move, or remove pieces while the system is running, which makes it a lot less intimidating than it may otherwise be, since you’ll never be wondering if you need to wait for some things to happen and then quickly stick in a new bit or move something around. The gameplay also appears to be entirely deterministic, so you can expect the exact same thing to happen every time you start the action (as long as you haven’t changed something yourself, of course). I like it.
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War — I’m fond of Warhammer 40k, but don’t tend to love the RTS genre, so I wasn’t sure what to think of this one. In general, though, I like it; the squad-based combat helps to reduce the micromanagement issues I tend to have, since you don’t have to move and handle every single unit individually. I liked the skirmishes more than I liked the campaign, but the campaign in the demo is only one scenario cut out of the middle, so there were some bits I didn’t really understand. The demo also includes a tutorial mission, which is nice, but it does require you to complete every step it tells you before it moves on, which is ordinarily sensible but causes trouble here. The game doesn’t have any key binding options, so if you can’t perform the default command for a given action — for example, if, like me, you don’t have a wheel mouse — you’ll get stuck with the game telling you over and over again to zoom the damn camera in. There’s also no option to invert the camera tilt axis and make it work the sensible way, but this is fixed in the expansions, so it’s not a huge deal.
Bioshock — Yeah, surprisingly, I’ve never played Bioshock, even though it came out almost a year ago. I don’t have an Xbox 360, and until recently didn’t have a PC that would run it. Everybody raved about this game last year, and it seems decent though not as exciting as it was made out to be. For one thing, it’s really talky, and is constantly interrupting the flow of the action while it locks you in a box to play a cutscene. The Half-life-rip-off bathysphere ride at the beginning is a great example of the game’s bad instincts when it comes to cutscenes. You come into Rapture trapped in a bathysphere, unarmed and defenseless, and all you know if you’re being attacked by a "splicer" (no, you don’t know what that is yet). The designers, for no really good reason, chose to root you during this whole process, so you know you’re just watching a cutscene and there’s no real danger; you’re trapped in the sphere anyhow, so it wouldn’t have hurt anything to let you move around so you could at least struggle and maybe panic a little. But it just wants to show you a movie and make sure you’re not distracted from watching it by trying to play the game at the same time.
Hey kids, games are interactive entertainment. Stop forcing us to watch the story and start letting us play the damn story.
July 25th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
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