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[Teneb]

That's 40k.

[nenjin]

That's 40k.

^

I mean, take a look at 40k art sometime too. Yeah there's Daemonettes of course and the occasional artisan-crated nipple on a piece of armor.

But other than that 40k tends to avoid sex appeal as well, even in the novels involving Slaanesh. It gives it its due place in the story, and some of it is graphic but that's pretty much it. It's self-contained. It's one of the things that has continually made me a fan of 40k, is that by and large it doesn't use sex to sell its IP. Part of that is undoubtedly that woman don't get a lot of screen time in 40k. Because they're not present most of the time it's difficult to objectify them without being an idiot about it. It'd be pretty obvious if every time a woman showed up she was a bimbo. But also GWS just seems to have an, I dunno.....almost pre "awareness of girls" state of mind where sex is rarely talked about and almost never acted on. I think it'd be an interesting case study to total the amount of words in 40k novels, like the average, that reference sex. Because I think it'd be a shockingly low amount.

Unless you consider the vast majority of Space Marine descriptions homo erotic >.>

 

[scriver]

Unless you consider the vast majority of Space Marine descriptions homo erotic >.>

We very much do.

[pisskop]

I was sure that they birthed slaanesh by being dirty dirty romans and having orgies.  Then dragons and spells to sink islands and then suddenly dark elves stabbing dwarves.

[Teneb]

I was sure that they birthed slaanesh by being dirty dirty romans and having orgies.  Then dragons and spells to sink islands and then suddenly dark elves stabbing dwarves.

Nah. Slaanesh was already around. The whole High Elf vs Dark Elf thing was that Malekith got incinerated in the ritual to become the phoenix king (apparently, according to end times, this was actually supposed to happen. The ones after his attempt cheated.) and got declared unworthy. He then threw a fit and started a civil war. All varieties of FB elves tend to not like Slaanesh, though the Dark Elves have more pleasure cults than most.

[Retropunch]

But also GWS just seems to have an, I dunno.....almost pre "awareness of girls" state of mind where sex is rarely talked about and almost never acted on. I think it'd be an interesting case study to total the amount of words in 40k novels, like the average, that reference sex. Because I think it'd be a shockingly low amount.

I actually went to an academic conference where that was talked about - not just W40k/the black library (although that was a large part of it), but fantasy in general. There's an avoidance of it in many parts of scifi/fantasy, but in other parts its wayyyy too OTT and super graphic. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, and even the most normalised stuff tends to come across as strange or awkward in comparison to sex scenes in other fiction. There wasn't really a conclusion to the debate, just that it was very odd.


RE: mods: I'm hoping that non-warhammer fantasy mods will just be 'without the support of CA' but I strongly suspect it'll be a cease and desist bonanza. My big problem with all this though is that it's just another brick on the road of commercializing mods, because as soon as you've said you can't do this, you're one step away from saying you can if you pay us.

Most of all though, I don't really get where developers feel they're allowed to step in and tell people what they can and can't do with their property - once I've bought it, it's mine to do as I want with it. If I buy a toaster and decided to turn it into a spring-action automatic dildo launcher, Russell fucking Hobbs can't step in and tell me not to.

[nenjin]

Spoiler: Off topic (click to show/hide)

Consider the demographic, I guess. Early 40k fiction is sexier, I suppose, if that term even works in 40k. There is a higher awareness of sex it seems. I've read some early 40k novels that had the obligatory "gotta reference how hot the character is even in passing" and "main character and hot character hook up." I think though the pivot to marketing the game to kids sort of demanded non-adult storylines. (As in, adults tend to care about romance way more than pre-teens.) It's not that sex per se is too adult for a universe where people graphic violence and corruption is the norm. It's just that it didn't fit what drove people to the universe. War, heroic last stands, death, gothic sci-fi and all that is. Using sex sells as an adjunct to how you market your stuff isn't a new idea. But GWS to this day has remained ideologically pure when it comes to how they present their games, visually and in the literature. (One could quibble that making the game ALL SPESS MAHREN ALL THE TIME is an ideological impurity but I'd have to disagree.) The Dark Eldar are semi-sex because it fits the race, same with all things Slaaneesh. But you don't see Imperial figures of pretty much any variety tarting it up. If they are it's an anomaly to make the character stand out, not a trend. Even the occasional appealing-looking Sister of Battle keeps it pretty reserved. They're pretty without being smutty.

On one hand I gotta respect them for that. On the other though I think it shows how GWS is still kind of a boy's club. They really only deal with these issues in the most extreme ways and only because canon calls for it. Otherwise they sidestep most issues relating to intimacy. I've played enough games with enough nerds to know where that comes from.

In the end though, I think the limited usage of sex hearkens back to an earlier time of adventure story writing, where sex really wasn't as important if not important at all to the stories. Back in the days when stuff like this was considered 100% the domain of men where manly things happen and women and intimacy were almost wholly considered an "off screen" affair. But as you get into the rise of pulp fiction, sex sells both in the visuals and the writing starts to become a lot more prevalent. So in that sense I think the spirit of 40k writing hearkens back to pre-world war style of adventure. Put another way, compare and contrast 40k to say, Star Trek in terms of the presence of female characters and the attention paid to the intimacy between them. Early Kirk-era Star Trek hails from the pulp era of writing, where TNG and beyond hails from the sort of soap opera, adult-level of intimacy era. 40k, by contrast, barely even addresses either of those paradigms by and large. (Individual authors sometimes sprinkle that stuff in but it's still kept on a tight leash. The Ciaphas Cain novels have, I think, the most to do with sex out of current 40k offerings. And even that is mostly the main character referencing thinking about it or getting it, before getting on with the actual content of the stories.

[scriver]

RE: mods: I'm hoping that non-warhammer fantasy mods will just be 'without the support of CA' but I strongly suspect it'll be a cease and desist bonanza. My big problem with all this though is that it's just another brick on the road of commercializing mods, because as soon as you've said you can't do this, you're one step away from saying you can if you pay us.

I'm not sure what makes you think that when to make it legitimate CA would have to pay other people license fees to make it legitimate.

[Retropunch]

RE: mods: I'm hoping that non-warhammer fantasy mods will just be 'without the support of CA' but I strongly suspect it'll be a cease and desist bonanza. My big problem with all this though is that it's just another brick on the road of commercializing mods, because as soon as you've said you can't do this, you're one step away from saying you can if you pay us.

I'm not sure what makes you think that when to make it legitimate CA would have to pay other people license fees to make it legitimate.

I meant it in the broader sense, not that they'd make you pay to use other people's IPs, but more that they'll start saying that they can take a cut of all mods or stop ones they don't agree with arbitrarily. When mods were completely 'not the developers issue' then it didn't matter if people used other IPs (except if the IP holder objected) or what they did. Again, I've bought a product - you can't tell me what I can and can't do with it.

[Radio Controlled]

They can though if you agree beforehand on certain limitations, no?

"You may buy this toaster, but on the condition that you do not turn it into a spring-action automatic dildo launcher. If you cannot live with that, buy your toaster elsewhere."

[Retropunch]

They can though if you agree beforehand on certain limitations, no?

"You may buy this toaster, but on the condition that you do not turn it into a spring-action automatic dildo launcher. If you cannot live with that, buy your toaster elsewhere."

Not really, you can't really enforce anything upon the customer that "limits their legal rights". In terms of product liability, the law even states that companies have to take into account that their product might not be used in the way intended when paying out damages (the age old example of people standing on tables).

It's honestly only gaming companies that feel they can do this, and they normally get blasted for it anyway (look at Nintendo's attempt to lock out non-patent cartridges). It's like the whole 'second hand games' thing - you can't restrict people from selling on other goods, yet game companies feel entitled to do so.

[Radio Controlled]

Mind, I don't think they should be putting up artificial restriction like this though, and obviously the law protects against some things. But still, I kinda find it strange how far that can go sometimes for non-vital things like entertainment. If companies take it too far, just don't buy their product, and market forces will quickly select against those that can't get their stuff sold anymore.

[umiman]

In case anyone doesn't know (I didn't), CA has hours long livestreams of all their race campaigns on their Twitch site.

https://www.twitch.tv/totalwarofficial/profile

I think they're only missing Chaos right now.

-----

The Vampire one had me wondering, if you do a co-op campaign with someone playing as Von Carstein... how are you supposed to deal with his gigantic monstrosity early on? I'm gonna assume no one starts next to each other or something.

[Teneb]

The Vampire one had me wondering, if you do a co-op campaign with someone playing as Von Carstein... how are you supposed to deal with his gigantic monstrosity early on? I'm gonna assume no one starts next to each other or something.

Dwarfs and orcs start pretty close to each other, but I think vampires, empire and chaos are somewhat distant. I'd say that the method to dealing with monsters is to either use an anti-monster unit like slayers, other monsters, or siege engines.

[umiman]

The Vampire one had me wondering, if you do a co-op campaign with someone playing as Von Carstein... how are you supposed to deal with his gigantic monstrosity early on? I'm gonna assume no one starts next to each other or something.

Dwarfs and orcs start pretty close to each other, but I think vampires, empire and chaos are somewhat distant. I'd say that the method to dealing with monsters is to either use an anti-monster unit like slayers, other monsters, or siege engines.

Now that you mention it, I think the other guys start with OP units too, not just Von Carstein. I believe the Slayer King starts with Slayers and Kholek Suneater starts with Dragonogres.

BTW, here are more misc info that I picked up here and there:

1. There's no army limits (like the old days). Instead, each lord increases the upkeep costs for all your armies by 5%.
2. All settlements can be upgraded with walls again, like in the old days. However, there are no battles in un-walled settlements and it will instead revert to a field battle if you do fight in one.
3. You can block artillery shots with flying units.
4. You can significantly upgrade the settlement garrisons now, but it costs a building slot to do it. We're talking big settlement defenses though with really strong, high tier units. It's probably because of this that they removed the army cap again as capital cities basically always have a full stack army on them and you can do the same with any other settlement if you want.

-------------------

Edit:

I just realized something very tactically interesting about the new sieges.

In the past, there was very little reason for you to leave the gates yourselves when defending against an army. You just waited for the enemy to attack your walls. Here however...

Towers do massively way more DPS than ever before and have infinite range. Even the level 1 base towers easily out DPS anything any other siege defense has ever been able to do in any Total War game. Also, the sieges are all limited to one or two sides now so there's really no escape from them. Lastly, their biggest weakness is that they cannot shoot anywhere except in front of them. So if you get on the walls or behind them, you're safe.

What this means is that you actually don't want them to reach your walls like before. You want them to stay out in the field getting absolutely shredded by the towers. You see what I'm getting at here?

Basically if you have loads of zombies, shitty cavalry, or shitty humans spears bogging down the enemy just outside your walls... the enemy is going to get obliterated. It's not like they can choose not to fight you. The towers have infinite range and you can't exactly flank the crap units as you're probably stuck with big siege towers and if you go around them they'll just attack you in the rear.