stone cold lead
Member
Just John":262s363r said:
Perhaps going a little off topic but was there ever a good reason given by GW (unofficially I guess) for dropping the Squat lines and purging them from 40K canon?
Squats
- Thread starter Count Von Bruno
- Start date
Perhaps going a little off topic but was there ever a good reason given by GW (unofficially I guess) for dropping the Squat lines and purging them from 40K canon?
Chico
Member
stone cold lead":3nhtkyw3 said:
Yes, this is what Jevis Johnson said in 04
"I know I shouldn't get drawn on this... but... can't... resist
Seriously, a couple of points just so you can have an informed debate based on the real reasons that Squats are no longer available. Be warned, it is going to be hard reading for people that like the Squat background.
First of all, Squats were *not* dropped because they were not selling well. There were then, and are now, plenty of other figure ranges that sell in the sort of % quantaties that the Squats pulled down, especially when you look across all of the ranges produced by GW rather than just those for 40K.
No, the reason that the Squats were dropped was because the creatives in the Studio (people like me, Rick, Andy C, Gav etc) felt that we had failed to do the Dwarf 'archetype' justice in its 40K incarnation. From the name of the race (Squats - what *were* we thinking?!?!) through to the short bikers motif, we had managed to turn what was a proud and noble race in Warhammer and the other literary forms where the archetype exists, into a joke race in 40K. We only fully realised what we had done when we were working on the 2nd edition of 40K. Try as we might, we just couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the Squats. The mistake we made then (deeply regreted since) was to leave them in the background and the 'get you by' army list book that appeared. With hindsight, we should have dropped the Squats back then, and saved ourselves a lot of grief later on.
Anyway, the Squats made it into 2nd edition, and since we were doing army books for each of the races, we started to try and figure out what to do with them. Unfortunately we just couldn't figure out a way to update them and get them to work that we felt was good enough. The 'art' of working on an army as a designer is to find the thing that you think is cool and exciting about an army, and work it up into a strong theme. This 'muse' didn't strike any of us, and so, rather than bring out a second-rate product simply re-hashing the old background, we kept doing other army books instead, with stuff we did feel inspired by.
Now, while this was all going on for 40K, we were actually doing some rather good stuff for the Squats in Epic. On this scale there was a natural tendancy to focus on the big 'hand-made' war machines the Squat artisans produced, and this created an army with a feel that was very different to the biker hordes in 40K. However, this tended to reinforce the problems we saw in the Squat background rather than alleviate them, underlining what we *should* have done with the Squats in 40K.
In the end (and it took years to really get to the roots of the problem) this led to a realisation that we were going to have to drop the Squats in their 'Squat' form from the 40K background. There was little point having a major race that we weren't willing to make an army book for, and their inclusion in the background meant that people kept asking us when we'd do a Squat Codex. Instead we decided that we'd write the Squats out of the background by saying that their Homworlds had been devoured by a Tyranid Hivefleet. This would give us the option in the future to return to making a race based ont he Squat archetype for 40K. This race was given the name of Demiurg, and a certain amount of preliminary work was done to get a 'feel' for what the race would be like. At present the only hint of the Demiurg in 40K is the Demiurg spaceship for BFG. However, we do have this race 'in our back pocket' as a possible new race for 40K, or an interesting character model in Inquisitor, or whatever. So far the Demiurg have lost out to other projects, and it may be that their time never actually comes, as they will have to win through on their merits, not simply because we once made some Squat models in the past. At present, I have to say that it is more lilely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain predudice these days to simply taking races from Warhammer and cross them over to 40K like we did in the early days, so it may be that the Squats/Demiurg end up remaining a footnote in the history of the 40K galaxy. Only time will tell...
The second point I'd like to make is about 'old moulds'. In the past, Mail Order in the UK and US used to be the place that we kept all of the retired moulds for Citadel Miniatures, and we used to offer a service where you could order any Citadel Mniature ever made from MO. However, there are now so many of these 'back catalogue' miniatures that it is simply impossible to keep all of the old moulds in Mail Order and offer this service. Instead, we pick and choose which back catalogue miniatures are kept available. At present we're still struggling to produce special catalogues for these ranges (in the US there is the 'Phone Book' catalogue with everything in it, while the UK has special 'collectors guides' that are themed round a race). Once we've ironed out the kinks in the way we deal with the range of collectors models we want to keep permenantly available, the plan is to offer up other parts of the back catalogue for limited periods of time. In effect this will divide the back catalogue into three parts: a range of classic models that are permenantly available, a range of classic models we dip into and bring out for a limited release, and a range of retired models that will no longer be sold either because we've decided that they are embarrassingly bad, or because we are no longer allowed to sell them due to licencing agreement changes. So far we're still slowly working on deciding which classic models we want to keep permenantly available, and its going to take several years to work through just those. The old Squat range is most likely to end up as retired models, I have to say, though there is a good chance that the Squat war engines they could simply into the limited release classic range. Once again, only time will tell...
I'll finish off by saying that whatever we decide to do 'officially', there is nothing stopping players with Squat armies from using them, either in Epic or 40k for that matter. There is no GW 'rule' against using old Citadel Miniatures, as long as you use them with exisiting army lists and in a way that won't cause confusion for other players. I recommend taking a positive stand by saying "Have you seen these cool old models? They're called the Squats and GW used to make them back in the late eighties/early nineties. I love 'em, so I count them as Imperial Guard and use them with the current rules..." Put like this I can't imagine that anyone would stop you from using your army.
Best regards,
Jervis Johnson
Head Fanatic"
Count Von Bruno
Member
Surely relegation to a couple of choices for an Imperial Guard army ala Ogryns or Ratlings would have been kinder (OK, Im biased 
)
Imagine the tanks GW would be making for them now...*drools*
) Imagine the tanks GW would be making for them now...*drools*
Fimm McCool
Member
Hmm, I like Squat bikers. Comedic or not it was good to have a bit of humour in a game that is far too serious in a lot of cases these days.
And when they do re-release the classics line will we be looking at £100 a model upwards, in horrible, cheap "finecast" material? A friend and I sat down last night and worked out that to start playing 40k in its current incarnation you'd need to lay out the best part of £200 BEFORE you even got near choosing your models. Realistically it would take £100-£300 to raise a decent 2000pt army of citadel (plastic) minis on top of this (minis that cost GW about 0.5p each cost price and are now designed on computer and mass-produced in China, great). And this is a game they target at 13 year olds.... morally bust GW, morally bust. Ok, rant over.
Jervis":ktfa887e said:
And when they do re-release the classics line will we be looking at £100 a model upwards, in horrible, cheap "finecast" material? A friend and I sat down last night and worked out that to start playing 40k in its current incarnation you'd need to lay out the best part of £200 BEFORE you even got near choosing your models. Realistically it would take £100-£300 to raise a decent 2000pt army of citadel (plastic) minis on top of this (minis that cost GW about 0.5p each cost price and are now designed on computer and mass-produced in China, great). And this is a game they target at 13 year olds.... morally bust GW, morally bust. Ok, rant over.
stone cold lead
Member
Brilliant stuff Chico! 
I guess having no passion for the little fellas is a good enough excuse.
I guess having no passion for the little fellas is a good enough excuse.
Just John
Moderator
I'm not sure why but I just don't buy into the 'lost interest so we dropped the race' thing as being the reason for dropping them. There was much more to the squats than just hairy bikers too. Now I'm no expert on RT/40k but if my memory serves quite a lot of the minis weren't biker types and the plastics were just like dwarven Imperial Guard. Given the character of the races dropped - Amazons, Chico's Rape Lizards and the slaver Slann I wonder was there a bit of PC'ness coming into a company that was beginning to market itself towards children and therefore needed the willing participation of parents.
Chico
Member
Just John":3jq8qttp said:
There was 2 waves of Squats, first being the straight laced ''look like guard'' and later the bikers and pirates and my favs the Chaos Squats. But i do agree GW was becoming kiddy friendly at that point and don't forget the dropped Genestealer Cult as well which reproduces via raping humans in an alien way.
Count Von Bruno
Member
Count Von Bruno
Member
Count Von Bruno
Member
Cheese mate, and yeah I detest the 3rd wave myself, though I do love the artwork of them taking on the World Eaters in one of the 2nd ed books 
Asslessman
Member
To sum up things, they got rid of alcoolic bikers, naked wild girls (proto femen?), rapist lizards and rapists aliens (not to mention an anarchist and rebel chaos god) feeeeew, I don't know how Khorne and Slaanesh took their arse out form this fire but I guess JJ is right in that they were heading kid friendly...
Btw, why did they need so many rapists (Fimir/genestealer/Slaanesh/centaurs/hobgoblins/...) ?
Btw, why did they need so many rapists (Fimir/genestealer/Slaanesh/centaurs/hobgoblins/...) ?
Fimm McCool
Member
Asslessman":ml7yz5fa said:
They were teenage boys (mentally anyhow) who weren't getting enough. You've only got to look at the photos to realise why! Some mighty terrible haircuts and jackets going on there!
Fimm McCool
Member
Just John":3b3ajccm said:
And yet Teclis has retained his pornographic staff.
Thantsants
Member
Talking of lost races - anyone seen this before? 
As for Amazons - they were ok weren't they?
Sensibly dressed, just going about there business, protecting their holy shrines from marauding Norsemen, taking the odd narcotic, worshipping their Goddess of Murder and bloodshed...
...Ok - fair enough!
As for Amazons - they were ok weren't they?
Sensibly dressed, just going about there business, protecting their holy shrines from marauding Norsemen, taking the odd narcotic, worshipping their Goddess of Murder and bloodshed...
...Ok - fair enough!