Enter the Citadel: Ask The Audience - We want to hear what you think about Warhammer 40,000

The "Ask the Audience" section of the day was something I'm not really convinced about. The premise was that the hosts (Jervis Johnson, Phil Kelly and Jes Bickham) would ask the audience a series of questions to get some feedback on our thoughts on 40K.

I'm not really sure the format worked. With a couple of exceptions, there were too many people to feel you could safely get into a debate with them without taking time away from others. I didn't take as expansive a set of notes on this one, as not every question was worth hearing the audience answers on. Still, where I bothered to note the answers, I'll mention them, as people might find it interesting.

What is your favourite 40K model?

• Dark Vengeance Set
• Deathwing Box
• Tau Riptide
• Wall of Martyrs
• Wraithguard
• Tau Broadside
• Chaos Cultists

More expansions or more codexes?

This one got a more interesting debate. There was a discussion of expansions firing the imagination and applying across the brand as a whole, rather than just one army. One audience member mentioned an event called "Wolftime", which I haven't heard of before.

There was a mention that Games Workshop felt that too many people had been seeing 40K as simply a system for small, competitive games at a fixed points set, and wanted to move away from that.

One audience member said that they weren't a fan of the additional codexes, and they would rather see a core set of versatile Codexes, and was worried that they would get to the point where everyone needed two or three supplements to play.

Jervis responded that supplemental codexes will draw on a main codex. They are being designed so they don't have to be updated and can survive by themselves to avoid Games Workshop finding themselves in a situation where there is too much to update.

One audience member suggested grouping Marine codex supplements, so, say, the White Scars and the Raven Guard got a shared supplement as the "fast attack" Space Marines, and so on.

What do you see as the biggest threat to the Imperium?

• Chaos
• Tau
• Necrons
• Tyranids
• The Imperium itself
• Angry Squats

There was some discussion of the upcoming Farsight Enclaves books, mentioning that Farsight was, in many ways, a very sympathetic character, and that the upcoming book would give a very different perspective on the Tau.

What is the best thing about 6th Edition?

• Flyers
• Overwatch
• Allies
• Randomness
• Return of older features / return towards Rogue Trader elements
• Challenges

The panel then discussed that they wanted 6th edition to have a feeling of you being on the field of battle. The perspective on covers is low or next to the model. They are trying to put you into a situation of seeing a model's eye view, as if you're there.

What is the best thing about Apocalypse?

• Datasheets / variety of datasheets
• The scale and scope
• The freedom and variety

There was then a question about what people wanted to see

• Sisters of Battle plastics and codex
• Genestealer Cults
• Lost and the Damned
• Xenos Terrain
• A Tyranid model to put the Wraithknight and Riptide to shame
• More factionalisation and customisation

A couple of these ones got some further points. It was mentioned that originally there had been a technical problem with developing Sisters plastics, but that Games Workshop would now have the technology to be able to do them.

There was also a mention of a pitch for "Codex: Evil Imperial Guard" which hadn't succeeded so far.

At this point, the Q&A had drastically over-run, so it ended rather swiftly to head into the next Q&A.

This article is one of a series I'm writing about the Enter the Citadel event...