Games Workshop has announced that they will return to the iconic Warhammer Fantasy setting, the Old World, in the coming years. The Old World has not been the primary setting of any tabletop games since 2015 when Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles was replaced by Warhammer: Age of Sigmar after an in-universe apocalypse called The End Times. However, the Old World is quite popular as the setting of the biggest Warhammer Fantasy video games—such as Total War: Warhammer 2 and Warhammer: Vermintide 2. The studio’s announcement is little more than a teaser announcement and a logo. More, says the post, is “a long way off. Years. More than two. Like three or more.”
Running more than one IP in the same setting and line is not new for Games Workshop. The Horus Heresy prequel setting for Warhammer 40,000 has been used for both tabletop and video games. It appears likely that that same dual-game-line approach is what Games Workshop wants for Warhammer: The Old World.
The Old World has definitely made a video game splash in recent memory: Both Total War and Vermintide are quite good games, Chaosbane released this year, and Warhammer Online was more popular than its closure might suggest. Games Workshop didn’t explicitly say that video games’ popularity is the reason for bringing back the classic setting, but their post notably calls out Warhammer video games as a way to “jump into the Old World right now.”
The Old World started in 1983 as the setting for Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles and continued until 2015. It spawned numerous novels, spin-off games, and was on its eighth edition when Games Workshop stopped supporting it. If you'd like to learn more about it, we've got a summary of major events in the Old World timeline. Its tabletop RPG, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, continues via third parties.
You can read the blog post from Games Workshop here.
