This past week has been a great time to be a Warhammer 40,000 fan. The new 9th Edition launch box, Indomitus, hit the shelves and instantly sold out, just as it had done two weeks prior online. Games Workshop had already had to take the drastic step of introducing a new ‘Made To Order’ product to meet the unexpected surge in demand, partly reneging on their limited availability promise. There’s still waves and waves of reinforcements to come for 9th Edition over the forthcoming weeks so everything is looking peachy for GW! Right?
The new Warhammer 40K app is available in the Google Play store as we speak and it promises a lot. You can read the full app description here, but the opening paragraph makes a bold statement. In GW's own words, “Warhammer 40,000: The App is designed to make your tabletop gaming experience as easy as possible. This means less time flicking through your book and more time rolling dice and playing the game you love!” Sounds great doesn’t it, but let’s reflect for a moment on what was originally promised.
July 9 saw the original announcement:
- There would be two levels of access, free and a premium paid monthly.
- Read the core rules (Free)
- Codexes and supplements through codes (Free)
- Reference all your rules, fast! (Paid)
- Construct and validate your army lists, Coming Soon (Paid)
- Bonus offer - all the rules from 8th Edition codexes (Paid)
The Good
On the surface, GW has delivered. They have put together an app that has a clean and easy to use interface. You can access the core rules. The army list builder is coming in August and if you pay the monthly $5/£3.99 you get access to the 8th Edition codexes.
The Bad
Let’s start with the Core Rules. There are reports coming in from users that say when they have tried to access the core rules the app crashes. We haven’t been able to replicate this, so we suspect this is based on the device used. Regardless, this really shouldn’t be happening. To compound matters, the core rules don’t open within the app. Instead, they link to a Google Drive doc that opens in an external browser. Not the slick experience we were expecting.
The search is awful. Sure, if you know exactly what you want and how it is spelled you will get a positive match, but outside this, good luck. It is far too literal, and with plenty of third party search APIs available to devs, there really isn’t any excuse. Even accessing simple things could be improved with better filters.
The Ugly
The reviews are in, and it doesn’t look good. Almost 3000 people have given their verdict and the current rating at the time of writing is a dismal 1.4!
The cost is a bugbear for many. $5/£3.99 is a lot to pay for so little. The only saving grace is the access to the 8th Edition codexes, but these will disappear as they are updated to the latest release. The remaining features certainly do not justify such a high monthly fee. The promise of an army builder will be a great addition, but this should be the default upon which you build. Charging for this functionality is a separate argument, but given the free resources put together by fans for 8th Edition, we can expect similar for 9th Edition. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about whether we should pay, just whether the package delivered so far justifies the payment now.
The biggest sticking point for probably 50% of Warhammer fans is that the app isn’t available for iPhones and iPads. It is coming soon (tm) but given that 9th Edition is the best release yet then it should have been there from day one.
Another aspect of allowing app access to the 8th codexes we hadn’t thought of, comes from independent GW stockists. Many feel betrayed by GWs move to provide this service to users, as it essentially renders their stock of codexes obsolete. They fear that users won’t pay the premium for a paper copy they know is to be replaced when they can access it via the app.
What We Would Like To See
- We want to see an app that works and is worthy of the Warhammer stamp of approval. If that means taking the existing app down until it is ready and issuing refunds, so be it
- The core rules should not be a link outside the app. The same should apply to any other rulebooks and supplements. Whenever the app is opened, the latest updates for licensed content should be downloaded and stored locally
- The inbuilt document reader should load content only from the local copy. This will reduce access times
- Use the power of the cloud for searching content. It's not difficult to write an API that would allow the app to use remote resources for searching and then displaying the returned content. Heck, it’s how the web already works!
- Include the army builder
- Include White Dwarf for existing and new subscribers
- Integration with Black Library for eBooks and audio
- Make it work on BOTH Android and iOS
- Reduce the monthly subscription by about 50% and offer an annual subscription
The Conclusion
The release of the Warhammer 40K: The App should have been flawless. There really isn’t an excuse for such a poor showing. It screams laziness and that the app was an afterthought rather than an integral part of their launch strategy. It is incomplete and in reality nothing more than a set of bookmarks wrapped in a Warhammer 40K skin. On paper, it sounds like it is already the essential tool for Warhammer 40K. For now, it isn’t. We hope it will grow to become so. What is clear, is that it should not have been launched in its current state. My advice, steer clear for the moment and give it a couple of releases to mature. We’ll be keeping an eye on things and will revisit the app as it matures and new features are added.
Source: Google Play Store, Warhammer Community