Its terrible timing on their part to be honest. They should have milked Total War, and then a few years later transition to AOS if thats what they were committed to do.
A lot of the concepts with AoS are great, with the alliances and changing fluff. I dont know why they couldn’t do that in the Warhammer world. They could have even had the Sigmarines turn up in the end times to stop the world ending, but the world would look drastically different and need to be rebuilt.
Anyway...
Frankly I'd rather have the End Times than that. The reason I miss WHF being supported is I liked it for what it was, if the price for it continuing to be supported was radically changing it that's not really any different for my money than replacing it with something different.
GW stuff has always been at its best(IMO, obvie) when it was a setting that drew you in and made you care, then got right out of your way and let you tell your own stories. When it was a "toolbox" for us to use. That doesn't mean GW doing "story" content was inherently bad, but look at the difference in how most folk think of Armageddon or the Badab War books compared to Storm of Chaos or Eye of Terror - it's no accident that the former are fairly self-contained "events" that you can choose to involve your own stories with or not and were generally well regarded, while the latter were big, showy, what-we-say-goes-for-everyone catastrofictions designed to alter the status quo for all and were thought of so poorly GW had to retcon them. More than the different tone, more than the Sigmarines, more than the purposefully undefined "worldspace", more than the Nouny-verb Noun-noun nonsense names, it's the "ongoing story" thing that puts me off AoS(and nu40K) - I don't spend hours writing character bios and histories and fictionalised accounts of tabletop battles so that GW can turn around and say "Timeline advancement! 300 years have gone by and any of your guys that aren't Stormcast, Undead, or Daemons are dead and also everything they did is irrelevant because we've wiped out that whole region you set your stuff in. Enjoy!".
Anywho...
I'm interested - has anyone played the Norsca DLC yet? The inclusion of everyone's second favourite one-eyed monsters makes me interested, but I found the Warriors of Chaos hideously dull to play and I don't want to fork over for it until I know the Norse are a bit more fleshed-out.