Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-6078851-20150628150826/@comment-6078851-20150702140307

you're right about 40k lore being the setting for the tabletop game zixis, but it is also a story: initially it was nothing more than the setting but from the mid-90's onwards it's actively been a story in its own right. it's an exceptionally grand story that has a beginning, has a middle (that is continuously being expanded), it's now just waiting to have an end (waiting for over 20 years).

if primarchs return there will obviously be a few novels filling in more backstory, as well as the novels chronicling the end times. i would like to point out that in-universe there is quite a lot of references about the end times, such as primarchs returning for the final battle, and the whole of 40k's universe has told us fans, over the years and over and over again, that it's a bleak and hopeless time to live in, there is only war, everything's going to shit etc, so a rational and logical conclusion to 40k's story would be the final galactic conflagration where no-one wins (except maybe 'nids :P).

@ sanguiniuslives, the idea of emps battling the gods in the empyrean but neither side having the upper hand, resulting in essentialy the same balance that we currently see, is exactly the type of thing i refer to when i speak about gw 'advancing' the story but instead just recycle old material and continue the status quo - if the balance doesn't alter drastically then what's the point in making such a change in the first place? if emps becomes a warp god (which i also doubt, though not as vociferously as zixis) then for the story to actually progress he will have to kick their collective asses or have his own ass handed to him :)

there are many, many scenarios that 40k can progress down for the end times, some possible, some not so possible, some make sense, some don't, but the one that makes the most sense in terms of the plot, as well as in terms of the founding concept of 40k, is if the end times are genuinely the end. make no mistake though, if they are the end gw will drag it out and milk it for all its worth and we would have a few years of novels detailing the most epic conflict the galaxy has ever known.

if gw end 40k's plotline i can guarantee that their sales would go up because of it, i doubt the tabletop games set in 40k will suffer in the slightest, and they will continue to produce more story detailing more of what they're already been detailing for 20 years - backstory. personally i'm thinking more and more that ending the story in a cataclysm, a cataclysm that's been foreshadowed for decades, is exactly what 40k needs.

but as always, only my opinion does this be :)