Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior

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For the Greater Good!

Welcome, new Fire Warrior. Here is a shitty weaboo dagger you will never use, here's a lame 'pulse' weapon that hits a cap gun and can't be replaced, and here's your first sortie. You'll loot weapons that don't suck from the enemy, until you trade up. You'll face marvelous varieties of the gue'la menace. Worry not, they're pretty easy to outsmart. You'll also have to wreck a bunch of machines and demons. Worry not, they're all in convenient arenas with cover and supplies. No, you won't get to ride a Battlesuit or Hammerhead Gunship, because you are, after all, still a rookie, despite somehow racking up a body count to shame Farsight. And afterward, if you succeed, you will not be quite the same. Have a shitty day.

THQ released a video game tie-in called Fire Warrior soon after the initial release of the Tau Codex. Taking the role of Kais, a Shas'la about to undertake his first trial-by-fire (ha!) in an attempt to rescue an Ethereal, it was a thoroughly unremarkable introductory FPS, similar to many that follow any successful or hopefully-successful movie. It is not a terrible game. Neither is it a good game. It's just... there. If it's any consolation, it's a game from pre-Fourth Edition, and they were still ironing out some of the Tau's wrinkles at the time.

Highlights include bolters working pretty close to the fluff: semi-automatic mini-rocket launchers (actually, they're pretty close to a goddamn Soundstrike Missile Launcher now that we think about it), some badass dialogue, Tom Baker and Sean Pertwee (son of John Pertwee, the Third Doctor, who is becoming a recurring guest star in 40k), and BRIAN BLESSED, great art-direction, and somewhat interesting level design.

Not-so-good highlights include shitty hit detection, pulse rifles acting like assault rifles (they aren't suppose to fire in an automatic pace; that's what pulse carbines are for), pulse rifles that somehow trade equivalent to lasguns, shooting down a Valkyrie with small arms fire (shoulda sprung for the extra armor upgrade!), and killing a LORD OF CHANGE ON YOUR OWN. Managing to sword a Space Marine is hilarious though. The fact that you're essentially a one-man unstoppable killing machine is rather silly, for better AND worse, especially considering you're just a Shas'la on his first day of duty (If you were around a Shas'vre or Shas'O in a functioning battlesuit, it would have been slightly more realistic to be the Tau version of Rambo). But, Rambo you are, and if you want to do that and don't mind that you're ripping more holes in canon than an actual cannon, again, it's not terrible. Just... run-of-the-mill.

The novelization of the game suggests he was being helped by Khorne (which makes even less sense that you're eventually trying to stop a Lord of Change that for some reason has Khorne's favor). If anything Kais could be being influenced by a certain self-loathing asshole that loves to fuck with his fellow Chaos gods because reasons. Hell, it's also implied that Kais was being guided by the Lord of Change himself in his Tzeentch fetish for Just as Planned. Needless to say, said Lord of Change got his feathered ass handed to him.

tl;dr: Fun, perhaps, but unbelievably stupid. saved by the fact that you can shoot some Ultrasmurfs if you are so inclined.

But Then Suddenly

Word from Dark Crusade's development team is that Shas'o Kais, the protagonist of Fire Warrior, is the very same Kais that is the Tau Commander in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. This is actually kind of clever, since after all the shit Kais wound up drowning in pulse fire/photon grenades/railgun slugs/etc in Fire Warrior (including a Greater Daemon, apparently), Kais was certainly qualified for a promotion. According to interviews, it's never fully stated that such is the case in-game (Kais is an extremely common fire caste name, as evidenced by the fact that Commander Farsight has it, among others, but that him being the same Kais from Fire Warrior was expressly intended as a polite nod towards the earlier game.

You shouldn't be surprised; Eliphas the Inheritor came back like 3 times, albeit by Chaos bullshit a tau wouldn't have access to.

The Novelization

Believe it or not, they made a book about this game. Written by Simon Spurrier, it is a lot less goofy than the game, thought that alone is not saying much. It still struggles a bit in the sections where it cannot avoid some of the more egregious crap that happens in the game, but it balances those out with several moments of awesome too.

It goes into a lot of Tau philosophy and psychology, often switching perspectives between characters both to give a wider view of the conflict and to bring their views of the situation into contrast. Lots of pointless characters get introduced to give the narrative weight and get the reader empathizing, and many of those characters are killed off a paragraph or so after their introduction and exposition of their back stories and aspirations just to underscore how fucking Grimderp the setting is.

It is also interesting in that it gives snippets of Ethereal perspectives that both impart the evidence of them being on blatant power trips, using pheromone conditioning, and displaying their absurdly derp levels of ignorance towards the dangers of Chaos counterbalanced by their genuine desire to bring prosperity to the Tau race, foster order and cooperation between the castes, making a cursory attempt to get along with the rest of the galaxy, and wrecking the shit out of the races that are a threat to everyone. Though one could dispute the last statement since the fluffy Tau, at the time of Fire Warrior, were kind of trying to give three-fingered handshakes to factions like the Dark Eldar and Orks. At least they were smart enough to yank said hands back from the Nids before they were bitten off, because the mere thought of them jetting some Por'el diplomats to a Hive Fleet just epitomizes failure.

There is lot of semi-poetic description going on, with characters observing to themselves the vagaries of the universe they inhabit. For example, this is an excerpt from a scene in which Kais comes on the remains of some Fire Warriors and Imperial Navy Armsmen in the wake of a Chaos attack:

• "Here a tau arm lay, knuckles clenched, beside a de-limbed human corpse. There was a symbolism here, perhaps. A sense of unity, a sense of physical sameness. Given a talented enough por'hui journalist, this scene might mean something. `In death, we're all the same'..."

Heavy shit right there. Khorne cares not from where the blood flows, red or blue is all the same to him, no matter what side of the conflict you are fighting on. In this universe, everyone ends up butchered meat, no matter which species they are.

Speaking of Chaos, the book does justify a lot of why Kais is kicking Imperial ass left and right. You know the big bad of the piece is a Changer of Ways of Chaos Undivided, right? Did you really think that a lone Fire Warrior doing improbably well would not be a case of Just As Planned? Or that Khorne himself is not also capable of pulling off a different plan of his own? The Tau are as a whole resistant to Chaos, but not completely immune. When they find one Tau with enough rage to get Khorne's attention, even despite the weak warp connection, that starts the Chaos Gods thinking about trying a few experiments.

This is probably the only time you will hear a tau yelling Khorne's favorite line... which would certainly explain the cover art quite nicely.

The end also has the main character's commander talk about the Nature of the Greater Good in a Galaxy like 40k has. More or less the Tau ideals are impossible to truly reach, but what's really important is trying to reach them. In other words "the grim darkness of the forty-first millenium is grimdark enough as is, so let's not add to it if we can help it."