35 replies to this topic

[Myke Pantera]

xengk, on 18 July 2014 - 03:33 AM, said:

This right here is why I read the novels.
They are the 50 shades of grey of Battletech.

50 shades of grey (endo) steel =)

[CeeKay Boques]

Myke Pantera, on 18 July 2014 - 04:20 AM, said:

50 shades of grey (endo) steel =)

[Coralld]

101011, on 16 July 2014 - 12:20 PM, said:

Well, you made some interesting points until this paragraph...I find it rather arrogant to say "Anyone who likes these factions obviously agrees that inncest/slavery/whatever is a good thing"
You have the Davion emblem by your name, therefore that means you condone causing the equivalent of a world war because you feel like giving your bride a wedding present. See?

You do realize why he attack House Liao in the first place right? Max Liao tried to kill Hanse and replace him with an evil double. I don't know about you but I do believe those are grounds to go to war. Hanse used the wedding for dramatic effect for the start of the war. Also, every House was at attendance at the wedding on Terra, which meant Max was there as well. What better time to attack your enemy than while their leader is away? Brilliant!!

Edited by Coralld, 18 July 2014 - 07:04 AM.

[xengk]

xengk, on 18 July 2014 - 03:33 AM, said:

[redacted]
Edited by Egomane, Today, 07:42 PM.
questionable content

[Egomane]

Coralld, on 18 July 2014 - 07:02 AM, said:

You do realize why he attack House Liao in the first place right? Max Liao tried to kill Hanse and replace him with an evil double. I don't know about you but I do believe those are grounds to go to war. Hanse used the wedding for dramatic effect for the start of the war. Also, every House was at attendance at the wedding on Terra, which meant Max was there as well. What better time to attack your enemy than while their leader is away? Brilliant!!

I don't believe a personal vendetta is enough reason for war. It clearly shows, that he is rating himself much higher then all the lives a war will destroy on both sides. One life for a billion? That doesn't add up!

An assassination attempt would have been justified. All out war, that would include all five of the successor states, as an act of personal revenge, was clearly madness.

Edited by Egomane, 18 July 2014 - 08:09 AM.

[Heffay]

Egomane, on 18 July 2014 - 08:09 AM, said:

I don't believe a personal vendetta is enough reason for war. It clearly shows, that he is rating himself much higher then all the lives a war will destroy on both sides. One life for a billion? That doesn't add up!

An assassination attempt would have been justified. All out war, that would include all five of the successor states, as an act of personal revenge, was clearly madness.

You're looking at it the wrong way. He probably wanted to go to war for <insert reasons here> and just needed an excuse. It could have been anything, really.

Of course, there are people whose egos are that big anyway, so even the official reason is probably legitimate enough to stand up on its own.

[Opus]

to OP: Between TT game play, Canon Lore in the books, and all the MWO video games > they all make me queasy at times..

Si-Fi Technology, Personalities of the POV characters and almost bizarre politics within the venue always seems self gratified to the writer, not really designed to keep the reader/player intrigued at times.,.,(just my opinion after meeting Mr Stackpole)

BUT that being said > the over all expandability and retelling of the Verse as a whole - has always kept my imagination engaged

[Jody Von Jedi]

Wrenchfarm, on 16 July 2014 - 06:25 AM, said:

After playing this game for almost two years without really diving into the lore, I finally read some Battletech books.

It was a mixed experience.

More interesting than my tepid opinion of the writing though, I found some interesting similarities between the novels and MWO and what it means to be a Battletech fan.

You can read the blog I wrote about them here - http://www.destructo...ks-278200.phtml

So I'm not the only one. LOL

I've played the games since the 90s, but never read any of the BT novels until a few weeks ago. Started out with the Gray Death series. I've finished Decision at Thunder Rift and reading Mercenary's Star now.

They're really not that bad. I've enjoyed them so far. Of course the Mech battle sequences are the best part. Although the Locust in book 1 is nothing like the Locust in MW:O !

Jody

[SnagaDance]

Hanse Davion's reasons for attacking the Capellan Confederation are quite well explained in the lore.

He was in fact focussed on his more traditional enemy, House Kurita's Draconis Combine, the ones responsible for his older brother's death. Maximilian Liao's 'little' stunt made him switch priorities. Sure there was a big personal element but he was also convinced that a man capable of forcibly destroying another person's identity (the double), and who was known for wielding a ruthless state police as an instrument of government was a horrible leader for his people.

In essence, he convinced himself he would be liberating the people of the CC and getting personal payback in the bargain.

It's human nature for people to justify their decisions, no matter on what level they are made. Anyone remember that bad dictator in the middle east with all those weapons of mass destruction? He wasn't the best leader of his people either. That country was liberated too, and those nasty weapons taken out in the bargain right? In hindsight maybe not the best course of action for that country's populace though, but that's human nature for you.

[Kelvin Casing]

OP, it seems to me your blog is an apology to yourself for liking something that you feel is irredeemably nerdy. And also an attack on PGI's shoddy sales tactics (high-five).

No, it's not high art. The BT universe is just diversionary fun. It isn't and never was aiming to be War and Peace! Are the BT books fantastic? No. Are they worse than the literary atrocities committed by Mills & Boon? Hell no. Are they better than most reality TV? You betcha. Yes, yes, the characters aren't realistic and Kai Allard-Liao goes over a cliff twice and it's paint by numbers...

But that's okay, you know? It's okay to have fun and like things with little or no literary merit sometimes. If you want you can stay at home in a polo neck, reading Dostoyevsky and discussing deep semantic nuances with your nearest and dearest - I'll be with the giant robots and the pewpew, dakka dakka But really, it's not a choice between one or the other. You can have both.

And, yes, it's nerdy. But so's Star Wars, Game of Thrones, any movie by Jim Cameron and a thousand other hugely popular franchises. Get over it.

Oh, and if you think the cultural cliches in BT novels are offensive, just take a look at some "high", well "higher", literature ... from Ezra Pound's far right leanings, to what T.S. Eliot had to say about women, or the name of a certain cat in Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls"....

Just relax and have fun, it'll be okay.

p.s. OCD forces me to tell you that the clan packs cost up to $240 not $210.

[Hex Pallett]

SnagaDance, on 18 July 2014 - 10:11 AM, said:

It's human nature for people to justify their decisions, no matter on what level they are made. Anyone remember that bad dictator in the middle east with all those weapons of mass destruction? He wasn't the best leader of his people either. That country was liberated too, and those nasty weapons taken out in the bargain right? In hindsight maybe not the best course of action for that country's populace though, but that's human nature for you.

For a split second I thought it was sarcasm.

But indeed it makes sense. To some degree.

[SnagaDance]

Indeed, it was not intended as sarcasm, but merely one of the most recent events in human history that illustrated my point.

People have been able to justify almost any decision, and we do it all the time.

*looks guiltily at the big pile of unplayed PS3 games he hasn't had time to play but whom he couldn't resist in the store because they were so cheap*

[Pht]

Heffay, on 17 July 2014 - 09:38 AM, said:

A reboot doesn't invalidate old lore. It supplements it. They can both peacefully coexist without any problems.

First, I apologise for the insulting nature of the part my first post addressed to you here. You did nothing to validly deserve that. Don't post while mad...

Moving on ... a reboot, by definition does invalidate what's rebooted. It invalidates whatever is changed/retconned and a new replacement is made, and in this case I don't think CGL would begin to have the desire or the resources to maintain both continuities.

There are other mech-centric options out there, and the field is open to make new options... and yet the common refrain is "REBOOT! RETCON! SMASH!"

-----------------

Now for the rest of wrenchfarm's blog article (let's hope he actually wanted to discuss it, instead of just trolling for comments to add to a one-sided easily controlled public monologue).

Quote

The Clans are an equally contentious group, a society of deep-space warlords with superior technology, curious syntax structures, and a high school sophomore's understanding of eugenics (infused with some fairly unsettling undertones of ******).

----

Asking MechWarrior fans about the books generally elicits a slightly apologetic response.

Clan society: a screwed up cluster of disparate (mostly immoral) beliefs glued together by extreme social conformism, all born out of people deciding that doing bad things was the way to deal with harsh conditions.

----

It does? ... as the saying goes, "I dunno how that guy got elected, I don't know anyone who voted for him..." The BT novels aren't high literature. They aren't even high-sci-fi lit. At best they're middle of the road beer-and-pretzel sci fi. Some I really liked. Some I hated with a passion (tetatae? True crime pron? really? 'cmon)... most of them that I've read have been interesting, and sometimes fun light reading, (which is all I expected from them). I also happen to like that they actually attempt (even if they don't always pull it off) to not heinously contradict each other from book to book. No, don't ask me what I think of what joe quseda did to spider man and mary jane. He should take a long walk off of a short dock over leech infected swamp water.

The BOK trilogy? Not too bad, in spite of kai's whinyness. The warrior trilogy? Pretty good. Especially if you hate the capellan society. However, if you read the books with the assumption that they should be examples, even at the beer and pretzel level, of very well executed literature, you'll hate them. I guess you'd hate even a great hard apple cider if you think that somehow, apple cider should be equivalent to 50 year old single malt.

Quote

I've always hated novels and movies where the plot hung on a simple misunderstanding that could be resolved with a minute or less of talking ... Conflict that is introduced only to fizzle out mere moments later is just as painful.

----

The comparison says something unflattering about the maturity level of the audience the Battletech books are aimed for (and I suppose by extension, that includes me).

If that really bugs you ... you must HATE reading history books.

----

Than, quite frankly, it says something unflattering about all of humanity, because we get into the same stupid squabbles all the time.

Quote

It lends an air of deeply nerdy credibility to the proceedings. The Morlocks who've played the tabletop game would certainly appreciate the commitment to Battletech's quirky mechanics.

----

However, I can't help but wonder what non-fans reading it would think. Readers unfamiliar with the Battletech style, puzzling over why these futuristic war-machines can't seem to hit the broad side of a barn, or why anyone would want to pilot a giant bumble robot that can helplessly tip over mid-battle and die like a turtle stuck on its back.

I guess if I have to be a morlock to have played the TT, you have to be an ill-tempered skin and bones vulture in someone's basement to be a critic.

----

... "broad side of a barn" ... do you seriously expect battlemechs to be gundams? Every Mech/Mecha HAS to be wing zero, or it's trash? "Like a turtle on it's back" - gee, it's kinda hard to get up on your feet when you either don't have any, or they're riddled with compound fractures, or, like an idiot, you tried walking into quicksand or out on slick ice, but of course, you'd have to know what the PSR's are to know this ... more lazy critics, not doing their homework first.

Quote

I suppose the reasoning was that nobody outside of the die-hard fans would be reading these novels anyway, so they might as well cater to their core fanbase at the expense of outsiders.

This was my first deeper observation about the franchise, because this exact toxic frame of mind continues to haunt the series to this day.

----

For a F2P game that should supposedly thrive on a huge playerbase of casual players, curious mayflies, with a small hardcore audience to anchor it, MWO does not give a about new players. Not a single one. Zero, zip, don't even ask.

Oh look, a critic basing his criticisms on a self-admitted supposition.

----

You know, you should really do your homework before you accuse.

I don't agree with how PGI's built MWO; the leadership and development @ PGI and I go separate ways on more than a few topics, some of which are foundational (for their part, they have been VERY courteous to me; I attempt to be honest and constructive for my part on our disagreements).

PGI has exhibited that they very MUCH care about new players... which you'd know, if you even lurked the forums when the third person view nuclear-meltdown-world-ending-debacle happened. Pretty much the ONLY reason third person view got added was for new players, and it was added over the absolute screaming and hatred of virtually EVERYONE on the forums and over the knowledge that the MW community has HATED 3pv for decades. There is evidence that they rather care very much. But, of course, you can expect to be quite safe from any response from them; because their hands are tied. If they did point this out, you'd be the underdog, getting pummelled by a bunch of bullies - if they don't say anything, than people just take what you say for truth.

Quote

I’ve never seen a game so stubbornly refuse to do even basic things to reach out to a broader audience. Hell, it took them nearly two years to even add a bare bones tutorial to the game.

Do you have any idea WHY it took them two years? Do you even care? I have no access to PGI's financials of any sort - I don't even know any of the PGI crew - but even I'd be willing to bet money I don't have that they had to go WAY into hock and have a ton of investment capital on the line for MWO. As a matter of public fact, we *know* they couldn't get any big publishing house backing (bean counters should count beans, NOT make policy), and that they basically had to start this whole ball rolling by themselves, with no outside help. So of course the game isn't what it should be - of course, this doesn't excuse promising big things and not delivering them - but anyone who bothered to be informed on the topic would have know good and well that PGI wouldn't be able to get CW, robust tutorials, etc, up and running at delivery - or, quite frankly, in the first year. I suspect PGI at the start did not know understand just how complex and involved developing an MW video game would be... much less an online F2P MMOG implementation of said series.

Quote

MWO is a mechanically broad game (I would never call it "deep" like Dota or Street Fighter, because it isn't, but there is a lot to learn and keep track of). The jumbled HUD full of indicators, paper-doll readouts, weapon groups, and endless meters is flat-out overwhelming for players new to the series.

Which would be where PGI and I somewhat depart. The game should be quite deep, but easily grasped at the basic level, and for a simple reason - BattleMechs are designed and built on the KISS principal. 'Mech controls are quite simple ... push left pedal down to turn left, right for right, use RH joystick to aim the reticule, and a torso twist control. The neurohelmet is something that new pilots don't even really have to mess with per se; it mostly just watches their balance centers for balance inputs. Huds aren't supposed to be cluttered up; they're supposed to be streamlined as much as possible (and otherwise be extremely configurable). However, getting this over to the video game format from the lore is the sticking point.

There is, however, an undercurrent in the MW forums community that has a real love-on for an obscene making it necessary to master an amount of detail in order to play an MW game, and they vocally and ardently beg for more, all the time - they have been for years... decades maybe. This desire is the noise that clutters up any effort to make any MW game.

Quote

I always laid that blame on PGI's feet. I thought they were shortsighted and greedy (and even a little exploitative), but maybe that tendency has always been there in the franchise. Maybe that's why Battletech has disappeared off the shelves while similar games like Warhammer 40K soldier on, why MechWarrior couldn't find a publisher to fund a proper single-player campaign game and had to go the F2P route.

The franchise has eaten itself hollow from the inside out.

----

Over the past year or so of the game, the playerbase has wised up to this tactic and even casual pub matches are dominated by jump-jetting snipers playing jack-in-the-box over a mountain. It makes matches incredibly slow as most players are too terrorized to leave the safety of their nook. To top it off, those same sniper weapons are equally capable of brawling as most of the specialized close-in weapons! So even if you do manage to wade through the never ending downpour of lightning bolts and electro-magnetically hurled gauss slugs, you won't even have the advantage in the knife fight!

----

... Maybe the idea of fun rock-em-sock-em robot battles in the series is just crippled by design. Things were ruined the first time a pen-and-paper designer sketched out the idea of the gauss cannon, and the disease has just metastasized over time. Growing and spreading as the game left the world of random dice rolls (where your super powerful sniper shot could uselessly ping off a mech's toe by the whim of the dice) and allowed players with eyes and brains to target those sniper weapons where they'd do the most damage. PGI has been negligent, but the patient was doomed long before their malpractice.

Wouldn't it be nice to read a hit piece that got it's facts straight and didn't engage in false justifications.

PGI couldn't get funding from the large publishers because, IMO, the bean-counting pollsters (quants, wired calls them) refused to fund a game not allowed to go onto the PS3 console, mainly, and because of the idiocy of letting quants make leadership decisions. Glorifying bean counters doesn't make them anything more than bean counters. Letting them make corporate leadership decisions is just as stupid.

----

Which has happened because PGI mistook at least parts of the TT combat mechanic for being what they weren't. Namely, the 'mech part of the aiming equation didn't make it into MWO. Instead, MWO went the way of "all weapons of the same velocity fired at the same time hit the exact same spot" ... which irrevocably breaks the balance, if you try and use any other part or parts the tt combat system (armor numbers, weapons damage, you name it) ... or any of the rest of the BT lore, for that matter.

----

The problem you mention isn't present in the TT in anything like the way it is present in MWO. If you can get to knife fighting range, and you have a knife fighting setup ... you can make any sniper battlemech setup pay for their stupidity. DPS on knife fighting setups is OBSCENE compared to DPS(DPT? ) on sniper setups in the tt.

Quote

While the Clans caught me off guard, the antagonists of Test of Vengeance didn't. The Draconis Combine, a Great House of the Inner Sphere modelled after the samurai of ancient Japan (as well as some random Chinese elements because why the heck not) were every bit as painfully stereotypical and vaguely racist as I expected. The leader of the "Black Dragon" army is exactly the Fu-Man-Chu knock-off you'd be embarrassed to caught reading (long white beard, takes his command meeting in a zen garden while sitting cross-legged in a pristine white gi, simply closing his eyes and taking twenty minutes between every cryptic riddle of a command) and yes, the mechwarriors of the Combine do indeed shout "BANZAI!" as they charge the enemy.

This would have shocked me if most of the mechs of the Combine didn't already tip their hand on the racist thing already. My favourite is the Hatamoto-Chi, which is an 80-ton ROBOT that's head is shaped like a big ol' samurai helmet and will walk into battle with a gigantic katana and a replica wood and fabric banner flying from its back. We're talking Capcom levels of cultural sensitivity here.

Yes, if a fictional faction is culturally identifiable instead of a pile of post-modern impossible to define jello, in any way, it MUST be racism! I would ask whatever happened to not tossing the accusation of racism at non-racism, but the "burning lower-case t" in the "front yard" that the false accusation of racism is ... I guess, too tempting.

Quote

You'd have to burn it all down.

You would have to chop, and torch, and pulverize everything but the core ideas. Go back to square one, rewrite everything – pitch the stereotypes, re-write the Clans to be more ominous and alien than banal and creepy, re-work all the weapons and mechanics of the mech so you could build a fun and interesting game around them.

I always thought the Battletech/MechWarrior franchise could aspire to more. That with the right steady hand on the rudder, the series could make a comeback, both with the games and the novels. With the success of Pacific Rim and Game of Thrones, you would think the time was right for people to accept a series about giant mechanical knights duking it out on the battlefield while future space viziers stabbed each other in the back in a deadly political game. But I can see that I was wrong.

It doesn't need a steady hand, it needs an iron fist. A great merciless smashing of retcons and reboots.

... and the usual critic's "curative"; I don't like it, therefore, the right thing to do is ... SMASH IT!

Edited by Pht, 19 July 2014 - 08:41 AM.

[Anjian]

Wrenchfarm, on 16 July 2014 - 06:25 AM, said:

After playing this game for almost two years without really diving into the lore, I finally read some Battletech books.

It was a mixed experience.

More interesting than my tepid opinion of the writing though, I found some interesting similarities between the novels and MWO and what it means to be a Battletech fan.

You can read the blog I wrote about them here - http://www.destructo...ks-278200.phtml

You should try to read the Dark Age novels because that is quite frankly, much darker, more medieval and more interesting. The Mary Sue faction become the Republic of the Sphere, but as you progress through the main arc of of Dark Age, it didn't end happily for the Mary Sues.

Jordan Weismann had always intended that Battletech history to reflect human history; the Star League is the Roman Empire, and whose fall led to disunity and the kingdoms across Europe. The Clans were the Mongol Toumans, which swept across Asia and into Europe; the inference is direct, since the military arm of the Clans are also called Toumans, and their leaders are called Khans. There were different Mongola Toumans like the Golden Horde, and that's why there are different Clans --- they share the same culture but are politically divided. The Mongols were stopped with a few decisive battles and over time, they were culturally assimilated by the conquered. Through the acquisition of technologies from the Chinese and the Persians, such as firearms from the Chinese, the Mongols also had technological superiority over both the Europeans and the Mamluks of Egypt. The brutal social structure of the Clans are reflective of the Mongols and their warrior culture as well.

Similarity of the Clans to the Klingons are nonintentional. The Klingon Empire is also inspired from the Mongols and their strict warrior culture, at least originally, in the original Trek series, though somehow turned into merry Vikings in the later series. Scifi tends to look at Man's own past history for inspiration for its stellar empires, like the Romulan Empire from the Roman Empire. Or like in Star Wars, the Republic from the Roman Republic, or even an allegorical reference to the USA. One of the reasons for using human history as inspiration is that the original creators also have some social commentary to tell.

The Battletech Jihad period you may also find intentional historical parallels in the rise of Islam or with the sectarian wars in Europe. After that, the Dark Age was an attempt to keep the fragile peace among the Clans and the Houses by creating a new plutocratic Republic, which seems modeled after the old Roman Republic. Dark Age can be regarded as somewhat of a "reboot" of the series without breaking the historical continuity, but this effort somehow alienated many of the "classic era" Battletech fans.

Edited by Anjian, 22 July 2014 - 04:52 AM.

[Heeden]

Egomane, on 18 July 2014 - 08:09 AM, said:

I don't believe a personal vendetta is enough reason for war. It clearly shows, that he is rating himself much higher then all the lives a war will destroy on both sides. One life for a billion? That doesn't add up!

An assassination attempt would have been justified. All out war, that would include all five of the successor states, as an act of personal revenge, was clearly madness.

My goodness, that would be as crazy as post-industrial Europe entering a 4-year was of devastating attrition over a single assassination.

I've only read a couple of Battletech books, and that was quite a while ago, but from memory they seem to be pretty decent "bolter-porn" (if they used bolters); which is ropey-to-passable plot-lines being used to string together some unlikely but awesome and visceral military sci-fi.

[Heeden]

I just read your blog and it isn't that impressive. It lurches from the obvious "trashy novels released for a niche table-top game are trashy and resemble the table-top game" into a long-winded, glorified forum-rant before veering off into some random comparison of the villain-of-the-week you picked up from Reddit and a warrior caste from a space fantasy series.

The finale, where you lament the cultural insensitivity of making a giant-robot that resembles a samurai was pretty cringe-worthy, I'm fairly certain the culture of the Far-East (or West Pacific nations if such a Roman-centric designation is offensive to you) is big enough and strong enough to survive being lightly-bastardised in the name of giant-robot fun (if not the anime genre would have erased Japanese history by now), just like all cultures are capable of withstanding the (odd crude stereotype/visual trope)* being recycled for the sake of (laziness/brevity)*.

* - delete as appropriate according to your levels of (in)sensitivity and butt-hurt.

I get your point (assuming I extracted it correctly from your ramblings), there's certainly potential for the Battletech universe to be the home of some truly great space opera with well-researched cultural parallels, intelligently developed plots and emotionally engaging characters. The thing is FASA just wanted some hot robot action with a few human bits to string it together. Maybe it is something only suitable for teens and young adults (or older folks on a nostalgia trip) but then again that's the market they were aiming for.

If the idea of the clans disturbs you I'd recommend staying far, far away from Warhammer 40k fiction which harbours some far nastier ideas and has even reached the NY Times bestsellers lists.