I'm thrilled to see the Wolfhound finally make it into Mechwarrior Online. It has been a favorite battlemech of mine since my teenage years. I eagerly went to look at the concept art and... well, I'll let the observation of someone from Reddit speak for me:
That last word resonated with me. The torso was perfect, but the head struck me as generic. And this cooled my ardor to buy it (and the rest of the pack) much more. I guess I am disappointed. I wanted a Wolfhound with a lupine-stylized head... not with a 20-ton Stinger's head.
I get how the TRO were inconsistent and showed off two different kinds of Wolfhound designs. One is... uninspired.
While the other made a better effort of sticking to the paper novel description of the Wolfhound.
The actual book description from Lethal Heritage describes the Wolfhound so:
Litterature beyond the two paragraphs above have not been shy of comparing the Wolfhound's look with the Egyptian God of Death, Anubis. I even saw a modded model trying to come closer to that:
Which looks nice, I guess, but takes the twin viewport/eyesocket theme too far - cockpit view then would be downright horrid.
So, I still think the best compromise was this design:
Ears, muzzle, a very functional cockpit.
A good amount of the hype surrounding the Wolfhound will come from older MWO players whom will have read the books and value the Wolfhound in the symbolism of an iconic hero mech. I'm shamelessly part of that group. I am quite surprised to see how the ball seems to have been dropped with the Wolfhound when such a fantastic job had been done with the Panther.
I would beg PGI to revise the head's aesthetics. Please
try to give it the semblance of a muzzle and upthrust ears; otherwise it'll feel much less like a Wolfhound (at least less so to us bookworms). Thank you for your consideration.