Bishop Steiner, on 08 September 2016 - 08:26 AM, said:
well, I've was beating that drum even back during the preempted MW5 era....
Aside from 3rd Succession War, my dream eras for Game and Storytelling are the actual Jihad and the End of the Amaris Civil War/Fall of the Star League. Gimme a MW2 Mercs multi year/decade narrative game set in either setting? I'll throw my wallet at ya right now.
Yeah, I agree on a lot of those. 3rd Succession War is a great era for ongoing conflict and crapsack, Mad Max retro-futurism. The major Star League conflicts don't get much attention, which is unfortunate - imagine an MW game where you could play through a campaign as a member of Kerensky's SLDF fighting back through to Terra! It's be pretty damn epic.
I don't love the Jihad setting, mostly because I feel like the wobbies get more asspull mechanics than even the Clans (Clans: Double the effectiveness of all our technology even while resource limited and fighting a string of genocidal conflicts? Sure why not! WoB: ComStar is terribly resource strapped following Tukkayyid and rebuilding... Oh look we suddenly also have all these Star League warship fleets and tons of crackhead mech designs and WMDs and cybernetic superhumans and and asteroid mass drivers and insane automated defenses that... um.. fell off the back of a truck...). I also feel like, while some of the destruction of old merc units and plot-armored hero characters were overdue (hell, a lot of them should have been dying of old age by the FedCom war!), mostly they didn't get replaed by anything interesting... seriously, we get Deusexmechina Superspacejesus the Chosen One, who's about as (un)appealing as Annakin was in the Phantom Menace, and for all the same reasons. Some of the tech, too... Mech Tasers? Really?
The way the alliances all get reformed around that era is definitely great, though, and it leads to much more interesting and varied faction balance. Particularly, it gives a chance for the Clans to get interesting again, as individual leaders become more important and the individual philosophies guiding the various factions get interesting. Not every I.S. power has to be hardlocked into a nihilistic struggle with its two closest neighbors all the time because they can't go anywhere else or make gains any other way. It'd be really fertile lore setting for some good gameplay, except for unappealing fiction and some tech items that should never have seen daylight outside an Experimental Tech supplement.
I get where Dark Ages try to do kind of a reboot from super-high tech after this and jump back to the earlier crapsack, low-tech/retrotech era, except it feels really forced and... agromechs? Why bother with some of this crap? The Succession Wars have enough poorly balanced technology built apparently for no other purpose than to suck without doubling-down on making things suck.
As for I.S. vs. Clan invasion... it's too warmed over at this point. It was never particularly interesting unless you got hardcore about resource limitations, anyway, and while the Clan Tech does a somewhat better job of being internally balanced (e.g. Clantech vs. Clantech) than I.S. did, placing intentionally suboptimized designs with intentionally suboptimized tech against moderately optimized designs with super-optimized tech isn't all that interesting, mechanically. Better focus on the clans as emphasizing more spec-ops/raiding/individual combat vs. the line-unit/conventional warfare of the succession war armies would be fun, but the mechanics hamper it by building Clan technology as just better armed and more survivable and with easier dice rolls and longer engagement ranges, essentially just stronger line units reminiscent of a Reunification War setting (where at least that made sense from a lore perspective). The haphazard limitations on upgrading I.S. units is a pain, too (seriously, DHS upgrades are just a maintenance operation but putting on CASE requires a complete factory overhaul?) But all the mechanics encourage the Clans to function as a reunification War army, not their appropriate lore basis, and the forced unity and forced crusader mentality really hamper interesting development of the Clans as individual factions. Really, there's a lot about the timeline that I'd really love to reboot, particularly from a game balance standpoint. I guess MWO has had some opportunity to do just that though... just a shame they're still trying to work around the pinpoint alphastrike convergence problem instead of addressing it directly.
Heh, which brings me back to the Bushwacker. I remember back when I got MW3, and the rules were pretty cool - SRMs with limited guidance, powerful burst-firing autocannons, multi-beam pulse lasers... sadly no DFA
but that knockdown mechanic where you could try to hit things with an alpha strike and knock them over. I remember trying to get that to work so much when I first got the game, with all the weapons on my (stock) Bushwacker behaving differently and scattering damage. It was a gamble for a potentially big reward, which I like as a mechanic. Sadly there was a lot in that game that could be exploited miserably (leg instagibs, instant hitscan laser boating, boating
anything to make that alpha mechanic easy), but it introduced some fun new stuff. (Some of which, like knockdowns, was actually old TT mechanisms). Too bad more hasn't been carried along over time.
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