82 replies to this topic

[Koniving]

For single player and co-op, high fidelity graphics, customize the main character, etc. should all be doable without much sacrifice to the game itself, though as with many past mechwarrior games to fit in a good narrative, narrowing the scope is often necessary, as such linear stories or less cohessive sandbox stories tend to be the norm. But about multiplayer and what is below...

Cathy, on 03 March 2018 - 06:14 AM, said:

Its a niche game with low population which is sad, because it deserves more popularity, but even with more popularity, I've touched on a few reasons above why it would be sabotaged by the people that play the game.

The Majority don't want a realistic game they want a game where they can put three ERPPC's on an E.C.M Kitfox and alpha them all day.

If you know a rich person that wants to dump $10-15-20 million into this project go for it, because if you have to come to the community for funding it will just be so dilated you'll get what we have here now.

I know this is a Hypothetical ask and I may well have broken the rules by giving real reasons for it's non existence, but it's a subject I think about myself from time to time, but i've never bothered to address it until now, because even at this level there are so many variations on the questions you've put forward.

If most people don't want a realistic game, then the push for higher graphics, more customization on characters, and well... things like Star Citizen just wouldn't exist. The issue is that realistic and fun aren't the best bed fellows. Then there's budget. Any game needs make more than it spends or it isn't worth doing, anyone and everyone knows that. At its core, I believe that a game that focuses on the gameplay, the immersion, and most importantly the feel of what it is trying to do can be given some slack on not going for the top graphical fidelity.

Lets be honest, if you blow a chunk out of a building, do you need to be able to see at a glance the life story of whatever apartment you're staring into from the dirty couch to all the beer bottles on the floor or the body slumped over in the bath tub that's apparently been dead for days prior to your battle because he drowned?

No, not really. But that's what triple A titles keep pushing for. It isn't necessary but someone, somewhere, won't rest until you can actually see that one tiny scratch on the bullet that was put into a magazine, loaded into a chamber, and destined to be ejected prematurely due to a silly technique and ever since that one jam the character will wear on his necklace for over 20 years. Keep an eye out for that bullet if you ever play the MGS series.... Its in every game in some form or another.

Would Mechwarrior be less of a game if it looked like this,

but still had everything discussed in this hypothetical thread, including Battlefield-level environmental micro and macro destruction?

Of course, with that level of polygons in meshes in a more modern engine, you could fill that place with all kinds of detail... and if you keep the meshes relatively simple and low poly you could go so far as to fill a map much larger than DayZ, fill it with 100+ players, and have everything from player infantry to VTOL craft to periodic dropship delivery of mechs and easily run 60+ frames on everything, and still have it run good on ancient relics. It'd also shave millions off the budget, be much faster to develop, and leave a lot of processing ability for a truly and deeply complex game.

Right now MWO's trying so hard that there's no processing power for the game to handle its own host state rewind if something like "Move slowly through water" was added into the game... Like seriously?

Lets take a look at where that screenshot came from. A 2001 game called Multiplayer Battletech: 3025. What was its big goal? Inner Sphere combat, with an MMOG style server where players picked a side, picked a planet accessible to them and fought for it. After EA got involved (in other words after there was money behind it) and after the combat got upgraded, they went and upgraded the conquest side of things... and that's where it gets really good. I bring you, quoted from memory, a story from a conversation in which some of the players from my group regaled unto us the tale of one epic week in MP BT 3025's beta.

"So you could take planets, but you had to have supply lines. Gotta get repairs. Need to have ammo. But you're not working for yourself. You have the whole faction behind you. Sometimes they work together, sometimes **** knows what anyone's doing, right? But you can't just pick any planet, sure you pick where you started from but you gotta travel from place to place. One night me and the guys get together on the same planet, took us about a day to do it, and we decide to just gun it. We spent 8 hours taking planet after planet after planet after planet in a B-line for the Davion home base, their capital planet whatever it was called. So we do it. Not a whole lot of resistance, defenses are just scattered about of course and those that stood in our way weren't well supplied against our Steiner Scout Lance. Half of it was spent setting up our supply line, resupplying, etc.

So the next day we get together and we go at it again making another 4 or 5 planets. I get ready to start winding our supply line in tow when somebody said "Screw it, we can do this." Another day or so, the Davions realized what was going on and you could see their forces starting to converge a few planets ahead of us so our progress slowed down a bit. Thereabouts the rest of the Steiners figured out what we were doing and other players started traveling our way to set up a supply line. But by then we had made so much headway that trying to connect supplies from place to place.. it just wasn't easy. So there we were, all hell piling up 4 planets ahead of us and supply lines coming to support us about 12 planets back, ammo's all but gone and materials just about spent, we dedicated that night to getting what we could fixed up in the hopes that supply lines could catch up. Next day, some 6 planets back for supplies and all hell at our door step we came back to a slew of match after match of cheap mechs thrown at us in waves of four as that's all you could do in this game.. it was like late 90s early 2000s for christ-sakes. But there ended our march on Davion, nearly 5 days and so many planets conquered. Our guys and theirs clashed after we got wasted, but then the game was just gone."

So. From that.. We already had a CW mode. With R&R, resupplies, etc. Admittedly it didn't have a quickplay mode, the only mode was fighting for planets. There were 6 or 7 factions. Assault mechs were economically not sound, but when in the field they were apparently awesome. I have no idea how much customization was allowed. The wiki states it used a LOT more BT rules than the Mechwarrior series ever has.

But consider this: Despite not having top graphics, not even for the time, it had many of the gameplay elements BT/MW fans looked for. Fun, challenging, immersive, and yes for some reason quite unforgiving. And it was gameplay that was so good it sparked Player A to tell Player B,C, D, etc. about it 14 years after the game disappeared. It obviously left an impression. Have you ever had a match in MWO that you'd tell as a story to someone 14 years after MWO no longer exists?

I believe that if game is really well made.. it won't really matter if it runs on the most amazing photo-realistic graphics... or if the whole thing runs on pixel art... so long as you can identify what you're looking at. (Couldn't get into ASCII art games... if I can't identify what I'm seeing without having to look at a map legend on another screen....yeah. Gotta at least be able to tell what I'm looking at.)

As far as realistic games and preferring to fire 3 ER PPCs all day long.. No doubt if someone can do it, most will want to do it until they get bored of it, just like Chun Li's kick in Street Fighter II; there's so many things to do but that's the easiest way to boost your stats.

So why do people fund a game like Star Citizen with 1,991,316 players having shelled out $179,573,225 (having just checked right now; that's roughly 90 dollars per player) where your character can run out of breath and lose consciousness from running for too long when they could just play while complaining that the 60 dollar price tag is too high? (Do yourself a favor and mute the guy in the CoD video...)

I can certainly say they're not buying into just an aspect of it. Multi-crew ships. Plenty of games do that, they tend to bomb. Co-op adventures. Tend to be nice but burn out quick. Space combat... that's bound to get the same as pretty much anything else. Boarding someone's ship after disabling them? Okay maybe. I know when I realized that could happen I got excited. Damage repair -- sounds boring until you really combine it with a bunch of other things. Decking back in a fire fight to cauterize a wound before you bleed out as you make your last stand because you refuse to give up your ship? Done something like that in DayZ, made for good stories but something usually ruined it. Strapping bombs onto repair drones and pretending you're going to repair that pirate that harassed and disabled you for not giving up your services for free? Getting revenge after someone backstabs you on a deal? See as we expand on this what we're focusing on isn't just about some gameplay elements but an experience.

At that point it isn't about just some game but something truly memorable. If that can be captured and harnessed, minor flaws tend to be overlooked as long as that is delivered.

Where MWO has failed collossally is on delivery...as it has yet to deliver a single complete feature from its original list. ARK is another game that tries so many things but hasn't actually delivered anything complete...yet already they talk about a sequel game without having completed the current one, pumping out DLC without finishing what they had or fixing many of the long standing bugs.

Sometimes with the tools, players can deliver the experience themselves. However, ideally the game should put in the effort first.

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On counter play... actually I've been quite surprised about how much counter play is in Battletech... but until you're at level 3-and-up rules you pretty much won't see jack for it. But double blind, in early and later renditions, provide quite a bit of it when you have larger maps going with combined arms. Is it practical on the board game? No, which is why you won't see much of it. But toy with all the advanced stuff and larger battles on Megamek... and before long you have satelites helping you coordinate attacks until the other side starts trying to hack it or sends air forces to try and destroy it. Got infantry deploying recon sensors from a couple of APCs that the Scorpion you've got sporting a Mech Mortar/8 targeting data loaded into its 1 ton of comms equipment (supplementing the base cockpit which makes for the "2 tons" required have this interaction) to help you locate and bombard targets to support your pair of blackjacks, infantry units and light tanks from land mines and ambushes. They had a series of stealth units and dogs to help them find my recon sensors so shortly after a dog appeared by one it'd be disabled by an undetected form of stealth infantry. Beyond their dogs, Kurita had aircraft providing recon runs and soon I set about using my Blackjacks as largely ineffective anti-air until I could get a delivery of an AA vehicle. That delivery was shot out of the sky, however by their own AA. So plenty of counter play right there. That's not even going into mech-level stealth, counter stealth, etc. of double blind.

But even at the most basic level, you have scouts with TAG marking targets for airstrikes, and you can counter that by killing or engaging those scouts so that they are too busy. Deal with infantry spotters to hinder long range mechs and tanks or in the case of C3 usage, take out the C3 master to make the C3 slaves useless or just damage the equipment. They in turn could counter that counter by trying to tie those C3 slaves to new C3 master... but now there's not enough masters for the slaves and then comes a whole new issue.

In one scenario I had police forces trying to find some insurgents when a heist takes place. Said heist had a mech taser that they strapped to the back of a large truck and disabled the responding Nin Kei (a custom police mech). By coincidence that completely random heist made a collision with another vehicle that happened to be driven by one of the insurgents we were looking for, but this wasn't realized until the bomb went off while trying to extract him for medical attention. The squad of 3 officers were instantly killed in action. My Celico Ranger was unscathed. All but one of the heistmen had died and the remaining one was taken into custody. This was in Battletech/Megamek. The third party (the bank robbers) had a counter for a mech which helped them deal with a threat, which they themselves did not have mechs. Neither did the insurgents. But the insurgents had bombs and other means to cause terror and to retaliate against the police as well as being hidden among dozens and dozens of identically named units (nearly 100) while as the police I had methods to try and find them within a limited time frame.

There's no reason a Battletech sim can't tap into the many forms of counter play Battletech's advanced rules could offer...even if many players have never gone so deep into the game to even know of their existence. I mean I just discovered last week that Battletech had torpedo carrying orcas and that the dinosaurs have autocannon-hauling models... AC-totting freaking dinosaurs and Shamu carrying anti-ship torpedos!

[Grey Rabbit]

I've been following this thread for a while and enjoying it. One thing that I have to say as a boat mechanic/game design hobbyist is that there's beauty in simplicity. As far as games like Star Citizen goes, they either melt their wings as they fly too close to the sun that is their own hype or they get too complicated for the average player to get into. The second one is usually because a good GUI that explains everything going on is hard to make on simple games. A lot of time people don't realize what they're asking for anyways with those things.

I've thought about making a BT game based more on characters and story. Specifically, I wanted to rewrite Crescent Hawk's Inception in such a way that if I took it back in time to my 13 yo self on his Tandy he wouldn't cringe at the adolescent writing. Game writing has come so far since the 1980's. I've messed around translating some BT stuff to learn game making. My first game was extremely like Dingo Red's Lancer. I'll spare you the details, but it taught me the value of a good GUI, and how important simplicity is when the player is in the thick of it. That and how to make terrible models.

In the original post it, it asked about character customization. Yes! That would be a different game than CHI, but both game types have their places. The only thing about single player games where you customize your dude is that co-op to show off said dude always brings everything full circle for me.

That's just one guy's opinion, though.

[Koniving]

Much of the starting questions went into the idea of a single player experience, and future questions would likely do the same. However since then, numerous questions have related to multiplayer concepts as well as simulator aspects. The content of this post could potentially apply either way, however a large portion of it has a focus on multiplayer.

And before I get too far, I tried an Indie game recently known simply as "Echo." If I were to describe it in the simplest terms without spoiling anything, it would be "Metroidvania meets RE4 meets Holy ******* ****!!!!" The game does well to capture attention and any time you think you're ready to take a break (as it does have a slow building pace and a few elements that merge narrative with gameplay in an impressive way ), something happens that either gently tugs at your shirt collar or a bit later violently yanks you in.

Note: Steam has a few games of similar names listed, so here's a link. This is a game that you ideally want to go in as blind as possible. You will thank me later.
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(Fun thing to listen to or watch as you read.)

Yeah, Star Citizen has a huge budget and it's going into a lot of things... effectively they're creating a life in the future. It seems awesome, it'll undoubtedly have a life filled with micro-transactions as time goes on to keep it running. The single player game is being sold as a separate entity which makes sense considering how vastly different and separate the two experiences are and I fully believe it should be.

Now, Star Citizenhas a few merits that could be useful. From what I had heard, they have no issues with the concept of modding, provided mods run on separate, rented servers. With all the work into everything... changing a few things, redesigning some vehicles, and most importantly having an ACTUAL FOCUS...rather than trying to force a futuristic universe in which you can be anything... could lead to a phenomenal BT mod. Especially if a bit of effort is done to reduce the production quality... as forcing production quality like that, on a non-profit fan mod dooms it to failure.

But if it focuses on what really matters, gets that experience down to its fundamentals and touches it up to cross the T's and dot the i's, you have something that could always be expanded upon later on. A BT simulator (multiplayer) would be a lot more focused on the battles, getting the missions, supplies, scrap, etc. and more missions to take over the universe and rewrite the history in favor of whatever faction. A single player simulation focused specifically on characters would also have a much more direct focus following those characters and what they could do without having to get into what Hanse Davion puts on his cheeseburger if you're living in Marik space.

This said, I've been entertaining the idea of "What if faction warfare, as PGI originally described it and tied heavily into the BT universe... was made with those tools"?

As such, I've begun creating scenarios in Megamek, setting up teams, preliminary characters, etc. for a number of things from skirmishes to campaigns, to be played out in Megamek and then fleshed out into a series of short stories or mini-novels. Kind of like what I did in King Crab versus Dire Wolf, with the Clan Invasion forces versus Project Phoenix but much more cohesive, less as a literal narration of a battle and more of brief stories.

One of which is already underway and will probably be ready soon after I move in real life (I'm now paying 950 USD in rent monthly, moving to cut my monthly costs).

Part of these stories is meant to give us a glimpse into what some of us (or at least myself) would have liked to have seen with MWO and the potential it presented us with but with more of a Battletech filter. Part of them is to give ideas perhaps to PGI on what they could do to make CW something...meaningful. These ideas combine some of PGI's attempted but botched ideas (fixed) as well as numerous other ones presented in Mechwarrior/Battletech RPG, Battletech campaigns, Battletechnology (it may no longer be canon but it was canon for many decades and most of the stuff Catalyst pumps out is still ripped right from its pages) and a few other sources some of which inspired the BT series and some might be surprising.

As an example of a surprising one we have Roughnecks, a CG older-kid oriented television series about Starship Troopers that in my opinion is very well done considering literally everything about Starship Troopers. In fact some of the first words in a few of the episodes remind me of when I had a brief encounter with a BT/Megamek playing team in the Skye Rangers Brigade. In a single conversation with them (and I regret not going back due to having forgotten their TS...website...etc..), I was able to share a number of resources with them and engage in a discussion in which they made mention elements of BT that I never even thought of before. "The intelligence was wrong." They had rolls for intelligence prior to a mission which would give them an idea of what they could face, resulting in different levels of knowledge about opposing forces before they made their drop. Exactly how it worked wasn't really told, however from the sound of it players would not know they had bad intelligence until they learned it first hand. Much like the Roughnecks, as the narration goes on to say what intelligence expected as opposed to what they really found. For the Roughnecks, intelligence was almost always incorrect. Which is what reminded me of my brief time talking with the skye rangers on the subject.

This also dives into a three page long article in Battle Technology about a specific unit within the Draconis Combine. We've all heard how the Dracs are known for honor battles, being up front about stuff, etc. The sentiment might be widely taught, however the perils of war make certain sacrifices necessary and so they do have a means to steal information, sabotage enemies, etc. They pale compared to the masters of espionage and spying, the Capellans, but as 'everyone does it', the Dracs are not without the means.

So you have intelligence, counter intelligence, supply lines and of course the team management which give the impression of time transitioning between battles, which can also play into repair and rearm as well as sending units from place to place. By having control of numerous characters, you could have characters fielded in multiple areas ensuring that you could get into play as well as the other elements. I won't dive into too much because there's actually a few more posts that I want to do here on other topics as well as something else to get into here. Hopefully in the short stories, you might actually be able to see game mechanics as they're introduced.

The one I'm working on at the moment is meant to emulate a special event, as such it is implied that attackers have been planning on it for some time and begins with an infiltration using expected merchant dropships whom are expected to deliver an order and pick up a shipment. Whether the plan works or falls through will depend on the play and the dice.

I wouldn't mind getting ideas for regular engagements in the mean time. So ideas on vehicles, infantry and mechs to use, locations to fight over, goals in mind are all appreciated. No trojan horse setups (I'm already in the middle of one). Can you think of lore-based issues to tackle? One such issue I'm currently tackling is that of the Centurion, whose right arm AC/10 is known for a number of problems, including the issues of replacing them. As such there's a Centurion that has experienced this issue in this first scenario. The Flea 15 will not fit into this first scenario, but don't worry I fully intend to give the Flea 15 its own spotlight in the near future. Numerous mechs are being showcased here.

At some point (potentially in this scenario as the year is correct, but potentially in another scenario), I will have the original Komiyaba Type VII Hunchback and the "classic" Crucis Type V Hunchback square off in a battle that breaks down damage to the second (with a summarized version, too). Whether both will be armed as straight 4G models in respect to their chassis (different weapon variants on both) or armed differently really depends on what people might want. By technicality, all sub variants of the Komiyaba Type VII are just modified 4G Hunchbacks while all sub variants of the Crucis Type V are factory built official variants, but even then the very first thing the Dracs did with the Crucis Type V was slap Gauss Rifles on them... If anyone's read the TRO 3039 Hunchback entry (or almost any post in which I mention Crucis Type V..), you'll know how well that went...

So leave your ideas for mechs/vehicles/infantry types as well as any particular quirks/flaws/fluff you'd like to see and I especially want ideas for interesting planets, missions and potential scenarios (a mission is a sortie with set goals; a scenario is something particular within a sortie that happens; i.e. a routed enemy gives a final stand and ambushes with an unknown element, a drop is interrupted by a warship, or a local third party doesn't like either side).

Note: beast infantry will have to wait; I know I recently talked of those that ride Killer Whales and Dragons but there are technical issues with Megamek blocking this at the moment. Yes, I thought it was hilariously exciting to find out that there is Dragon riding in Battletech, but wait for it... I'll play it out when it becomes possible in Megamek. So in due time.