Battletech not being anime isnt the problem. The problem is bad writing and and an antiquated game system.
They need to delete all the writing and write a backstory that's actually good. Battletech has potential to be game of thrones with mechs. But its not because the writing is so damn bad. A big part of the problem is that the game setting and story dont focus on just a single time period. Instead its diluted over a period of several hundred years and ends with the absolute worst plot arc ever (dark age) that makes every sacrifice any notable character has made upto that point ultimately pointless. The story should just focus on the 4th succession war and nothing else. No clan invasion, no jihad, no dark age garbage.
The game also needs to stop being perpetually trapped in the 80s. It needs a serious update as far as technology goes. The game system itself needs a huge update too.
Battletech not being anime isnt the problem. The problem is bad writing and and an antiquated game system.
They need to delete all the writing and write a backstory that's actually good. Battletech has potential to be game of thrones with mechs. But its not because the writing is so damn bad. A big part of the problem is that the game setting and story dont focus on just a single time period. Instead its diluted over a period of several hundred years and ends with the absolute worst plot arc ever (dark age) that makes every sacrifice any notable character has made upto that point ultimately pointless. The story should just focus on the 4th succession war and nothing else. No clan invasion, no jihad, no dark age garbage.
The game also needs to stop being perpetually trapped in the 80s. It needs a serious update as far as technology goes. The game system itself needs a huge update too.
Then it sort of loses what makes it BattleTech.
Part of it's charm and it's identity is tied to what it is and the time in which it was created. Sure certain aspects could be tweaked for the better/modernized without causing too much disruption, however once the tech, the aesthetics, the culture, and the overall story sees dramatic changes, it starts to lose what makes it BattleTech.
I'm not against change, and I think many of us understand that some things would have to be altered. We just need to be careful in wishing for change if the result barely resembles what we started with. At that point, it might as well been an original property.
Well they tried to modernize it with MWDA or clicktech as I call it and look where it is now everyone is playing....the old stuff.
Yes old style Battletech survived the modernization. I still haven't tried Alpha strike, what is more of a simplification then a modernisation. Still from looking at the rules I miss stuff, like armor locations, critical hits and stuff.
Could it still use some smoothing of the rules? Little bit but its a pretty solid experiance I think. As for the lore? I think yes parts could be updated like ranges of weapons. I think they where a bit to close to the tabletop when comming up with the numbers. Don't know if people would accept it when you say you could fire your laser at ranges in the kilometers instead of meter but see units on the board standing just centimeters away.
I mean during the succession wars most stuff became so faulty that it would be okay to say that targeting systems of that time where so broken that they couldn't keep up with tracking the target but later on, tech should have been improved to the point that its similar to todays standart or even beyond.
Still while that is easy to write in a story its hard to translate onto a normal sized table you play on without messing up the scale.
I remember that I tried to do a WW2 ship battle tabletop and when I gave ships the ranges that was scaled to the ship models I ended up firing with my battleships over 10m. That didn't work out
I fully support having a BattleTech/MechWarrior animu, so long as the people doing it knows BT lore and are consistent.
Also as long is doesn't feel like Gundam where the Mechs are pretty much doing ballet and stuff. What I like about BT/MW compared to other Mech related franchise/Anime is that they feel slow and clunky.
It honestly all depend on the marketing and the first episode. That first episode is VERY crucial. Communities, especially those in Facebook and Youtube can bring a lot of hype and interest.
No thanks to anime nonsense infecting Battletech. There are macross and the HG gang for that.
Battletech is trying to be more "realistic" and grounded than those chaotic swoosharoo mechs with over the top weapons, agility and big eyed child pilots trying to prove a point.
No thanks to anime nonsense infecting Battletech. There are macross and the HG gang for that.
Battletech is trying to be more "realistic" and grounded than those chaotic swoosharoo mechs with over the top weapons, agility and big eyed child pilots trying to prove a point.
The problem is that weebs and game players are almost synonymous and vastly overlap each other.
But to be honest it could work you know. War Robots started with zero lore, no anime connections, realistic inspired from war machines robots and then went on to becoming one of the more successful mobile games (50+ million downloads, Top 50 gross ranking) before they went pay to win and increasingly sci-fi weaponry (lock downs, damage suppression, god shields, stealth, godawful weapons, etc,.) totally screwing things up. But even at the height of their popularity and even today, that game have large dedicated player bases in Japan, China, S. Korea, and South East Asia where anime popularity are peak.
This is a market that is ripe for a disruption. You just need to create a good mobile game featuring Battlemechs to lure them in. While you may not to saintly follow tabletop specs, the base mechanics should be there. You have to accept a third party point of view, with a limited number of respawns and players up to 4 to 6 per each team. This is will be Mechwarrior Lite, and is meant to introduce players to the franchise. This is not for satisfying PC and console players who can have their own separate and much more hard core game. The idea is to introduce players to the franchise and later inspire them to acquire the PC and console games. But its no problem if players stay mobile forever also, but at least the franchise needs to cover all platform bases (PC, console and mobile). Lets not forget, that you can at least get a decent revenue stream so you can develop future products in the franchise and sustain all the games.
Then we work on separate PC and console games, a combination of multiplayer only online games along with single player, linear campaign story driven games. Cover bases with both shooter players and strategy players.
Battletech will survive just fine without an anime.
Anime studios will never consider the battletech universe anyways, because of how asian cultures are depicted.
Battletech would be much better off with a reboot; that condenses some of the plot by eschewing the bad parts, not using board game mechanics as the basis of technical lore, not letting future authors do pretty much whatever, actually paying good authors to write good books.
Please no. There are plenty of big robot anime things already. I don't like the mech designs. I don't like the 13 year old pilots wearing school girl costumes. I don't like the basic tropes of nearly all anime I've ever had the displeasure to bear witness to. **** I didn't even like being in Tokyo for a few days as a stopover. The culture that has taken over in that country since I guess the end of WWII is just weird. Repressed and uptight but freaky.
In the plus column they make good whiskey. Love sushi.
You people are going to cringe in pain seeing this then. The US servers have turned live a few days ago. Its completely ridiculous --- ridiculously fun at that is.
Its good for Battletech to have a separate identity, but years of borrowing designs and different artists without a unifying artistic theme vision means that the Battlemechs all look like they come from different universes, from Dougram to even a hint of Star Wars.
I think Alex Inglesias has done a good job trying using his interpretation to bring these diverse themes into a single unifying artistic vision again. But you still have this humanoid walkers which are of Eastern origin vs. chickenoid walkers which tend to be Western. Then there is also the lack of factional identity and theme mechs, which the sculptors of the Dark Age sets tried to address.
You need to have a clear design language and identity style, so with one glance you can tell this mech is Hawken or Titanfall. Japanese anime tend to have a problem because all these series tend to hire a few elite mechanical designers such as Shoji Kawamori, who puts designs anywhere from Macross which you all know, but also to Armored Core, the Transformers, Aquarion and countless other TV series, the latest of which is the Last Hope you can watch right now on Netflix. Because these shows share the same designers, they end up having the same stylistic themes, although Shoji Kawamori's style is quite distinctive from those on Gundam. For example, Kawamori-san likes to put rabbit ears on his mechs.
Design rules that create a design identity is important for science fiction. Star Trek is a foremost example of such, we can tell a Star Trek design from a Star Wars one.
Ive always been a fan of the Front Mission mechs. It seems closer to Battletech than your average "super-boost beamsword-angel" designs that Japanese mecha have
I suggested a few years ago, that if they were going to go back to anime sources for artwork to license, then the macross sequels made the most practical sense,
From Macross Zero...
Macross Plus
Macross Frontier
I just used those as examples where the artwork diverged from the stuff in SDF:Macross significantly enough to not just have people saying "use that for the stinger, wasp, crusader". But for that matter, they could have licensed art from Gundam or Patlabor also...
I like to avoid works by Shoji Kawamori, like all these Macross ones. Why? Because Shoji Kawamori is Shoji Kawamori. His style is too distinctive, and despite that he supplies mech designs to countless anime series, you can take all these designs and they all appear to be part of a Shoji Kawamori mecha superverse.
As for me, the work done by Alex Inglesias is just fine. If I were heading a unified Battletech/Mechwarrior franchise management company, I would make him the overall art director, or like the art czar for the BT universe, and continue to render all the gazillion designs of the franchise so they all belong artistically and thematically, to the same universe and guided by the same type of technology. Having an art czar would enforce a consistency in the artwork even if new artists are hired.
If you look at the founding mechs of Battletech, those taken from Dougram and Macross, right from the start, that was a huge mistake. Dougram is very different from Macross, and I would say Dougram itself is so Battletechish that it should be the spiritual progenitor of the franchise. It takes place in a remote planet that was governed by some kind of neo-colonialist government with European overtones, there is a baddie even named Von Stein there. The mechs in Dougram are all terrestrial, they don't fly, they fight on the ground, they don't transformed from planes, and they are the ones that started the Mechwarrior design trope of having glass cockpits in the head. They also carry weapons on their shoulders. The story is about a band of guerillias who managed to capture a mech prototype called the Dougram and tried to use it and other captured mechs to fight the colonialist government.
And then you go to Macross and you have an entirely different universe arrangement. Macross is set back on Earth. Its being invaded by aliens known as the Zentradi. Much of the combat takes place in the air and in space. Not only are there Earth mechs, but also alien mechs, though they are really pods containing the giant aliens. The "Marauder" is an alien mech, the "Warhammer" and the "Rifleman" are actually AA defense mechs that attach to the sides of the Super Dimensional Fortress Macross which itself is like a mothership in the shape of a super giant robot.
This is like making a space franchise where you combine the designs from different scifi franchises. That simply won't look right.
Overtime, because of the lack of design guidelines, and because succeeding artists tried to follow either the "Dougram" design model or the "Macross" design model, things start to look really weird and confusing.
As much as outsiders try to generalize anime, anime mecha can easily be divided into subgenres on their own, ranging from the realistic types you see in the Front Mission game franchise, to nearly alien designs, to the giant super robots, and then to sword and sorcery knight looking types, and then to steampunk ones, and even to cyberpunk designs like in Ghost in the Shell.
Battletech and Mechwarrior needs to have a consistent, design style of its own. If it needs to look towards its roots for inspiration, I would say it needs to look closer to the Dougram line of realistic mech designs. You need to look at the other mecha works of Ryosuke Takahashi, who is the creator of Dougram (I know I know he has the same name as the protagonist in the fast and furious precursor anime Initial D). Try looking at the mecha of his other works, like Armored Trooper Votoms (which heavily inspired the Heavy Gear mech franchise), Gasaraki, and Blue Gender.
Try watching his works. His mecha anime is very gritty, if not bloody. Blue Gender is one of the underrated classics of the genre.
7
