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I have been reading various posts and threads on this board and get the distinct impression that a lot of people don’t get what’s what. I read things like; “this is Mechwarrior, not Battletech” and “Mechwarrior split off from Battletech”, which to be blunt are rather ignorant statements. People seem to immediately equate Battletech to the boardgame, even though this isn’t correct.
Battletech is the entire franchise and universe, Mechwarrior has been a number of products in this franchise.
For instance, Mechwarrior was a RPG before it was a mech simulator. Mechwarrior represents the life of a character in the BT universe; the Mechwarrior computer games put the player in this universe via the cockpit of a mech.
In a number of other cases this boils down to discussions between tabletop and videogame players and how they perceive the games. I have personally started with MW2 and later moved on to the tabletop and novels after that I played MW4. The perspectives of the crowds give rather different interpretations on what MWO should be, but I’ll list a number of things that both “camps” so to speak think of each other.
The Mechwarrior Players
For this I’ll mostely focus on the MW4 and Mechassault crowds since MW, MW2 and MW3 are pretty close to the TT as it is. Many players in this category are really unfamiliar with the universe this all takes place in, MW4 and Mechassault don’t really bother to do a lot of explaining.
These players are also often overwhelmed by the plethora of information the universe has to offer. I’ll be fair here, the BT universe can be rather intimidating due to its copious amounts of lore and game books. I get from a lot of people here that they are scared that the game will essentially be turned into the TT where the players are sitting in miniatures instead of 3D mechs. This won’t be the case in MWO, the TT players don’t want this to happen as much as you do.
This probably stems from the fact that TT players want to have the TT construction rules for mechs. This will work for various reasons:
- MW2 and MW3 already did this and approached the canon universe rather closely.
- The novels and the mechs portrayed in them also obey these rules.
- There are actual Technical Readouts with descriptions of mechs and their backgrounds the canon weapon loadouts can be found here.
This will ofcourse lead into “the TT mechlab is unbalanced” discussions, but let’s not fool ourselves here. The MW4 mechlab is extremely unbalanced since it throws out a lot of rules and often made stuff up along the way.
The only thing this group wants if fun gameplay, but they think that the TT crowd wants to bury MWO in boring rules and whatnot.
The Tabletop players
Often labeled “the Battletech players”, I’ll lump the MW, MW2 and 3 crowds in with these guys since those games are rather close to the TT. The main fear here is that MWO will be dumbed down too much like it was with MW4 and Mechassault. And to be honest, I agree with this, too many good things have been thrown out to keep these games simple. It doesn’t really help here that Microsoft pretty much replaced the canon mech configs with their own homebrew content.
Some people in this group can be rather elitist because they have far more knowledge on the background and universe then our average MW4 player. This tends to create a rift between TT and MW crowds.
But rest assured, this group only wants a decent mech simulator. These guys don’t want a 100% conversion of the boardgame, they want to play the game like it is depicted in the novels.
The TT crowd wants to see things unfold like they did in the canon storyline, this will most certainly enhance the gameplay.
My personal opinions
I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but people shouldn’t overreact. The MW4 and Mechassault crowds don’t know what they have been missing out on all these years. Many in the TT crowd shouldn’t expect this game to be 100% true to the universe since minor changes will be made for the sake of gameplay.
