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ArmandTulsen, on 11 January 2013 - 01:07 AM, said:
Really, dude? You're going to throw that at me? You said it yourself, the game is 30 years old. Most of the player base that was in their 20s at the time are now probably grandparents. It's certainly dead or stagnant, because, you know, IT'S A THIRTY YEAR OLD GAME. But imbalanced, it isn't.
Instead of just going ahead and assuming that the theory can't be put into practice, if I can use that close analogy, why not be open to the idea of a direct digital, real-time port of the game? I mean, we can even take MWO as it is, and simply change the values to reflect the original game. Then we can see how that will play out.
Without even attempting it everybody, including game developers, just seem to assume that it won't work. Why is this? Are people afraid of a ten second recycle on the AC/20? What's that you say? It'll make the game SLOW? Well, tough, that's the damn game.
I suspect the game designers don't do so because many of those systems don't pass initial scrutiny in a live environment. A big part of game design is thought experiments and physical prototyping. Battletech was as much an RPG as it was a battle game, and without scenario driven circumstances and planned scenarios with built teams that had intended functions (all things a skirmish based live environment game don't have) the game fell apart. Grab eight random mechs from a box and eight from another, and one team would steamroll another. The moment you roll up against five xl engine assaults with your team of centurions you're going to get trashed. That was an unreasonable expectation in battletech, it's commonplace here because of how persistent arena games work. Battletech is a board game, this isn't, changes have to be made for function and decorum. Mechwarrior had objectively bad mechs and weapon systems (The spider, machine guns, urbanmechs, etc). What made them work was the fact that it wasn't a competitive battle game, it was a tactical RPG. Cost factored, scenarios were important, and due to it's existence as an RPG it had a breathing world surrounding the players actions. These are things that aren't really possible in this genre of game without a multi million dollar investment and hundreds of staff.
If you want to play the board game MW:T just announced it's founders package. I want to play mechwarrior, not battletech. That means making this game the best game it can be for the type of game it is, and that isn't done by doggedly pursuing a model that is doomed to failure because it was never designed for this format.
There is a tendency on these forums to assume that any changes from the board game are a sign that the developers are abandoning battletech, but I used to play and enjoy BT and MW both. I think they're both great, but MW games were never perfect replicants of the board game. If they were we'd be seeing dozens of mechs with AC20s in their legs and everyone would put all of their ammo into their cockpit. The games developers have adhered very strongly to the board game, sometimes to MWOs detriment (repair and rearm costs being an example of something truly damaging that they had to remove). You should laud them for making the closest MW game to the board game yet rather than be mad and shout at them all the time.
Edited by Shumabot, 11 January 2013 - 01:03 PM.
