182 replies to this topic

[Belial]

Okay, here are my 2 C-Bills: I liked Dark Age well enough (a few things sorely ticked me off, though) but the Jihad never has and never will make sense to me, nor will I ever accept the current version of events as canon. The poorly thought-out Jihad may have given Dark Age the rough start and reputation that it had since the writers had literally NOTHING to work with: no HPG, no Clans (yet), no Great Houses. The novels, I felt, did a good job of building characters and (eventually) bringing real BattleTech back to the fore. And yes, Clan Jade Falcon was a very different Clan by this point, but we saw that coming a while ago. The clix game itself was, in my opinion, a lot of fun, very accessible and allowed more freedom for unit movement and faster combat.

All that being said, I'm much more in favor of everything pre-3067. Shoddy storyline aside, I didn't like the sudden slew of new tech that came out of nowhere. X-pulse lasers are okay I guess, but it seemed like the makers realized they hadn't introduced many new weapons in twenty years, and tried to redeem themselves in one TRO. It didn't work.

[RecklessFable]

Didn't really like Jihad stuff but I liked the idea of Dark Age. The phone company goes out and every planet is isolated because of it. Like 40k if the Astronomicon goes dark.

I don't think the universe as a whole needed to be grittier, but I agree that it is a huuuuge suspension of disbelief that humanity could lose tech on a galactic scale and produce no new advancements.

[Chuggernaut]

People were actually rediscovering things in the Succession Wars. It's just that any time a breakthrough was made, ComStar killed the people responsible, destroyed their research, and made it look like an accident or a raid or pirates. So people were having to rediscover the same things over and over again.

If you get a chance to read the old ComStar book, it frames up the Succession Wars way differently.

[Gherrek]

Speaking of mechs over 100 tonnes, the Word of Blake made a 150 tonner with two legs and it looks like a massively scaled up Stone Rhino/Behemoth.



Three Gauss rifles and two LBX-10 Auto cannons although a max speed of 32 kph, and yes it is massively well armoured.


The whole Dark ages stuff to me didn't happen, its just...ruibbish!

[Pht]

Chuggernaut, on 29 May 2012 - 05:11 PM, said:

I think that leaving out the gory details is what desensitized people. Makes it all seem clean, manageable.

Um. That's an impossiblity. How can someone be desensitized to something they've never encountered?

Besides which, you can show the moral horror of a thing without having to be gory about it.

[Frostiken]

Infine, on 26 May 2012 - 07:24 AM, said:

1) Davions. The WoB, the ComStar, the Clans - they all happened later. Davions are the indicator that BT lore wasn't heading in any likeable direction from the start. Davions are the Knights In Shining armour. Always just, always right, always the winners. They can kick puppies and eat kittens and it still would be justified. Other fractions are the foil. They take turns holding either villian ball (Kurita, Liao, finally even Steiner) or ***** ball (Marik obviously).

This, a thousand times this.

[DocBach]

I never liked how Phelan Kell was so readily accepted by the Clans, becoming one of their leaders in two years.

Edited by DocBach, 03 June 2012 - 06:53 AM.

[Vollstrecker]

Battletech ended at the conclusion of the FedCom Civil War for me. I read these atrocities like the Jihad and Dark Ages like they're another franchise.

One thing that bugged the hell out of me personally, is the good rap that Hanse Davion gets in most of the main storyline books and arcs. Hanse Davion was not a champion, he was a colossal ***. He married an 18 year old girl at 45, then proceeded to declare war in her name against her own philosophy at said marriage. He hadn't even had a honeymoon or anything before he had essentially plundered the economies of both nations.

I'm surprised that the marriage (and treaty) wasn't measured in minutes.

[DocBach]

Hanse Davion was awesome. Your rant is actually making me consider flying the sword as my banner instead of the fist.

[Gendou]

Vtack, on 28 May 2012 - 09:01 PM, said:

Really? All this time and no one mentions the weird mystical force users of the battletech universe. Morgan Kell and Yorinaga Kurita are both depicted as having some type of odd mystical connection to their rides.

The whole "Phantom 'Mech Ability" was ridiculous, but at least it could be written off as exaggerations, unlike some of the other stuff. Reports regarding the mystical nature of the Kell/Kurita encounter were first-hand, unreliable narrator accounts rather than being third-person omniscient.

In other words, it might have bit of unexplained or secret LosTech rather than anything magical or mystical.
I would rather chalk it up to a bit of exaggerated legend than assume magic.

Also, sapient bird-aliens never happened.

Edited by Gendou, 03 June 2012 - 05:04 PM.

[errorabbit]

Vollstrecker, on 03 June 2012 - 04:45 PM, said:

Battletech ended at the conclusion of the FedCom Civil War for me. I read these atrocities like the Jihad and Dark Ages like they're another franchise.

One thing that bugged the hell out of me personally, is the good rap that Hanse Davion gets in most of the main storyline books and arcs. Hanse Davion was not a champion, he was a colossal ***. He married an 18 year old girl at 45, then proceeded to declare war in her name against her own philosophy at said marriage. He hadn't even had a honeymoon or anything before he had essentially plundered the economies of both nations.

I'm surprised that the marriage (and treaty) wasn't measured in minutes.

I thought exactly the same.
I loved those insults Sun-Tzu Liao throws at Victor Davion's face in later books, because they were all true.
You also forgot to mention that before the clans in the book, he's the major agressor, invading other successor states for no reason and without provocation.
His only claim for the war against Liao was that he thought Maximilian Liao is insane... Hello, assassination? That wouldn't cost thousands of soldiers's lives, including your own citizens. And it's not as if he was feeling assassination and that sort is too dishonorable. He's not above hiring people to pretend they love those he considers close friends so that he can spy on them either. And he's just as much a dictator as all the other House Leaders... well, I guess Marik at least claims to follow democracy, even though they don't.

I wouldn't mind all that, if he and the other Davions weren't sold to the reader as shining heroes and paragons of justice....

[The Paleo King]

The whole ROTS and Dark-Age saga... everything post WOB in other words. Come to think of it even the WOB was retarded (well aside from some of their mechs, even though many of these seem way too overpowered for their relatively basic weapons loadouts). They actually prayed to technology thinking that would make it work better? Wonder what happened when their **** broke down. Off to re-education camp for you, mr. Adept.

The concept behind ComStar was very interesting, though the ideology just sounds too loony to be credible as a real faction. (Same as WOB). And one day after being so brainwashed Anastasuis Focht and Sharilar Mori just DECIDED to reform their beliefs and become a more rational organization, and just HAPPENED to discover Blake's original writings and ACCEPT them after being brainwashed to believe his writings were something else entirely!

Plus how the heck did Christian Mansdottir get chosen as First Lord of the new Star League? He was practically a nobody up until then. And as far as scandinavian patronymic names go, Mansdottir is female, his name should have been Mansson or Manson (but it wasn't, for obvious reasons). Way to go with naming your characters, FASA.

[CJDodo]

Vollstrecker, on 03 June 2012 - 04:45 PM, said:

Battletech ended at the conclusion of the FedCom Civil War for me. I read these atrocities like the Jihad and Dark Ages like they're another franchise.

One thing that bugged the hell out of me personally, is the good rap that Hanse Davion gets in most of the main storyline books and arcs. Hanse Davion was not a champion, he was a colossal ***. He married an 18 year old girl at 45, then proceeded to declare war in her name against her own philosophy at said marriage. He hadn't even had a honeymoon or anything before he had essentially plundered the economies of both nations.

I'm surprised that the marriage (and treaty) wasn't measured in minutes.

DocBach, on 03 June 2012 - 04:50 PM, said:

Hanse Davion was awesome. Your rant is actually making me consider flying the sword as my banner instead of the fist.

Thing is Hanse had his flaws, but still, Nelson and Wellington had their own, Nelson not being the best husband, if I remember right he's the one who eloped on his wife with a prostitute or something similar etc, but still we loved them in England. Why? It wasn't cause they were saintly and goody good like people seem to like their heroes in modern times, but cause they killed lots of French people. So if Davions are modelled after the UK, then you wouldn't even need propaganda to make the people like him, all the dead Capellans would suffice.

[KageRyuu]

Minimum ranges on direct fire weapons.

Also, whoever that noob is who said melee on the first page should die. If you're going to give a mech a humanoid frame with arms let alone hands, expect someone at some point in time to throw a fist (barrel) into someone else cockpit, especially when they've destroyed all his other weapons.

[Alizabeth Aijou]

Quote

One bit of lore that bothers me is that people barely live longer than they do now. In a 1,000 years you are telling me they haven't figured out any kind of way to boost a life span? Come on! The average lifespan should be at least 120, maybe 130. Instead, everyone is still ancient by the time they are 70-80. That never really made any sense to me.

92 average across the entire inner sphere.
150+ (iirc) on Terra.
Remember, people dying due to all the wars and such doesn't raise the average.

Quote

The Dark Ages *grimmace*

Seyla.

Quote

200+ years, and no one says, "Hey, let's build some science academies"?

Eh... no real motivation for them, mostly.
Of course, it doesn't help if anyone who actually uses half his brain gets killed by ComStar.
NAIS? The FedSun one barely existed until 3015 or so. The DC one being even more obscure, with barely any reference or mention. ROM managed to kill over 300 of the greatest scientific minds in the Inner Sphere in only 5 years time (2838-2843). So not many people remained who could actually teach anything about a lot of subjects.

As for what rubs me the wrong way?
The whole anti-DC vibe from the early years.
Helm Memory Core recovered?
DC getting its act together and manages to vastly improve the economy and such?
FedRats who keep sitting on their lazy arses get to be the heroes while their economy is still rubbish and the DC gets pounded by the clans even though the DC should have a better military than the FedRats by then.
Really, not cool.

At least the DC gets a huge boost in the decade after the invasion.
Remember how we got our act together and vastly improved the economy?
Well, we're making it happen now by making over a dozen new BattleMechs/OmniMechs in only a few years time.

[Chuggernaut]

Gendou, on 03 June 2012 - 05:03 PM, said:

The whole "Phantom 'Mech Ability" was ridiculous, but at least it could be written off as exaggerations, unlike some of the other stuff. Reports regarding the mystical nature of the Kell/Kurita encounter were first-hand, unreliable narrator accounts rather than being third-person omniscient.

In other words, it might have bit of unexplained or secret LosTech rather than anything magical or mystical.
I would rather chalk it up to a bit of exaggerated legend than assume magic.

Also, sapient bird-aliens never happened.

Stackpole writes his novels where Phantom Mech appears as third-person omniscient, not first-person. He gives us characters' internal monologues (you know, in case their motivations and one-dimensional personalities were too hard to understand).

[Aym]

Franklen Avignon, on 27 May 2012 - 07:03 PM, said:

A few things about this thread.

A few things about this thread... It's SUPPOSED to be stuff you don't like, because it rubs you the wrong way. It's a feeling thread, I FEEL the game universe would have been better without x-y-z. It doesn't matter that you are not rubbed the wrong way by these things.

[Reyge]

Grayson Death Carlyle dying of something like cancer. I mean, come on! IF they're gonna kill him off, they should've at least had him die in the cockpit of a mech! You'd think that if they had the ability to grow new eyeballs, join real muscle to synthetic muscle, and travel faster than the speed of light, they'd have found a cure for cancer.

[Auggie Barrenechea]

Is anyone with me on the concept of a reboot? New company, new beginning? If Star Trek can do it, why not Battletech? Redesigned faves (Warhammer, Marauder) retool the clans and just make it a little more adult tone to it. I love Battletech, but the Dark Ages make me want to pull my own teeth and the way the Clans were handled was terrible. I think they could start over like every other part of my childhood and make more money off it. I just once want to see a freaking decent Mech strut across a movie screen. Is that too much to ask? And to be fair, I'm running on no sleep at this point.

[DireWolf307]

Everything after the Twilight of the Clans never sat with me well, particularly the Dark Ages. I agree with the comparisons everyone makes of the Dark Ages to the Star Wars Prequels.

There were a lot of misguided things within "Classic Battletech" (LAMs come to mind), but the Dark Ages is the one that really sticks in my craw.

Auggie Barrenechea, on 26 June 2013 - 04:06 AM, said:

Is anyone with me on the concept of a reboot? New company, new beginning? If Star Trek can do it, why not Battletech? Redesigned faves (Warhammer, Marauder) retool the clans and just make it a little more adult tone to it. I love Battletech, but the Dark Ages make me want to pull my own teeth and the way the Clans were handled was terrible. I think they could start over like every other part of my childhood and make more money off it. I just once want to see a freaking decent Mech strut across a movie screen. Is that too much to ask? And to be fair, I'm running on no sleep at this point.

Battletech isn't a universe that needs a reboot, like with Star Trek where it had outgrown itself. If anything, MWO is somewhat of a reboot in then only ways Battletech needed a reboot, primarily the artwork. But the universe created as a whole is vast enough that it doesn't really need a reboot.