The new Mechwarrior isn't dead

[VF5SS]

I've heard a lot of good things about Border Break as far as team based robot combat goes.

clearly inferior japbots not superior "western" design

[Darksider]

clearly inferior japbots not superior "western" design

There are people who actually think that?

I mean the mecha genre is much more developed in Japan, (what "western" mech series are there besides BTech?) so naturally there's gonna be some crap in there, but it's not like BattleTech doesn't have the occasional shitty design.

[VF5SS]

I mean the mecha genre is much more developed in Japan, (what "western" mech series are there besides BTech?) so naturally there's gonna be some crap in there, but it's not like BattleTech doesn't have the occasional shitty design.

There's a lot of ignorance thrown around in international relations involving mechanical designs.

Even if you really want to ignore the fact that the very genesis of Battletech is based on Japanese designs (with people interpreting the two smoke grenade launchers on the Dougram's head as SRM2s and the rocket launcher some kind of LRM), there is no real set Japanese or Western style to design.

A lot of people assume that the popularity of things like Gundam means that all Japanese robots are bipedal humanoid designs that flip out like space ninjas (this does not happen in Gundam that much). Not saying there aren't robo ninjas in Japan, but most of those are meant to be cool or more toyetic. Just look at the Jesta from Gundam for some tacticool.

There are distinctive styles of design unique to certain prolific artists no doubt, but a lot of them are incredibly versatile. If you check out the designs by Yutaka Izubuchi for the Patlabor series, you can see how much variation comes with just one guy.

When you start looking into video games like Steel Battalion or Gungriffon, it becomes very clear that Japanese designs are more than capable of producing more than just the popular Gundam-esque machines.

Honestly I feel like Battletech fans may harbor a grudge against Japan, which has produced so many kewl mecha series for the sake of merchandise whereas the "west" has only produced a handful of iconic machines. Of course the funny thing is, those ED-209s and AT-ATs have also inspired many Japanese designers.

I would say Battletech has way more bad designs than good. Fans have rallied around these machines that employ blocky structures and restricted joints as if they mean something more than just primitivism and lack of design work. They say this is clunky and unworkable, therefore it must be realistic. The reality being that without a core of dedicated artists, Battletech just accepted whatever they could find to pad the ranks of each new source book.

Very little about the machines in Battletech point to any kind of unified design theory or vision. There are small sets of designs that are competent, but most of those came from one artist like say the early Clan designs that were in the console port of Mechwarrior 2. Far too often to do we get things like that one robot with a boomerang in its leg or the squiddamn Champion.

I'll let Stark get into the idea of how neither the PC games nor the table top game really even acknowledges any functional differences between say a humanoid robot or a chicken walker.

Of the thing I hate is when they put a robot with no waist joint in a game (LOOKING AT YOU BLACK HAWK) and suddenly it has a disadvantage because it can't torso twist like the rest.

this is my hobby so maybe i know too much :x

[Vendetta]

Hey remember the mech game with customisation that created a vibrant, mutually supportive teamplay environment with innovative and interesting tradeoffs?

No, you don't, because they've always been broken as fuck. Of course, that's what people liked about MW2; the power players had in single player through cheesing the amazingly broken rules combined with the broken direct-fire system. I'm pretty sure everyone was convinced they were brilliant in 1996.

To be fair, Chromehounds was alright for a while until people figured out how it was broken, and Sega made no attempt to balance patch it at all ever (90% of the game balance appears to have been arrived at by writing some numbers down and saying "yep, sounds about right", without ever actually testing anything).

It even had big clompy slow western style robots, despite being by the same people as Armoured Core, which is well into the flying ninja robots.

[Stark]

I was thinking of Chromehounds and the horror of the big towers with rockets on top, the armour placed to make cockpits immune, ect. Sure,MIT was only that bad because there was no moderation, but systems like that always have a best path that everyone follows, which means 'customisation' is fun for a week and is then irrelevant game wise, in a world with gamefaqs.

[Companion Cube]

I would say Battletech has way more bad designs than good. Fans have rallied around these machines that employ blocky structures and restricted joints as if they mean something more than just primitivism and lack of design work. They say this is clunky and unworkable, therefore it must be realistic. The reality being that without a core of dedicated artists, Battletech just accepted whatever they could find to pad the ranks of each new source book.

I was going to support this point with a picture from one of the sourcebooks, but after browsing the battletech wiki I couldn't decide on which of dozens of designs to post. Multi-metre cannon bores supported by pipecleaner arms, legs whose hips can't possibly articulate, rocket launchers drawing ammunition from somewhere, etc, etc.

[VF5SS]

this is all you need, really

[Stark]

Maybe it's a plane with really big landing gear.

When ragging out awful btech art, it's important to remember how limited they were on poses and angles for a long time. The original (terrible) lineart for the Ostsol and the Ost-otherone are almost unrecognisable as the robot because they're leaning back and turning in a bizarre way (that the hips/waist don't really support). Some of them appear to have near-retangular torsos, because they're drawn in such a stepping motion - that one stepping pose seen in dozens of robots - that you can't even really see anything beyond 'is square' and 'has some holes that might be guns'.



This is actually a relatively humanoid robot... and not a ball with legs. It's just leaning back real far and has its hands in the air like it don't care. It's ALMOST - almost mind you - like they traced a regult battlepod and added arms.

ALMOST.

[VF5SS]

To be fair, even this was never perfect. Some fans have pointed out Okawara's peculiar desire to draw most of the Combat Armors from Dougram with a weird pigeon-toed stance by default. Also lack many of the earliest robot designs it lacks clearly defined joints for the sake of simplicity (although every Combat Armor has a fully detailed inner frame lol). It certainly does lend itself more to functional articulation and the animators were pretty good about making it look right. Enterprising fans and modern toy companies have been able to cope.

Of course once production of 80's era model kits and toys really ramped up, designers refined their craft at such a brisk pace it's really amazing. We went from the Dougram to the VF-1 Valkyrie in about a year.

crazy stuff


ps

if you're looking for a robot show that is really great (and more btech than btech) try Dougram. You may have to search the X-Nebula for it but it's worth watching.

[PainRack]

I said this before. just sub in to hit rolls and justify this with armour deflection,add in targeting locks from the old virtua and you gain two new tools to justify range,extreme range and balance weapons payload

[VF5SS]

You're going to have to explain that second bit. Because I'm guessing the devs are pretty focused on the four major Mechwarrior games because of the important brand recognition.

[PainRack]

The cheesy bits about the games were due to cookie cutter builds and the impossibility of translating pen n paper games to a com game. mechassault lost points due to its arcade nature, not because it changed game design.

What i propose isn't that new anyway. golden targeting locks were part of the first generation of battletech virtual consoles and it carried over into eighties fluff. what actually removed it was mechwarrior 2.
I
targeting locks had no real functional use becausearmor was purely ablative. just squeeze and lasers would still come out. so, give it a purpose. make armour not just simple ablative n you give tue new stimulator something tactical to work on. it won't upset core fans as they are the old game mechanics n fluff.

An example of balance could be that lasers had significantly reduced chance to ablate armour at longer ranges compared to autocannons. or srms offer quick lock on times but poor ablation when locked on compared to lasers

[Stark]

Why are you repeating what people said months ago earlier in the thread?

[VF5SS]

Ok stop saying "ablating" when you just mean hit points. Everything is fucked up because of hit points being applied to three dimensional objects in ways fucking knockoff games fixed.

Or maybe they shouldn't have assumed that they made the perfect universe and game system the first time over 25 years ago.

Or just give the robots some sense of agility that even the artwork sometimes shows.

[Stark]

That'd come with indirect targeting anyway; the player wouldn't be concentrated on putting his dot on the enemy's dot so he could be doing a lot more things related to movement. Proper per-pixel armour is probably impossible, but at least they've changed the designs. I wonder if it still uses the 6-zone hit location thing?

[PainRack]

Ok stop saying "ablating" when you just mean hit points. Everything is fucked up because of hit points being applied to three dimensional objects in ways fucking knockoff games fixed.

Or maybe they shouldn't have assumed that they made the perfect universe and game system the first time over 25 years ago.

Or just give the robots some sense of agility that even the artwork sometimes shows.

so. you essentially reject my model to revamp the hit point system by adding a mechanicsm that follows fluff because.....



i do advocate the

[VF5SS]

did you actually read the thread

or the other one down in testingland

I really have no idea what you're talking about. And this is as someone who owns a chunk of table top stuff, has played the game numerous times, and even went so far as to devote some my time to making videos of the four (or five) major Mechwarrior games in order to illustrate their problems and sometimes juxtaposing them against other games of the genre from other companies to attempt to promote the idea there might be another way

and i still don't know what the fuck you're talking about

[Vendetta]

I think he is saying "lasers should do less damage at long range".

That's the only bit that I could extract meaning from.

[VF5SS]

I don't mean to cross post from Testing, but I want to compare the only real major schism in Mechwarrior games between the more "sim" like PC version and the more "arcade-y" version of Mechwarrior 2. Using my own videos because I'm fucking biased.



Console



PC

So other being able to fiddle with useless shit that makes screencaps easier, what is functionally different between these games? Yeah the console game has useless power ups and some weapons cycle faster but hey, that makes it more fun right? The console version is by far easier to pick and play (and run again decades after it was released) than the PC version. In fact some of the contextual commands like overriding the auto shutdown are easily mappable to a quick time event or normally unused key.

I swear people get so huffy about their precious "mech sims" when a game comes along and you can't turn the fucking radar off.

[PainRack]

Ok.... I not going to post from a handphone ever again.


Seriously. What I said was I want to change the new mechwarrior games, the details of which I posted before to Stark in another thread when news of MW5 first came out.

How would I do this? Simple. Anyone remember that old virtua game that graduated into Mechwarrior 1 and 2 for the PC? The old arcade game?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHSmuBxqlG4

Mechwarrior 2 kept the virtua world targeting locks for LRMs and streaks, but the older fluff was that targeting lock? It featured for ALL weapons.

Bring that mechanism back and and change the armor model away from just hitpoints by adding a penetration rating. Its already in the fluff as I detailed in my btech analysis thread and frankly, what I suggest is just another way to add back the to hit rolls, range changes from the pen and paper game to the computer game. Its not as if such a system is NEW anyway, since any decent game out there already has a pen rating for tank armour and range, such as Close Combat.


Just adding these two mechanisms would add a new tactical balance to the game, AWAY from the cheesiness of MW2 or 3. It would be better than Mechassault because mech customisation has always been one of the fun bits of Battletech. What was really broken about the earlier mech sims was the cookie cutter builds and "aiming". I can't change the later, but I can change the former by making different weapons build viable. And we do that by simply adding a version of the penetrative rating, in which weapons have different chances of causing the armour to ablate at different ranges, or in btech terms, reintroducing back to hit rolls and range rules.

Alter it slightly by adding a targeting lock mechanism which helps to make it more difficult to point and shoot. It becomes much harder to simply stand and aim at a mech leg if it takes a few seconds to lock on the leg. We can even make this a tactical decision by playing around with our new penetration rating. If the weapon is locked on, your chances to cause the armour to ablate is say 50%. Remove it and it become 10%.

[VF5SS]

Wow that virtual pod thing looked so less cool than Star Blade or Virtual On

and nothing top Star Blade (come in Geosword) <3

So what you're saying is, try to convince people who have probably never played the pod game and who only know the series through point and clickan mouse-aim games that they have to wait a few seconds before pulling the trigger so their instantaneous laser weapons can lock on and shoot some slowass robot. Yeah I don't think the 90% of people playing with a mouse and keyboard (AS GOD INTENDED) are going to buy that.

and armor penetration is just another number to overcome using those vaunted custom builds you're so fond of

customization ruined the game because it emphasized the most munchkiny behavior for over 25 years.

Armored Core is literally built around customization and barely has any balance and yet it's still better

Speaking of AC, which i love so much i fuck it, I know how to fix aiming. Just have auto tracking weapons like Armored Core that uses piloting skill like the FCS. That way most of the controls can be streamlined to emphasize positioning and movement rather than fiddling with shit like torso twists and mushy throttles.

Or just play Gungriffon I or II for the Sega Saturn

[Vendetta]

So your "solution" is "more dice rolls"?

That sounds unspeakably bad for an action/sim game. Flight Sim X doesn't roll dice to see if you landed or not, sim games are supposed to simulate the physical rules by which things work and let their performances come as emergent properties of the simulation. (So, for instance, the different turning performances and stability of planes in a flight sim are a result of the values which simulate the control surfaces, not whether it has 2D6 stability or 3D6 and it might still stall if the dice roll says so).

A more better solution to broken builds would actually be to, y'know, just restrict weapons and balance mechs so you can't have all lasers all the time, you can only have them where the slot says "lasers can go here". It's also trivial in a modern game to have things like bullet drop and loss of stopping power, which you can fiddle with to differentiate all your different AC/Whatevers and lasers and missiles with different performance over range without having arbitrary maximum ranges and to hit rolls and other bollocks which has no place in an action/sim game.

[Stark]

I believe MW4:M had limited slots like that to prevent laser boating, and the fans hated it.

A game like Armoured Core can have a few dozen variations on 'gun that shoots bullets fast', so there's no reason to use things like ac/2 (or whatever) when that was an abstraction introduced to simplify play in a board game. Even the fluff is full of variation (fast-firing small guns, slow firing big guns, reliable guns, jamming guns, etc).

The AC system of having a variable tracking area to both simplify aiming and reduce the cheese of pixel-perfect aiming isn't really rocket science. Its kinda sad when people can talk about 'how to fix Mechwarrior' when they clearly haven't played any OTHER mech games.

[VF5SS]

you can still laser boat in MW4

just not as blatantly

fatacatapult fatacatapult~

[CaptHawkeye]

Chrome Hounds was a prime example of munchkin shit getting so out of control, when confronted on it most people were like "I thought this was how you were supposed to play the game." And yet it was still more fun than MW.