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MechWarrior is, along with Warhammer, a bizarre property that should not be doing as poorly as it always has. But it's had terrible marketing and leadership that forces it to push free to play/pay to win schemes over solid development and balance. It frustrates the hell out of me because I would happily pay 30 or 40 bucks for well done MechWarrior title with robust online functionality. But I'm just not sure how many other people the franchise appeals to. Battletech seemed to give it a bit of a revival, but instead of capitalizing on that and working with HBS to drive people to MWO, it seems like PGI have tried to do their own thing and well, we all know how that turned out.
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Oct 29, 2019 09:44
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No one's heard of BattleTech or MechWarrior. People in nerd culture have at least heard of Warhammer 40K and space marines through osmosis, but BattleTech has never been able to have that same kind of presence. Try to think of how many people under the age of thirty know what any BattleTech property is that aren't kids of a parent that plays the tabletop game or any of the tie-in video games. Star Man fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 16:03
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Kids these days don't know how good they got it
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Oct 29, 2019 16:09
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BattleTech is a game your dad plays.
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Oct 29, 2019 16:11
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Star Man posted:No one's heard of BattleTech or MechWarrior. People in nerd culture have at least heard of Warhammer 40K and space marines through osmosis, but BattleTech has never been able to have that same kind of presence. I doubt there are many people out there playing Cyberpunk Red, either. It's not the built-in fanbases that matter, because in the hands of a good developer, the setting is its own draw.
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Oct 29, 2019 17:36
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Star Man posted:No one's heard of BattleTech or MechWarrior. People in nerd culture have at least heard of Warhammer 40K and space marines through osmosis, but BattleTech has never been able to have that same kind of presence.
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Oct 29, 2019 18:09
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Like this is really a franchise that desperately needs I dunno a reboot or whatever to clear it of the legacy overhang
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Oct 29, 2019 18:10
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Lawman 0 posted:Like this is really a franchise that desperately needs I dunno a reboot or whatever to clear it of the legacy overhang All of the post-Clan invasion lore sounds lame anyway, just restart it in a way where you reaaaaallly lean into the Game of Thrones stuff. Feudalism is chic again, baby!
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Oct 29, 2019 18:42
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Lol I know you got backstabbing drama, wars, just add in a dash of sex and some stompy robots. I'm guessing no one wants to deal with the cgi costs to do a TV show with it.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:09
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Parallelwoody posted:Lol I know you got backstabbing drama, wars, just add in a dash of sex and some stompy robots. I'm guessing no one wants to deal with the cgi costs to do a TV show with it. I mean it would be a better bet than the last couple of seasons of game of thrones. 
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Oct 29, 2019 19:16
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A intense gritty reboot, somebody let PTN know we need novel about a mechwarrior who bangs his sister
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Oct 29, 2019 19:20
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Parallelwoody posted:Lol I know you got backstabbing drama, wars, just add in a dash of sex and some stompy robots. I'm guessing no one wants to deal with the cgi costs to do a TV show with it. That's what's so frustrating. Like the stories write themselves, it shouldn't be hard to create a feudal space opera set in a rust-tech space dark age. It's a very similar tech setting to Star Wars. How are people not taking advantage of this?
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Oct 29, 2019 19:57
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PGI knows they have a property with a dedicated fanbase, and at the same time are the worst gameplay and balance people I've ever seen. They are using it purely as a golden goose. At the same time they have a terrible company with no real developers in house and contract out for all the actual gameplay stuff and then even when they start to get talented devs in house they quit because the management are crazy coke heads with no actual respect for the game. The only way we will ever get another good battletech game is when the property completely dies again post MW5, which is shaping up to be a flop, and PGI finally goes bankrupt and has to sell everything off.
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Oct 29, 2019 20:07
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I feel like the gameplay and balance is decent now, isn't it?
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Oct 29, 2019 21:32
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Lil Peeler posted:That's what's so frustrating. Like the stories write themselves, it shouldn't be hard to create a feudal space opera set in a rust-tech space dark age. It's a very similar tech setting to Star Wars. How are people not taking advantage of this? Counter point: Fuedal space opera/parody & Comedy, the main cast of which is represented by helpful, behind the scenes guiding hand Comstar - And everyone else is just silly and dumb and incompetent (through design). Don't do the Game Of Thrones treatment to battletech. Do the Orville treatment. Or maybe babylon 5. Lots of politics, little disagreement, a lot of 'you want to do what?'
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Oct 29, 2019 22:39
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Willfrey posted:I get why they added ghost heat. Especially after quad PPC builds started showing up. Probably may have been a better way to manage OP loadouts but I aint a dev. This right here encapsulates how much PGI sucks at designing their own game. I was in the second round of closed beta and quit somewhere around the time ghost heat was added. I actually quit when they added 3rd person, but that wasn't long after ghost heat was added, and by then, I was just entirely done with their poo poo. There was a time, before they added ghost heat, where things were actually balanced. On one hand, you had PPC/Gauss snipers, and on the other you had SRM/ML brawlers. It was basically a fair fight: a GR/PPC sniper could kill things at range, but the moment a SRM/ML brawler got in range, it would melt the sniper. It came to be understood that the reason SRM/ML brawlers were so effective is that SRMs were bugged. Their splash damage would do full damage to each section their splash radius overlapped, essentially multiplying their damage by the number of panels they hit. PGI fixed the splash bug, and then suddenly, PPC/GR snipers were completely dominant again. PGI completely missed the point. The point, and this point is key to the weapon balance in MW and Battletech, is that if you boost short range weapons high enough, they will balance out high damage, long range alphas. Sure, PGI was right to fix the splash bug. However, what they should have done based on the data is increase the power of short range weaponry. They should have also boosted the power of mid-range weaponry (AC10s, LLs), but to a lesser degree. Instead of making this obvious change they introduced Ghost Heat, which was completely stupid for several reasons. First of all, it was completely non-intuitive and random. Different weapons had different rates and thresholds of ghost heat. Rapid fire ACs, which were never a problem, would now melt your mech. The number of weapons required to trigger ghost heat, and the amount of ghost heat was never represented anywhere. Second, it didn't solve the problem. The idea behind ghost heat is to make head spike if you fire alpha of like weapons. However, this completely doesn't affect the problem mechs (PPC boat jump snipers), as they can just can just cool down behind a hill. Additionally, ghost heat has no affect on GR snipers because they don't generate any heat to begin with. All of this was pointed out numerous times and it was ignored. There was a large pool of expertise from the MW4-mercs planetary leagues. Every single issue, from ghost heat, third person, stock trial mechs, and sniper/brawler balance, was noticed and numerous solutions were proposed. They/we were constantly on the forums trying to steer them the right way, and they were ignored at every turn.
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Oct 30, 2019 00:07
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TheParadigm posted:Don't do the Game Of Thrones treatment to battletech. Do the Orville treatment. Or maybe babylon 5. Lots of politics, little disagreement, a lot of 'you want to do what?' Game of Thrones with Babylon 5 undertones, shifting to full Babylon 5 when the clans come into play, and the internecine squabbling becomes less important than the existential risk.
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Oct 30, 2019 00:18
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Organ Fiend posted:This right here encapsulates how much PGI sucks at designing their own game. lol this sounds real bad. But balancing a F2P multiplayer game is really hard, and some of the most successful games are notoriously poo poo at it. All I really need from MW5 is BattleTech but in real time with a first-person view, so...maybe?
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Oct 30, 2019 00:27
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TheParadigm posted:Counter point: Nah you're going to have to take in the big bucks with a prestige drama to justify the cost of the cgi alone and give it the full merch treatment. House Steiner beer steins, Battletech:the TV show: the board game, Candace Liao Halloween costumes, comstar cellphone cases, etc.
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Oct 30, 2019 01:47
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Norton the First posted:lol this sounds real bad. But balancing a F2P multiplayer game is really hard, and some of the most successful games are notoriously poo poo at it. All I really need from MW5 is BattleTech but in real time with a first-person view, so...maybe? But that's just the thing ... it WAS balanced when SRMs were (unintentionally) buffed. It is hard to balance multiplayer games (especially games like Mechwarrior that have customization), but it is possible. Hell, MW4 was balanced better than MWO (at least when I left MWO, have no idea what the state of the game is now). In the end, there were solid long, medium and short range weaponry options and a place for a variety of different mech types/roles. At long range, you had the almighty ERLL, but you also had LRMs, LGRs, GRs, RAC2s, and ERPPCs which outranged the ERLL and were viable in their own ways. At mid range, you had the LL, HGR, RAC5, PPC and CapPPC. At short range you had the LBX/UAC 10/20s, HMLs, MXPLs and SRMs. All viable weapons. There were even edge cases where things like MRMs, ERLPLs and UAC2s/5s were useful. And when I say useful, I mean that these weapons were used in (winning) configs in competitive league (NBT4-mercs) play and in open multiplayer. The only weapons that saw no use were the MLs and SLs, mainly because they were nerfed to hell in response to MW3. Balance in MW4 was an iterative process. At the beginning, ERLLs were the undeniable best weapons in the game. Though various updates, the ERLLs were nerfed (but not to obvlivion), while other weapons like the PPC and LL were buffed. The ERLL nerfs also balanced the long range game between precise, more frequent alphas (ERLLs) vs longer range, bigger, but less accurate alphas (GRs/ERPPCs). New weapons were added that added gameplay options. For example, the LXPL had less of an alpha potential than the ERLL and shorter range, but it had an absurd rate of fire and cockpit rock. The LXPL was a tool for controlling snipers and for DPS bursts, but was limited by its own heat generation. RACs were added, and for the first time you had a real, full on DPS hose. Given the strength of the big alpha game, the DPS hoses were balanced. Addition of the HGR and HML made the the mid and short range game that much stronger. Later on, the players added their own weapons and mechs (Mektek mechpacks) like the CapPPC and Marauder, which further filled in the gaps. The key thing in this process is that the developers listened to the players. The Microsoft developers listened to the player complaints about ERLL-dominated gameplay and solved this by tweaking the ERLL and adding new weapons. The Mektek developers similarly listened to player comments and added weapons/mechs accordingly (although the Mektek lead was a bit of an rear end in a top hat). Through several iterations, MW4 became, IMO, the best balanced MW multiplayer game yet. This is what kills me about MWO. The core gameplay is so much more technically advanced than MW4. If the developers actually listened to their community and iteratively tweaked weapon stats or added new weapon types (as opposed to ignoring the community completely and adding bizzare new mechanics that solve nothing or make the game worse) , MWO could have been amazing. Hell its not just weapon balance. MWO originally was intended to be some kind of planetary league where players fought over territory. The thing is, the way to do this WAS ALREADY SOLVED by the MW4 planetary leagues! NBT4-mercs (and at least two other leagues I can think of, that my unit participated in) had functional planetary systems, where players fought for planets. There was an economy, production and movement of units, you name it. We knew how to do it! They didn't listen! Everything about MWO is just so damned stupid. Such a stupid loving waste.
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Oct 30, 2019 16:40
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Organ Fiend posted:Everything about MWO is just so damned stupid. Such a stupid loving waste. That's why I'm not going to preorder and wait to see how good/bad it is in launch. Zero confidence in PGI to deliver a good product on launch - or fix it post launch. Or make the right decisions on the way. Or listen to community needs at any point. Having played MWo for some time, my impression of them as a developer is basically: THey have all the recipe parts and ingredients to make a huge hit and financial success, and management's ego is the thing that trips them up from being ..... better? I'm sure there's other polite words to put here, but I think 'less of a disappointment?' captures my feelings on it. It could be so, so much better and yet... here we are. TheParadigm fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Oct 30, 2019 |
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Oct 30, 2019 20:51
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The lack of hype and media is weird. Every other in-development game on the planet is bombarding me with in game footage, feature lists, previews, and hype trailers. But I'd be excused to not even know MW5 is on the way. I'm taking it as there's nothing worth showing.
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Oct 30, 2019 20:55
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Organ Fiend posted:All of this was pointed out numerous times and it was ignored. At the core if it, this is exactly it. There has never been a single example of them listening to the players and then incorporating that idea. There are plenty of examples of developers who use a PTS in order to try out the ideas and it would have been a fantastic way for them to play with what the players were suggesting. Instead, the live server was the testbed and no one had any input. It was as if one of them had an idea, it got pushed through development, and then when it got to live and was clearly poo poo, they had to double down because of their sunk cost. I am sure of it.
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Oct 30, 2019 21:40
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I want to say that really early on (after open beta at least) MWO had a private test server, and there were a few of the really active goons invited to it, among others. They were told outright to not say a word about balance and systems, and only test functionality / map errors / trivial poo poo. I want to say we talked about it on the offsite forum, but I can't remember 100%. The only feedback people got into the game was when goons humped Paul to death and he pulled out knockdowns the next patch.
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Oct 30, 2019 21:46
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There was a period right when they added quirks where certain mechs got crazy fun to play and brawling ruled. Like you could march an Atlas through a whole barrage of fire and still wreck face.
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Oct 30, 2019 21:47
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MW5 puts me in a really weird place because basically anything that has 4 player co-op is like gold for my friend group. We'll play pretty much anything on game nights - hell, we even played all the way through Colonial Marines. But god drat if I don't have this feeling that PGI is gonna completely poo poo the bed on making it worthwhile. I love/d MWO, it was basically the only game I played for a while, but it's just... folks, it ain't good. Like fundamentally it's just not a good game, even if it is/was fun as hell.
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Oct 30, 2019 22:00
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Beet Wagon posted:MW5 puts me in a really weird place because basically anything that has 4 player co-op is like gold for my friend group. We'll play pretty much anything on game nights - hell, we even played all the way through Colonial Marines. But god drat if I don't have this feeling that PGI is gonna completely poo poo the bed on making it worthwhile. I love/d MWO, it was basically the only game I played for a while, but it's just... folks, it ain't good. Like fundamentally it's just not a good game, even if it is/was fun as hell. Aight so you guys be the guinea pigs and report back how poo poo/not poo poo MW5 is. Did anyone actually keep their preorders?
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Oct 30, 2019 22:36
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On the flipside to what I said a few posts ago; its my hope that PGI will be On some level, there's cooperation between the two studios due to licensing their mech models, and I'm hoping its more of the 'Weismann's back! lets ask him for advice!' than 'sure you can use models'. Basically, wishing that greed at HBS-tech's success open the doorway to PGI management's minds to
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Oct 30, 2019 22:43
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Pattonesque posted:There was a period right when they added quirks where certain mechs got crazy fun to play and brawling ruled. Like you could march an Atlas through a whole barrage of fire and still wreck face. The atlas ddc ac20+3SRM6+ecm And then they released a loyalty atlas S with ac20+4SRM6 with the cbill bonus. Played that to death, earned so much xp and cbills. Then they decoupled agility from engines and made all assaults suck at torso twist, and they got feature creeped
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Oct 30, 2019 22:49
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I miss that Atlas
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Oct 30, 2019 22:54
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Willfrey posted:The atlas ddc ac20+3SRM6+ecm That Atlas was a beautiful thing Other amazing brawlmechs: Spirit Bear pre-nerf could rush down fools at 95kph and deliver an LBX20 and 4SRM6 to the face Mad Cat II-2 could do TWO LBX20s and 4SRM6s The Griffin-3M did quirked 4SRM4s so well with a full dead side. You could do a tanky 90kphish or a loving crazy XL build with max JJs and flit around at like 114 The Griffin-2N could do 4SRM6 with ECM and huge shield arms The classic Menturion was always clutch That one Shadow Hawk with an AC/10 and 4 SRM4 was a baby Atlas that was a scouting murder god This was a bad game but there were some good times man
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Oct 30, 2019 23:08
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Pattonesque posted:This was a bad game but there were some good times man Listening to Synchtube with everybody, bsing with all you assholes and playing mechs are some of the most enjoyable multiplayer times I have had on any game
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Oct 30, 2019 23:19
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:I want to say that really early on (after open beta at least) MWO had a private test server, and there were a few of the really active goons invited to it, among others. They were told outright to not say a word about balance and systems, and only test functionality / map errors / trivial poo poo. I want to say we talked about it on the offsite forum, but I can't remember 100%. There was a private test server, the "secret squirrel program" (players who participated got an in-game trophy they could put into their mech). Goons were specifically not invited. We were, however, solicited for feed back before the secret squirrel program really took off (I think, it's been a loooooooooong time ago), via Garth the CM. I don't know the exact timing of when the Secret Squirrel program started, and if it was after of before we were asked for feedback. From what I understand the Secret Squirrels weren't listened to at all. MWO demonstrated the power of Goons to me. It was an amazing and terrible thing to behold.  If it matters, straight from the horses mouth himself, knockdowns were not taken out because goons hugged Paul to death (as loving sweet as that was), it was taken out because it looked janky as gently caress (because we ground that animation into his stupid loving head until he exploded from contact damage). He could have lied to my face, but to be fair, you did teleport all over the place when you got knocked down. If it could have been cleaned up, I think that would have done a lot to game balance, would have given dragons a role in MWO (there's another bug - dragons, which were 60t mechs, mistakenly had their in game weight, or at least their weight for the purpose of collision calculations, set at the max weight, 100t. This actually gave them a role early on in the game, and were an absolute trashfire of a robot otherwise).
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Oct 30, 2019 23:30
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Beet Wagon posted:MW5 puts me in a really weird place because basically anything that has 4 player co-op is like gold for my friend group. We'll play pretty much anything on game nights - hell, we even played all the way through Colonial Marines. But god drat if I don't have this feeling that PGI is gonna completely poo poo the bed on making it worthwhile. I love/d MWO, it was basically the only game I played for a while, but it's just... folks, it ain't good. Like fundamentally it's just not a good game, even if it is/was fun as hell. For a while in the 8v8 games when TTK was still relatively low you could still win with a rush strat of all close ranged mechs, even during times when pop sniping was unbalanced. Before they implemented 12v12 it was a fun game to me because we would play a lot of goon groups with voice coms. As soon as they introduced 12v12 the instant you poked out your head you would get near to cored or have an arm blown off and balance went completely out the window and I can't really recall any time after the introduction of 12v12 that the game was much fun, and right around this time the aimbots really started becoming common too. Everyone was shouting their heads off on the forums about TTK as soon as they announced 12v12 and iirc they still have never increased armor ratios or lowered damage in any meaningful way.
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Nov 2, 2019 03:07
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Ghost heat was bad enough but yeah, 12v12 hosed the game up.
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Nov 2, 2019 08:28
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Star Man posted:BattleTech is a game your dad plays. Battletech tabletop whips rear end and I intro it to new people all the time. It's a ton of fun when poo poo gets down to the wire and every single roll of the dice matters.
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Nov 2, 2019 09:08
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I still don't know if battletech tabletop is like, dnd in that it's "players vs dm" or more wh40k and pvp...
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Nov 2, 2019 11:18
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organburner posted:I still don't know if battletech tabletop is like, dnd in that it's "players vs dm" or more wh40k and pvp... It's pretty open ended what you can do with the Battletech ruleset. Mostly PvP scenarios, but I'm building out a narrative campaign for people to drop in and out of for over the next year (timed around when Clan Invasion drops) that has some PvE events and has a hell of a lot of fun with the specialty rules from Tac-Ops for stuff like meteor showers, minefields, volcanic explosions, subzero temps, and a bunch of other nonsense to keep things fresh.
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Nov 2, 2019 11:24
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organburner posted:I still don't know if battletech tabletop is like, dnd in that it's "players vs dm" or more wh40k and pvp... poptartninja has been running a frankly astonishing ttrpg game for like 8 years now
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Nov 2, 2019 11:32
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Parallelwoody posted:Lol I know you got backstabbing drama, wars, just add in a dash of sex and some stompy robots. BattleTech's got plenty enough of that. Willfrey posted:A intense gritty reboot, somebody let PTN know we need novel about a mechwarrior who bangs his sister I'll skip out on the incest, BattleTech has plenty enough of that, too.
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Nov 2, 2019 12:38
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