Uh, yeah, okay, I should probably elaborate on this, now that it's not eight-friggin'-thirty in the morning.

I'm not particularly looking forward to Champions Online, for the following reasons:

1) A lot can happen between now and fall 2009. A lot.

2) Contrary to popular hype, CO is not being developed by "the City of Heroes people". With the exceptions of Jack Emmert and those who had already left Cryptic Studios before NCsoft bought out CoH, "the City of Heroes people" still work on City of Heroes.

3) Pretty much any time Jack said anything in public about his game design philosophy while he was on City of Heroes, my reaction was, Oh, so that's why that's lame.

4) Twitch combat in what purports to be an RPG. No thank you. Combat in an RPG is supposed to be about what your character can do, not whether you can out-twitch a 12-year-old jacked on Red Bull.

5) Console version of the client. See 4) above.

6) I don't need two superhero-themed MMOs. Hell, I don't need two MMOs of any description. Thus, either City of Heroes would have to have folded, or Champions Online would have to be so much better that I'd be motivated to switch after, by then, about five years of play. See 1) through 5) above for reasons I don't consider that likely. (Plus, I don't team up with strangers, so many if not most of the CoH players I know outside the game now would have to switch as well.)

7) I never played the Champions pen-and-paper game, so the brand's cachet, if it has any, will play no part in potentially swaying me, as described in 6) above.

So, yeah, not really on my radar, except that the collateral effect of a little competition ought to be good motivation for the City of Heroes team, and I think CoH is better off without Jack.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

It's also apparently going to have twitch combat, which, again, worked out so well in SWG's, uh, third complete combat engine overhaul.

>And my understanding is (correct me, someone, if I'm wrong) that it's
>made by the same company -- Cryptic -- but not all of the original
>people, quite a few of whom chose to stay with City of Heroes/Villains
>under NCSoft.

STATUS: True. Indeed, pretty much the entire City of Heroes team that hadn't already left Cryptic for other pastures entirely (Zeb Cook, for instance) jumped to NCsoft, so the CO team over at Cryptic now is basically Jack and whoever he's hired since. All the other prime movers of the CoH experience, as it were, are either at NC or not doing superhero MMO work at all now.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

I have heard it claimed that the CO dev team is mostly refugees from the Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising project.

Ard Sumhenner
that Janice chick
Usual Suspect and general menace

I'm a big fan of the Champions RPG/Hero System. (At least I was back around 4th Edition; I don't know what they may have done with it since then.) I was never able to come up with a character idea, no matter how oddball, that couldn't be built under the Hero System rules. The only complaint I had was that combat could be painfully slow, but that seems to be an endemic problem with dice-and-paper RPGs.

The thing is, a system with that kind of flexibility _demands_ a quick-thinking, flexible gamemaster to make it work. And there's not a computer program in existence that could function as even a mediocre GM, unless there were major advances in AI last week and I missed the announcement.

So I suspect that while they may call it Champions, it won't really _be_ Champions, at least not in any form I'd acknowledge.

(Sorta like the "Clicky-Tech" Mechwarrior game--I don't care what the box says, it's _not_ Battletech.)

No, but - assuming you're referring to the series of you're-in-the-cockpit single-'Mech sims - it's (IMO) a highly entertaining series of games set in the BattleTech universe. For something that actually plays like tabletop BattleTech, what you want is MechCommander.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

-BZ

(And where the HELL is Mechwarrior 5, dammit? I was promised Mechwarrior 5....)

Personally my SalCreds are on the General Rossum!

Heh. Jen appreciates your vote of confidence, but even in the timeline where she stayed in the Rogue Isles, she's only Threat Level 29.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Ah, Dork Age. See, I was thinking "paper game vs. computer game with same brand name." False parallel.

>(And where the HELL is Mechwarrior 5, dammit? I was promised
>Mechwarrior 5....)

I hate to break this to you, assuming you weren't just being snarky, but MW5 was canceled, um, years ago.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

*sad smile* Yeah, mostly just snarky. Though, hell, hope springs eternal.

Man, FASA dies more times than your average X-Man.

	Chad Collier Smirking Kilrathi The Captain of the Gravy Train

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

It's in the passenger seat of your flying car.

As BZArcher said, I'm talking about the WizKids miniatures game "Mechwarrior: Dark Ages." Although it looks like "Dark Ages" is now just part of "Age of Destruction": http://www.wizkidsgames.com/mechwarrior/mw_home.asp

It's played as a miniatures game on terrain, with miniatures on a larger scale than the old lead figures--but with even more truncated weapons ranges relative to the scale of the figures.

You buy pre-assembled, pre-painted plastic 'Mechs, with pre-generated stats on pre-printed discs permanently glued into the base. If you want a 'Mech or pilot with different stats, you have to buy another miniature and hope it's got what you want.

The rules have been "simplified," so the rules booklet is _only_ 40 pages long--plus a separate 8-page foldout for "special equipment." Also, you get to memorize some cutesy icons for various damage and modifiers.

Oh--and the whole technology level's been slagged back down again to even worse than it was back in 3025. So a really really HUGE battle, for control of a planet, might have two 'Mechs on each side, with some vehicle and infantry support.

At least they still support "Classic Battletech"--the original game system--to some extent. But they actually _removed_ the design rules from the latest version, because after all custom 'Mech designs can't be used in tournaments so why would you need to build them? Unless, of course, designing new hardware was about 2/3 of the fun of playing the bloomin' thing in the first place...:(

Fixed that for you.

Don't be a cock, dude. BattleTech 3025 was my favorite wargame ever.

Besides, it's not the factories that are going to customize any decent MechWarrior's gear; it's his regimental tech crew, probably in exchange for liquor. This is how it has worked for as long as there has been military technology.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Sorry. Rather fond of it myself, actually. Got the Tech Manual (with favorite variants ticked) and everything.

>Besides, it's not the factories that are going to customize any decent
>MechWarrior's gear; it's his regimental tech crew, probably in
>exchange for liquor. This is how it has worked for as long as there
>has been military technology.

True, but I'm not talking about tinkering or House variants of existing machines. Haven't you ever run into a player whose MechWarrior seemed to have his very own Skunk Works in the back 40 churning out custom prototypes, each more outlandish than the last, for him to ride into battle each week?

... I am now disturbed by how much that sounds like a Super Robot show, in a setting that's supposed to be about "real" robots (as real as 20-meter-tall humanoid fighting machines get, anyway).

Only one, and that was because he did; that particular character owned the merc outfit we all worked for and had built it up into one of the most successful regiments-for-hire in the Inner Sphere pretty much with his bare hands over a couple summers' worth of play. He could probably have bought the Capellan Confederation, much less custom BattleMechs.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Eh, in the post-Clan Invasion era, the mercenary regiment I was XO of made more than our contract's pay selling OmniMech carcasses to the Draconis Combine. We figured they had enough parts to field an entire regiment of clan mechs and we had enough money to commission short production runs (mostly of vehicles, not Mechs but with some exceptions) from the Free Worlds League.

And then our dropship got shot down and we were broke with nothing but our personal Mechs to our name. That's the breaks in BattleTech.

Hey, it was fun. Granted that I never expected to really use any of those mechs in a real campaign, just in 1 off battles against my brother's custom designs. It was still fun, especially trying to make some of my wilder ideas/concepts work. 8)

And post Clan invasion the Houses started to design and feild all kinds of new mechs, so your comment about slipping backwards isn't entirely accurate. (can't say it's entirely inaccurate either, though.)

-------------
Lead me not to temptation, for I can find it myself.

Well, the general idea of the entire BT universe was that we'd managed to fight ourselves on a direct path to the stone age after a period peaceful advancement, though the idea that no one *really* understood how any of their stuff worked was kind of thin on the ground, IMO. And pretty much everything written from the 3025 period onward was about turning that around, either through all the caches of Lostech to be found or, yeah, events like the Clan Invasion with all of it's Omnimech tech to reverse engineer. By the time I stopped looking to hard at the game, around the 3060 handbook, everyone was well on their way to regaining Star League levels of expertise. Which to me, regardless on how you feel about any of the actual events, is more realistic than just having everyone stagnate in feudal nonsense just because the original concept demands it.

Boy did the actual game turn to shite, though. :D

	Chad Collier Smirking Kilrathi The Captain of the Gravy Train

Oddly enough, the higher the tech level went, the lower the storyline seemed to. Though there certainly were good points (Victor Milan's stories come to mind), but once it went Dark Age? PFFFT.

I think the current classic BT people are badly hobbled by the Wizkids stuff- if someone could push the shiny red history eraser button for everything post 3060's or so and get rid of the WoBbies, the game would be the better for it.

Not just that, even without external tech infusions the 3020s were when things were turning around in both understanding what they had and the availability of production capacity.

Um, okay, and thanks for the snark--I don't get enough of that in the rest of my life. :p

I actually had a whole explanation of our Battletech campaign, and why we played it the way we did, written and ready to post. But I decided to remove it.

Because that would be defending myself, and I don't need to defend myself to anyone. :)

Part of the fun we had was taking designs apart, tweaking them, then putting them out on the battlefield. Or designing from scratch -- We thought it was a challenge.

Total Warfare is a one-stop place for all the rules you'd need in a tournament, Tech Manual has all the construction rules for every sort of combat and noncombat you can think of. There are four more volumes planned, one covering campaign rules, another the RPG, and I can't recall what he last two are.....B-/

What alot of CBT players hate is they now know where the TL is going. They see Dark Age/Age of destruction (Point F), but in the current timeline, they are just getting into the WOB Jihad (Point A). They have yet to see Points B, C, D, and E.

It's bit of a downer when you see the 3130s and realize that the past 50+ years of game time has gone by the boards. Back to where a lance of light 'Mechs were the most powerful thing on the planet. No massive 'Mech battles, no RCTs burning in, just like, "We need to change the game universe to suit our needs for clickly tech." I know that Wizkids owns the game, and I know they can do anything they damn well want to, but they were not going to support CBT -- Fanpro, and later Catlysis Games Labs purchaes the CBT licence. It would have been SO much better if the WK people had spun off MW into it's own parellel universe.

Both FP and CGL had made strides in getting CBT back on the gaming scene. The new hardback books are a start. While some of us think the Jihad is a stupid idea, we now can at least be able to see how the Dark Age came about.

Craig

Because of course, people who enjoy designing mechs and testing those design are obviously engaged in BadWrongFun.

Polychrome

Bob Knight can be perfectly civil when he isn't on a basketball court. :D