>And even more astonished that they made one of the ugliest machines in
>Macross into something awesome-looking, but they've been doing that
>for Battletech's native hideous for a while now.

Leaving aside your scurrilous and unwarranted attack on the noble Glaug officer's battle pod, I have to... sort of agree and sort of not. The MWO designers have done a great job making the 'Mechs that were just plain preposterous-looking in the later BattleTech manuals - everything in Technical Readout 3050 and quite a lot from the Star League-era one, I'm looking at you - look less glaringly inconsistent with the look-and-feel of the setting. They're still, for the most part, hideous, but they no longer look incongruous. I mean, IMO there's just no way to make a Highlander, a Cataphract, or most Clan 'Mechs* not ugly, but they do look like they belong in the world.

Strangely, I think they've been less successful in adapting 'Mechs that already looked pretty good. Most of the Sun Fang Dougram designs, for instance, I don't think needed a lot of messing with - they were never in Robotech and I'd be surprised if they were subject to the Harmony Gold nonsense - but they've been brought into line with the general MWO design aesthetic... not entirely successfully, in a lot of instances. It's a question of proportions, for the most part. MWO's version of the BattleMaster, for example, is just too dang wide for its height, as is my beloved Griffin (which no longer looks like something a man could wear as a powered suit).

This is a common problem with the MWO versions of the Technical Readout 3025 'Mechs, in fact, even the non-licensed ones. MWO's Victor has exactly the same problem. They look like you're playing at a 4:3 resolution on a 16:9 monitor.

It's a good-looking game overall, and I can certainly understand the designers' goal of making the 'Mechs all look like they belong to the same tech base. I'm just not sold on how they did it in a bunch of cases.

That said, I enjoy that I could get an oscillating fan for the cockpit of my 'Mech if I wanted to drop a little bit of real-world currency on it. I can only imagine that that would be about as useful as the air conditioning in a '70s Lamborghini in actual practice, but it's a nice touch. :)

--G.
*By an odd coincidence, the Clan 'Mechs that aren't hideous are the ones that are obvious modernizations of 3025 designs...
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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