>>14596395
>>14596244
I've watched like a dozen hours of gameplay videos for this game. It actually looks pretty fun. Yes, tons of red flags went up when they only showed off the characters and that tranny thing, but if you remember HBS also made Shadowrun and they ended up putting out at least one campaign worth playing (Dragonfall) even if it wasn't a perfect game.
Conveniently, they've chosen another franchise where multiculti is technically allowed lore-wise. BattleTech is about events generally occuring past the year 3020, although rules do exist for tabletop players to play "historical" games that occur in prior years. Humanity of all races and cultures has spread out across the galaxy, with the most-civilized planets closest to Terra being called the "Inner Sphere." The worlds beyond that are called the Periphery, and while they do have nation states and centralized governments, they're less powerful than the great houses that control the Inner Sphere and tend to contain all sorts of humans who have traveled outward from all over the Inner Sphere. So it makes sense that it's a mixed bag. Even though we really know that mostly only white people and maybe some Asians would bother to go forth and colonize new worlds, as it was in history, but I've come to accept that would be going too far in a piece of media designed for mass sale.
If the trans designer is behind these choices, I guess that I am glad it is choosing settings which allow its fantasy to flourish instead of forcing its fantasy into already standing franchises.
Now enough with the political bullshit, I'd like to talk about the game and any problems I foresee for a second. I will say I actually like the way they represented some of the specific tabletop rules in an easy-to-understand way, they managed to do it while dumbing it down surpisingly little. Namely, evasion charges. In Classic BattleTech, you calculate your to-hit chances based on everything that the target you're shooting at has done and what you have done this turn. It requires a giant reference sheet full of bullshit like: have you moved, did your target move, did you or your target use jump jets, are you using an autocannon and did you also shoot that autocannon last turn, are your gyros damaged, etc. etc. I've been playing tabletop and P&P games for about 12 years and BattleTech's hit tables are probably the most onerous I've seen so far – note that I'm not a hardcore wargamer though, I know those can get much more insane. Anyway, evasion charges are added to your Mech every time it performs movement that would make it harder to hit. This eliminates basically half of the to-hit bullshit you need to think about, so that helps (damaged legs and shit are still things you need to think about).
On the other hand, there were a lot of "pilot abilities" which were added to the game to make it more… gamey, I guess. One of those is "sensor lock," which immediately removes two evasion charges, equivalent to a regular move for a middling-speed Mech. This ability, in turn, has made their multiplayer skirmish mode a shitshow, from what I understand and have seen of it. It seems like the multiplayer might have been mostly a waste of time the way they designed the game, but on the other hand it's a little bit silly to make a BattleTech game without multiplayer, since it was designed as a competitive skirmish game in the first place. They even said themselves that they're taking focus away from the multiplayer to focus on the campaign. From a game development perspective, I guess I appreciate this, but I also think you shouldn't waste time on a feature if you also admit that the feature is half-assed.