I acknowledge I am a nobody.
I'm not a huge contributor to this community or a game developer that
can make a better game. I'm just a lifelong Battletech fan. I won't
bore you with anecdotes about how much I love this franchise or how
significant it has been to my life. Just know that I do love it, and
it has been a big part of my life.
I don't care about the EGS exclusivity
one iota. All I ever wanted was to play a Mechwarrior game, something
I've been starved of since 2002. I never put much stock into the
"politics" surrounding the game's release. I'm also not
really into the tabletop world, so on Catalyst and everything there I
have no opinion of value. I think many in the Battletech fandom are in the
same boat.
I think my prevailing emotion nowadays
when it comes to Mechwarrior 5 and the franchise at large, is
sadness. I think the thing that makes me most sad is the calamitous
series of events over the last 30 years that lead to companies like
Harmony Gold and PGI being the stewards of this franchise, something
we all love so much. I know that these two companies shouldn't
necessarily be lumped together, but I think they're two different
flavors of shame.
To me, Harmony Gold are just a bunch of
faceless bureaucrats that don't give two shits about Battletech.
Obviously I don't know anyone over there personally, this is just my
opinion, I can't read minds. Battletech is just an IP they've
invested in. It just has to be good enough to make money. They're
just using the entertainment business as a moneymaking venture, they
absolutely don't care about the actual art of entertainment and they
certainly don't care about the fans of their IPs. I sincerely believe
there aren't actual fans of Robotech, Macross, Battletech etc.
working down there at Harmony Gold. This is all fair game, of course.
You're totally allowed to be entrepreneurial, invest money, buy IP
licenses and make money all without being actual fans. Fine. My point
is... it just makes me sad.
I don't hate PGI,
or anyone that works there. I really do believe that the
rank-and-file developers down there are fans of Battletech. But some
decision-maker(s) over there really disappoints me. I thought MWO was
mechanically sound, and combat was fun, and it was gorgeous. But I
thought the game was very shallow, it was essentially (not literally)
TDM over and over and over. The maps weren't different enough, the
game modes weren't different enough. For the most part, once you've
played one match of MWO, you've played them all. I called it "an
enormous puddle," tons of breadth, very little depth. I thought
that the level of grind was absolutely shameful. Everything was so
expensive and the rate at which you earned C-Bills was far too slow.
It felt like a tactic to force players to spend real money. In a F2P
game, that's fair. But there is a line. And I feel MWO not only
crossed this line, but stomped all over it. And they knew how fans
felt. There's no way they didn't know. This isn't a crime and it's
been done many times in the gaming world, but it just felt like a
game made by bean-counters, not gamers. This makes me sad. You can
argue the success of MWO all day long, I'm sure it made a lot of
money for PGI. But I believe, although I can never prove it, that it
was because the fan base was so starved for Mechwarrior that they
would take anything, and the fact is there's no real competition for
Mechwarrior. You can't say "Well there aren't any new
Mechwarrior games, but at least I can play XXXXXX instead!" So
it was either MWO or nothing. Again, this makes me sad. I like to
think if I were a developer, I wouldn't feel good about the fact that
my game isn't really that good, doesn't really do justice to the
franchise, but people play it because it's the only game in town.
Fine, it makes money. But does it feel good that fans at large kinda
hate your guts? That the general feeling is that your game is a cash
grab? That if there were ANY alternatives out there, the fans would
leave you high-and-dry in a heartbeat? That can't feel good. But
money, I guess.
I don't remember where or when I heard
the following, maybe I'm misremembering, maybe it was just a rumor.
So along the way I heard that the plan all along was to make money
with MWO, so they could fund making a true Mechwarrior sequel, the
dream game, the game we all want. That's a little shady to me, almost
like it's admitting the game was designed to generate money, not
actually be a good game. OK, I'm not a big "ends justify the
means" guy, but I like this goal. I'll be patient and wait. This
could, in theory, vindicate all of the PGI's behavior up until this
point, I thought. Again, I have no idea how true any of this is.
So, Mechwarrior 5. The launch was
tumultuous. You all know. I've already stated my feelings about the
EGS exclusivity (read: I don't care) and generally, I looked at the
fans who were lamenting to the stars that "They're just putting
out an incomplete product and hoping the modding community fixes it
for them!" as a bunch of annoying, presumptuous assholes. Even
though totally undeserved, I had faith PGI would fix the game, namely
the enemy spawning issue and the abysmal Lancemate AI. After all,
they're fans right? And making a good game is hard. And I'm a patient
person and probably too forgiving to developers. I don't know.
Updates started to roll out. They put a
bit of a band-aid on the spawning issue, explained that was the most
they could do without extensive testing. OK, fair. But then they said
"Don't expect regular patches and fixes, we're going to focus on
content." OK, I don't like the sound of that. More time goes by,
updates start to focus on mod support, and just recently the first
DLC was announced. You're proving them right, PGI. You're proving the
annoying assholes right. Now I'M the annoying asshole for having
faith in you. As it stands today, the AI is still abysmal, the enemy
spawning is OK-ish, still awful at times. The thing is, the community
was/is SO loud about these issues. I just know PGI knows about them.
It sincerely makes me feel like PGI doesn't care. Whether it's true
or not I don't know. It feels like MW5 is starting to go the
bean-counter route much like MWO before it, and completely relying on
the fan based modding community to make it an actual gamer's game.
It's so sad that this is how it all
turned out. From Big West to Tatsunoko to Harmony Gold to PGI, I wish
they'd all feel just a tiny amount of shame for all this.
