40K-ish Friday - Battletech Gothic

 

I'm so glad to see the return of one of my favorite out of print GW ... wait it's what? From who? Well, alright ...

I waited a week to let this thing percolate before I posted on it but my thoughts on it haven't changed and they come down to 3 main questions: 

• Who is this for? 
• Who is excited about this? 
• Is this the best way to spend your resources on building the BT game?

Prologue:

I've been playing Battletech for a long time. I've had ebbs and flows as far as my time and interest level but it's never gone completely away and I still have the first miniatures and books and things I bought back around 1986. I've been playing 40K since it came out in 1987 and I've been playing Warhammer Fantasy since the second edition came out in 1985. Yeah the 80's were a busy time. 

I've never heard anyone say, while playing Battletech, "I wish this game was more like 40K". Not once. Ever. 

When BT came out there were some surface similarities. The 3025 universe was post-apocalyptic in that much technology had been lost, very few places could make new mechs and even making parts for them was rare. Most mechs were repaired and rebuilt from salvaged machines and components. It made even a lance of four mechs a considerable force in the lore. Scenario books recreating "historical" confrontations would mention which mechs were present and what kinds of damage should be applied to them pre-battle to represent that bad leg actuator or missing laser. They got away from that aspect of the setting pretty quickly though and eventually that lost tech thing and damaged mechs being a standard expectation disappeared. Nowadays we have thousands of new mechs being constructed every year, not to mention the whole Clan situation.

Today it's much more of a "future Tom Clancy" type setting with new technology and specific weapons platforms taking the lead alongside political machinations between the houses and clans and whatever version of ComStar exists at the time. This makes for decent novels  and provides plenty of hooks for a campaign whether purely BT or going full RPG. It's "clean" in comparison to something like 40K - not a lot of tentacles, if you know what I mean.

But now we have this latest effort. Yes, I assumed it was an April Fool's joke. It's not. Alright so ...

Who is supposed to be excited here? 

Is this to try and draw in 40K players? I would think a lot of them would already be aware of Battletech as a game between the Battletech PC game from ten years ago or so,  the more recent Mechwarrior 5, and the resurgence of tabletop BT driven by Catalyst's Kickstarters  and boxed sets and new miniatures over say the last 5 years. I'd say Battletech has a much higher profile in the last 5 years than it had before - since the 90's at least. So I don't think awareness is a problem.

A part of this may be the thinking that if you make it look like 40K it will get more attention from that crowd. Well, maybe, but I don't think so. It appears to be mostly the same game underneath and that's a very different animal than any version of 40K. The look is only a part of the appeal of 40K.

• Both games have been building up their lore for roughly 40 years. BT is a combination of Historical Novel and Techno-Thriller. 40K is Epic Myth and Action Movie. The feel, the "vibe" is completely different between the games and the universes. People like the "grimdark" and 40K originated the grimdark - taking on the original when it's as strong and popular as it has ever been seems like a mistake. Battletech has strong lore but it is completely different than Warhammer 40,000 (no aliens, no psychic powers, no AI) and making a new offshoot of that is putting your new lore, unsupported by any prior products, up against the massive juggernaut that is the Warhammer Universe. 
  
  
  

  

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•  There is also the scale and scope of the game. BT tends to focus on mech action with a side dish of tanks, infantry, and aircraft for some players. I'd say 20 models per side is a big game in BT. In 40K the focus is driven per-army and could be a 100+ infantry on one side against fewer than 10  Knights or superheavies on the other - typically it is a mix of both. The look of a "typical" game of each looks wildly different as far as terrain, unit type, unit count. A lot of BT games happen on a hexmap, even with the miniatures, while a 40K game is always a pure measuring tape on an un-gridded table kind of game. 
  
  Most people could play both without much effort but most people also have a preference for on or the other and despite BT's standard approach being easier to set up I'd say 40K's approach  has more popularity and that's not likely to change by putting gribby monsters into the robot game. 
• Speaking of monsters let's talk about that. They're putting some kind of monsters/kaiju into the Gothic game. That's a huge change for Battletech. That's breaking at least one of the main rules of the universe and hey it might broaden the appeal. I've thought for a long time that a "mechs vs. kaiju" type option for BT would get some attention but I was envisioning something more like Pacific Rim than chaos beasts and daemon engines from Warhammer. So I like them working this angle in somehow, but then they go and leave them out of the boxed set! It's all mechs, and I believe it's alternate sculpts of mechs that already have new miniatures! This is effectively the starter box for a new setting and you can't include the very thing that makes it different from the old setting? That seems like a terrible decision. Even including paper stand-ups of the monsters is a fail - that may work for Battletech players but that hasn't been acceptable for 40K players since 1993 ... and it's still a meme today.

Who is this for? 

Effectively there are 3 groups at play here: Existing Battletech players, Existing 40K/Other miniature game players, and people who are not actively involved in any of these games at this time. 

• Existing (and lapsed) Battletech players: Existing players seem to be somewhat split on this one. I see a few people saying give it a chance. I see a lot of people not liking it at all - for various reasons. I can sum up my own take as a BT fan like this:
• If I want Gothic 40K exists and does it better than anyone has done or is doing
• As an existing player and fan of the only setting they've had up until now splitting this off into an "Elseworlds" side story means I can just sit this one out. It has no impact on the story I like and know and I have no history with it so unless I just really want to have my Thunderbolt punch a Great Uncelan One in the face I can skip this. It's the first boxed set in years that the core Battletech fan can ignore. And if I want to have a big robot punch a big demon in the face ... again, 40K exists. 
• Also a new setting and a new style of mech and the introduction of monsters means I would need to consider building up one or two new armies just for this game. Or I could just keep adding mechs and other forces to the stuff I use in the main game. 
  
  The one real opportunity here might be with people who stopped playing Battletech at some point because it was boring or the universe seemed stagnant or they were just burned out. This does give a new type of combatant and a new look to the old combatants and that might be enough to convince some people to check it out.
  
  
• Existing 40K/GW players: They mostly don't care about Battletech - or any other miniatures game either. 
• This is the main factor they are up against: the general arrogance of Games Workshop players. A large number of 40K players only play 40K and if they do play another tabletop game it's another GW game like Age of Sigmar or Kill Team. GW markets it as "the Games Workshop Hobby" and a lot of people buy into that - they won't even look at another miniatures game. This is something that all other miniature games face and it hurts Kings of War, it hurts Flames of War, it hurts Bolt Action, it hurts Crisis Protocol, and even the Star Wars games. Many of the companies publishing miniatures games today were founded by ex-GW employees and they often view the GW customer as their customer but the Fortress of Arrogance is not just for Comissar Yarrick. Non-GW games are looked down upon and dismissed as inferior by many of the people playing 40K and the other GW games. One element of this is popularity - as in, if Game X is good then why isn't it more popular? Battletech is reasonably popular but I don't think it measures anywhere near the numbers 40K hits in sales, convention & tournament attendance, and online presence. This new take might help but I don't think it's going to make a big dent in the state of things.
• Lapsed 40K players might be a different story as there is a fairly high turnover in those games and they often come out of it looking for something new. For them BT's rules barely changing in 40 years will be a feature when compared to GW's 3-year cycle and constant FAQs and points updates. A more 40K-like version of Battletech might gain some followers here.
  
  
• People who don't play miniature combat type games at all right now: I don't think this is likely to pull in much at all as these people also don't care. If they did, they'd be playing 40K or BT already and if they're new they will probably pick one of those "pure" options instead. A new RPG that's more like 5E D&D would likely pull in more new players to the BT universe than a new flavor of tabletop Succession Wars.

Finally, resources: 

Assuming you can only support one boxed set for Battletech per year - and they've needed Kickstarters to do that - then is this a good move for the game, the players, and the brand in general? Players are already talking about this taking resources from the main game. 

• Some miniature sets have already been delayed. Players don't like it when announced projects are held up for a surprise side-project
• There are major areas of the game that could use a refresh -like fighter combat. Wouldn't a cool boxed set of new spacefighter miniatures featuring a streamlined air/space combat system make more sense? It would give a new (refreshed at least) angle on things and still tie into the main universe. Your goal should be something like X-Wing which was really popular for a few years until the company screwed it up: A game based on small numbers of units playable in a relatively short amount of time by more casual fans. This would also provide an avenue to draw new players in to the rest of the game, allow an option to upscale things by making a Dropship expansion, and potentially tie in to a capital ship combat game (which they have said is in the works) by introducing ships and characters to new players and re-introducing them to the old players who may not have cared about space combat for years. Note that this is not "reprint Aerotech with new art" - this should be a new system that makes it simpler than and distinct from classic Battletech but can still interact with it in some way. That's just one example.
• They've talked about supporting the new line with additional miniatures - many of which would not fit in with or be usable with at all in regular Battletech games. Yet another resource draw.
• There is also talk of this being the first of an ongoing series of parallel universe games. This from a company that's had trouble keeping elements of their main game in stock. Now you're going to have a bunch of "stub" universes with limited support alongside the main game? They mentioned a more anime-flavored universe, a 50's style retro-tech universe (aiming for the Fallout crowd?), maybe a steampunk universe ... but what does that do for me as a player? That mostly sounds like alternate mech designs but how does the game change? If it's just republishing the same mechs over and over  - as we see with Gothic - who cares? That is seriously catering to existing fans, not attempting to expand the game or bring in new ones. Support is a real question - in 5 years how much support will there be for Gothic? For whichever other universes get the greenlight?  Will there be Technical Readouts? Timeline updates? Novels? What's the realistic lifespan of these things?

So yes, I'm pretty negative on Battletech Gothic. I totally understand wanting to expand the product line but this just seems like a misstep and a sidetrack.  Additionally this year's hot new 40K challenger is Trench Crusade which is also grimdark and violent and has all of the usual make-your-parents-mad imagery. I suspect the bulk of the "wanting something like 40K that isn't actually 40K" crowd is being pulled in that direction, further limiting the opportunities here. 

PostScript: 

If you're willing to compete with GW head to head and want to make something new why not make a 28mm skirmish game set in the Nth Succession War and have your basic units be infantry squads and individual vehicles with an occasional appearance by battlemechs? You could make basic infantry squads for each house (and merc unit and periphery bandit group) and also for each major time period (fewer bullets, more lasers as time goes on) and then make some vehicle kits as those are universal across houses. You have some interesting unit variety in the universe already with rifle infantry, laser infantry, and jump infantry and the basic trilogy of wheeled/tracked/hover vehicles plus the VTOL option. We have light medium and heavy tanks, transports, artillery, scout units, recovery vehicles, and even coolant trucks already. We have special elite units in many houses like Liao Death Commandos and the inevitable ninjas from House Kurita. Later in the timeline you get powered armor units. Battlemechs could be a limited use option like knights in 40K and would make for awesome centerpiece models in 28mm scale. 

It just seems like both a new and an obvious way to go to please existing fans while getting some attention from people playing other games that might be looking for something. Yet instead of this we get Mechs vs. Squiggoths ...