To be honest, if Weisman and crew wanted to see it done, they could open up 5 time-lines, including running 3025 to 3070 all over again, each with its own flavor, and you'd likely see millions again in the game universe.

Indeed, if Smith and Tinker does build a BattleTech MMORPG, I am beginning to come around more and more to the idea that it would be best during the first Star League era, much like BioWare is now doing with Star Wars The Old Republic MMORPG.

Oh, my God... shut the hell up!!! :lol:

OMG... ROFLMAO

You ARE joking, right?

Now THAT's funny!!!

Crim, you're probably not a touchy-feely type, but I'm glad you've got the new job, man.  Young people who are on this forum and read about the neighborhood kid getting in good will hope even more, and that will, hopefully, get more talent into the industry.  I guess you could be considered the equivalent of our own Barack Obama, hehe.

ToeBall's dead right.  Most likely, Crim is under not only NDA but has signed a proprietary information agreement.  I had to for my secret clearance PC job; I can tell you I have a secret clearance PC job, but anything else over the internet and I would have to find you and kill you.

Anything Crim works on for Crytek would, obviously, have to remain solely in Crytek's hands, and anything he does for MWLL has to be IAW the NDA, DYS?

Criminal, I'm really happy that you've moved into a place where your skills will be utilized in a capacity that is both professional AND paid.  I think the work you guys have done on MWLL thus far is magnificent, and one could only hope the rest of the team will get picked up AFTER this game is released by whomever needs truly professional folks.  Good work.

Ah, yes, I should have said welcome to the forum, first, but I didn't account for the new post count.  My apologies.

The loyal following MW4 has are about 80% twitch gamers who love bashing others with as many AC/2s, LB/x-2s, and ER Large Lasers as possible.  There are loyal old-timey BattleTech players still playing the game, though they are less likely to care who or what they're playing, which is good for them, but not for everyone.

And, thank you for those, DC.  I've not ever been able to play with those, mostly because of my serious lack of desire -okay, hatred- for MW4.

Eh, no, it hasn't.  I'm talking about the screen being dressed as if you, the player, are a character inside a cockpit.  MW4 is crap, period.  Have a nice day.

Those of us participating in this thread wouldn't have been having this conversation if it did.

Doc, it's not what you said, it's how you came across.  To me, you came across as "This is the ONLY game in town, and everything else is not worthy of BattleTech."  Whether or not you meant it, that's how I, and perhaps others who've not responded, took it.

One of the things a good friend of mine and I have resolved about making a BattleTech MMORPG is the negative potential of it.  Again, some folks are not going to agree on these points, and that's fine... to each their own.

1)  BattleTech is entirely too well-defined in most areas and ill-defined in others.  This is important because there's no room, really, to grow new stories, and of the room that is available, there's no way to really get things to work so they don't spoil other parts of the BattleTech story-line.  There ARE things that can be done to enhance the storyline, as built, especially since I would be openly proceeding from 3025 to 3070, sans the stupid-ass Jihad, but it's going to be extremely difficult to have a functioning economy and balance all of the other things that would be required to make a BattleTech MMO a fanboi's dream, while opening it to general players, twitchers, and science fiction/MMO audiences alike.

2)  No two groups, no two people, can agree on anything as far as how to put a BattleTech game together goes.  So, even if I were footing the bill, I would have to hire almost universally non-BattleTech people to make the thing work right and completely.

3)  Almost universally, players in the BattleTech universe have NO interest in playing the story at all.  This is sad because of the enormously rich history of the game.  Jordan Weisman and crew developed the universe just a bit too well.  For those who would ask, I spent the better part of three years gleaning this information from the community; as I explained in an earlier post, this is the only truly active forum account I have in the community because, agree with it or not, a lot of CBT/MW community members are shitheads.  That, coupled with the fact that EVERY SINGLE TIME I have raised the BattleTech MMORPG idea, except in these forums, the discussion has always turned to argument; since I don't put up with stupidity, I typically leave those forums.

Now, all of this is in reference to the idea that, if I win my lawsuits against the state that kept my sons illegally for the past two plus years, I would devote $100 million of that relief to developing a MMORPG.  For reference of scope and scale, World of Warcraft required $36 million to build AND market the game, initially.  Also for reference, the recent XBox title Lost Planet required $20 million each to build and market it, a total of $40 million.  Because of how closed BattleTech really, honestly, is -and I've discussed this with a LOT of players, friends, and colleague-players over the past five years- I would go with a different, popular game universe than BattleTech.

No hints, as yet.

I still think this community holds more sane and controlled discussions, though I've been in one tiff in the past two months where the other guy, a developer, was wrong.  Period.

Yes, thank you for the obvious advertisement.  However, to limit oneself to ONE supposedly legitimate program when there are other programs that do the same thing and cost nothing, is short-sighted, as far as I'm concerned.  You need to have the books to have what's legitimate.  The problem is, there are so many disparities between various sets of information that there is nothing truly legitimate.

I am not going to purchase a program when I can get better output from BMD 9.71, and the numbers and layout are every bit as legitimate as HMP.  The program is JUST the program; it's the data that goes into that program which is important to what comes out.

Skunker, thank you.

SintoX, I guess we have wildly different tastes, but Transformers did an excellent job of building the characters.  People only see the Transformers themselves as the stars because that's all they want to see, but there's an entire back story with Sector 7, with Sam's parents, and of course with the Transformers themselves.  I don't know what version of Transformers you saw, but what I saw was pretty damn awesome, and it didn't have to focus on the special effects for me to love the movie.

Those of you who want BattleMechs at the very beginning of any series are missing the boat, period.  You are looking for such a show to fail within it's first season.  BattleMechs cannot be effectively introduced until you have a solid and loveable character base, because you will just turn people off.  The reality we, as gamers, enjoy and the reality mundanes enjoy are two completely separate ideals; in general they don't get us, and they won't get any show that is limited to us.  Period.

I'm out of this conversation.

The 'Mechs would become the star of the show... but not right off.  It's a LOT easier to believe in a spaceship -especially one under the control of a hippy captain from a hippy time where marijuana and other recreational botanical appliances make it much easier to accept new things, and when science fiction was so new as a genre, still, that it wasn't too far fetched- than a walking robot war machine or, for that matter, up to hundreds of them at one time.  Besides, robots of all kinds have been so villified in science fiction, from Dune to Robocop and I Robot that it would be hard for many to see them right up-front, in your face, without immediately associating them with evil.  Best to tell stories about the people who control those giant war machines, first, and lead in with a great deal of foreshadowing.

I didn't say NOT see 'Mechs... I said foreshadowing.  For example, having a pair of supply guys on the ground while a Thunderbolt foot and lower leg walks past them.

I think introducing them too early would be disastrous for ratings overall.  It's not just the tech geeks we would look towards inviting in.

Look, I've made my point with you guys, and I won't repeat it.  Perhaps there's another way to look at it, but it would have to be a properly done lead-in... introduce the BattleTech universe in the credits, sort of like they did with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century... obviously without the circles coming at the viewer and the year counter, but perhaps something very similar to what was done in the MechWarrior III trailer mixed with the MWIII campaign intro.

As for whether to show it from the POV of the bondsman OR the POV of the unit who lost the bondsman, why not both?  It would show the exploits of the unit as they try to get back their beloved and/or very important friend from the Clans.  A lot of people love good detective shows, and this would be an opportunity to show that MechWarriors don't just 'Mungo kill!'

If I were the guy writing this show, I would have a good deal of foreshadowing about 'Mechs to draw in all the crowds, like they did with Clark Kent in Smallville -which is, what, 8 years old, now, and going to finish with 9?- and build up to full shots of them.  Anything sooner or more prominent than that might work fine with the tech geeks, but it's not going to get ratings, period.  You tell stories, like SG-1 for 11 years, which branched off into Atlantis and they're looking at, or building, a combo show, now and like they do with all great movies and long-lived television series, and you make things like the Stargate a tool for storytelling, nothing more.  Do that with 'Mechs, make them tools, background, unnecessary to the overall story, but a vehicle to tell more stories, and you have all the available types, and pretty soon you'll be telling the Usurper War, the 4th Succession War, and other time periods, as well.

If you start out with 'Mechs in the very first episode, you can count on your series being canceled after the first season, perhaps even midway through.  The show will become about the 'Mechs rather than the people, and the elements you need for success will be lost, period.  That's not just my humble opinion, either.

However, since I'm not writing the series...

I did... I caught it on scifi.com/rewind.  Still wasn't terribly impressed.
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Okay, but the way the first season would have to run is taking time to work into the BattleMechs, I think.  They would have a great deal of foreshadowing throughout say, the first half of the season -about 10 to 12 episodes- and then through a training camp, or a news reel about the latest skirmishes in the Inner Sphere, or some other way of introducing BattleMechs so they're visceral and awe inspiring.

The remaining 10 to 12 episodes of the season would introduce the Kell Hounds and Phelan, if they haven't already been worked into the story by now, and Phelan and his lance would become pretty well known.  By this time, people have enough time and energy invested in the series that when the BattleMechs finally show up -and they're a 'real' part of the universe, not some gimmick, and they're not only not indestructible, but are revered as family heirlooms, inheritance, and have a great deal of importance in establishing the nobility of the universe, the political intrigue, government, strategy and tactics of the battlefield, etc.- people will truly desire to continue watching.

My only fore-complaint is that the characters have to be as 'real' as possible, though I'm not certain having the universe be as dark as BSG is a good idea, either, and none of it can appear cartoony.  The DAVE School film, as excellent as it is, remains cartoony.  The 'Mechs are too clean, the pilots are good looking, the backdrops are too bright and not well-meshed with the foreground, etc., etc.  As much as I hate MW4: Vengeance, their trailer has ABSOLUTELY the right idea for displaying 'Mechs and people.  I mean, face it, the main guy in that sequence is one ugly motha-...... !

Whether humans, cars, or farting cows are doing the global warming, which I also believe is total crap, the earth goes through cycles of renewal.  This is proven in how the universe moves and our solar system within it.  This is proven by how the earth and its oceans move within and as a result of gravity brought on not only by our moon, but also the solar system.  The ice caps in the north will be gone in September, according to several NOAA scientists and landowners in Iceland who've been tracking the decline of snow and ice in their region for decades, now.

Because of the way our environment planetwide is constructed, the planet is made to renew itself, and it will do it no matter how many human beings there are.  The more people, the more upheaval of mother earth.  There are volcano's that go off once every 600 years, and we really don't know when the last time was in the U.S. that these volcanoes went off because records for our nation have only been in keeping for the last 300 years.  When Yosemite, Mount Hood, and half a dozen other mountains go off within the next 250 years or so, and when places like San Francisco and all of those along the San Andreas fault go off, people will die, the environment will renew itself, and we humans will begin our viral spread yet again.

The earth will take care of itself.  However, it's not a bad idea to keep ourselves healthier through developing clean-burning or green technologies, and I believe it will help us into the next step of our 'evolution' -for those of you who believe in that other nonsense, I mean our technology, our knowledge framework, not how we as human beings will adapt- so we can get out into space and begin exploring.

'Nuff said, I have an IMPS movie to watch.

A BT Series very similar to what Moore and crew did with BSG would be extraordinary, especially since it would actually FIT in BT.

I watched BSG until everyone turned into whores, and it became all 90210 in outer space, and I stopped.  However, watching Galactica pop into the atmosphere, start dropping like a rock, and then pop back out, and watching Apollo pop out of the tunnel on the asteroid only to launch the bombs and get the hell out of there... now THAT was worth watching.

If someone would do that with BattleTech... my God, I drooled over BSG and it wasn't even my favorite... I'd have to get out the plastic and towels for BT.