Quick correction. In this video I state that Battletech started losing popularity in the Clan Invasion. This isn't quite accurate. What I meant to say is that a lot of older fans began to lose interest around that time. Clan Invasion was when the franchise was at its peak.
I recently had a discussion with someone that began their view of the Battletech history from the year 2000. he didn't believe there was a strong following of the game during the fasa years. I enlightened him that Battletech was at it's all-time best from 1991 thru 1997. and that CGL can only dream of achieving what fasa had accomplished during those years. that said, CGL b.s. aside, they have done a lot for the IP. but they have a long way to go before they surpass the true golden age of this game.
I honestly never cared for the clan invasion. And even less for Dark Age and the Word of Blake BS. The Clans were supposed to be an analog for the Mongols (if the use of Khan for their leadership didn't give it away) They weren't. The Mongols didn't really have any superior technology other than their bows. What they had was superior tactics and strategy. The Battletech Clans had superior technology and inferior tactics and strategy. And they acted way more like pre-shogunate samurai than unified and disciplined Mongol warriors. Further, Mongols survived on mare's milk on campaign so they had created their own food as they traveled. The Clans were set up for dueling not total war which is the way the IS handles disputes. Once the Inner Sphere figured out they could grind them down and exploit their long supply lines the Clan defeat was inevitable. Attrition is what the Inner Sphere does best. And with their vast manufactuering base they could simply drown the Clanners with much simpler AFVs then finish them off with the mechs. Because how many Saracem. Harrasser or Savannah Master hover tanks can you buy for the price of one Clan mech? In other words, the Clan invasion could have been done better. I'd also say it wasn't needed. You could have generated more interesting stories by having the great houses fractured by the machinations of ComStar. You already had them set up to be the big villain by the Helm Memory Core affair. And since they controlled all communications they would have been a much more difficult enemy to defeat than the Clans ever were. It would have been like medieval countries trying to defeat the Papacy. The pope had lands and influence everywhere in the west. And vast amounts of money. Tough nut to crack. ComStar would have been even worse.
@Wastelandman7000 you make good points and have an interesting premise. not convinced about the Mongol hypothesis. Just using titles, doesn't mean they are using the same philosophies. what I was getting at was to use some of the key dates/events from the timeline, but run your games history the way you like it. kinda the best of both worlds. I absolutely agree that the J-war could have been for more devastating. with Comstar retaining a certain amount on anonymity and control of communication as well as banking (c-bills). they could have (and possibly would have) transformed each of the houses into their districts as individual power bases. (if you remember the Succession wars board game) the map was broken up by each house and within each house, the districts. even with the numerous factions throughout the battletech universe from the beginning thru fed-com civil war. now add in each district as a separate faction - no longer loyal to a house. that would give rise to a renewed clan invasion. then, a personality similar to the Cameron of the starleague founding could rise up to form the republic of the sphere. also, after Tukayyid, the clans had to change their military doctrine to accommodate things like armor, artillery and infantry. some clan leaders were stubborn, but many had gone to limited combined arms.
This is the first video I've found actually talking about the Dark Ages a bit. Anyone I've talked to irl avoided the question or said they'd rather not remember. This little glimpse you've given me has helped me understand why. Thank you.
The way the Republic of the Sphere was just basically invented for Devlin Stone to rule over was one of the dumbest parts of the modern canon. The worst part was where they gave that clown massive amounts of power and the first thing he does is demand everyone scrap most of their mechs. Because... reasons. I half expected for it to be revealed that Stone was an ancestor of Steffen Ameris all along or something.
Even more idiotic is that not only did he make that demand, but the Great Houses and all the nobles and mercenary companies actually complied instead of saying "lol fuck you" and going back to slapping each other around like they have since the 24th Century.
@@z3r0_35 freakin' exactly. At least it sounds like later on it kind of revealed that not nearly as many mechs ended up scrapped as they said. But still, that entire concept was just a really dumb way to justify a new artificial scarcity.
Mr Welch's best known critique for these tabletop resets at the time was: "don't nuke your setting." For his favorite setting, Mystara, the reset basically killed off the main conflicts or replaced them with ones that paled in comparison. For BattleTech, the conflicts after FASA always felt as though they had the depth of puddles compared to what came before. That and the ability for any given faction to suddenly have better-than-lostech equipment cheapened the consequences for sustaining catastrophic losses, despite having re-nuked a lot of the infrastructure to the setting.
BattleTech stops for me in October 3067... The Jihad. The whole setting just goes off the deep end and I frankly just didn't like it. I read a couple RotS civil war books, but they just lack scope.
@@pit2444 I liked what they were trying to do, but they just didn't stick the landing. It had potential, but... I dunno. I just don't know what the disconnect was nor where.
@@Deridus From the accounts I have heard, much of the lore was rushed and/or forced to fit in new units/factions, which goes a long way to explaining the inconsistencies.
@@Deridus Concur. The lore just goes straight off the rails after 3067. Like... the Jihad is a neat idea, but the whole arc of Battletech was humanity climbing out of the technological dark age of the Succession Wars. So the Jihad/ Dark Age story arc was really just a regression back to the starting point of the story; basically erasing what came before. If they wanted to make a game with scarcer mechs and more primitive tech, they should have set it in like the 2900s, not throw the entire lore and story of Battletech straight into the trash.
As a more recent Battletech fan I don't have a lot of the same hate for the Dark Age as some BT veterans do. But the more I think about it the more this reminds me of how 343 industries took over and subsequently ruined Halo. Which I absolutely loathe them for. So at least on that point I can understand. I will say this though. I do like the idea of super heavy mechs as a concept. I even own a few ironwind metals Aries miniatures. Which I think makes for great painting projects if nothing else. Hopefully one day BT will find itself in the hands of true fans that give it the respect and reverence it deserves.
It already is, no matter what Catalyst or any other entity does moving forward, the old Battletch lore, books and even models are already out there, they can't take them away from you. I am new to the franchise, and i haven't gone past the clan invasion, in a way i have no need to, it's all there: the houses, the tech, the mechs and an epic conflict.
@phillipmorel5116 I love the super heavies and mobile fortresses as a concept. I do not appreciate how they were executed. The rule of cool is a great concept but if you need to trample all over the lore and its fans to do it. It becomes uncool and defeats the purpose of the rule of cool. I may never use my super heavies on tabletop and I am ok with that. They look cool and that's enough for me.
As someone who's a bit older, the 90s/early 00s were filled with companies all too willing to shotgun their own settings for no real reason. TSR (Dragonlance), R. Talsorian (Cyberpunk 3rd ed), White Wolf (every single damn product), Games Workshop (WHFB/Storm of Chaos, it just took another decade to die). And of course, Battletech. Nothing makes me twitch harder than the setting altering nuke that takes away everything recognizable and worthwhile about it and turns it into a bland mush.
what? and pay royalties and settlements to every fan fic writer out there? reboots need to be 20-30% distinct to get insurance and investment due to IP liabilities.
@@WTFoolproof I mean, I'll give credit where credit is due - Mike Pondsmith realized people hated Cyberpunk 3rd so much he just shoved it into an alternate timeline.
@z2ei I never saw the pattern until you brought it up. Even Star Wars introduced the Yuuzhan Vong and flipped their own table, but I never noticed all of these things happened across different IPs in the same relative time frame.
@@Wastelandman7000 I would have liked the dark age more if it didn't have all the goofy shit and then the jihad happens to try and explain the blackout. Actually the blackout itself isn't a bad idea, I'd say it should have just been a quick affair that saw the borders redrawn and factions wiped out like the capellan's instead of say the FWL? Especially since their suppose to be the more stable nation as opposed to the Confederation where its top down managerial style of authoritarianism demands and requires monitoring of the public 24/7. It's should have put those nations foundational thesis to the test and instead all they did was just ridiculous shit.
I tend to fall into "the Dark Age was an interesting idea that was horribly executed" camp of Battletech fans myself. If I were to reboot it, I would write off everything after 3067 as being either an elaborate series of simulations and war games or in-universe speculative fiction, keep all the tech and stuff but write new fluff for it all so people can keep using their older stuff, and then instead of the WoB going apeshit I'd basically come up with a Fifth Succession War kicking off around 3070-ish, with the main factions being the allied Federated Suns and Lyran Alliance, the Trinity Alliance (Capellans, Canopians, and Taurians), the Draconis Combine (plus Clan Nova Cat), and the FWL and their Blakist allies. ComStar, the MRBC, other Periphery powers like the Marian Hegemony and Outworlds Alliance, and the rest of the Clans would be involved to varying degrees at varying points (I could see the Ghost Bears and Kuritans going at it again, for example), plus Rasalhague is still fighting a guerilla war for their territory.
Throw in a self-replicating version of Ameris's AI powered ships and mechs returning on a rampage after centuries of replication in the deep in the phrepery. Do you have a campaign where everyone does everything they have but it never ending wave of robot mechs and ships while trying to find out who controls them. An rogue AI, Ameris's descendent, a excaped branch of the Cameron family? The rush to find out and stop the machines will be similar to the early clan days.
@@tsiefhtes Actually I already did come up with an idea like that, only it involves a Star League-era AI with access to automated factories and the resources of an entire star system. It is, however, contained to the system because apparently AI-controlled ships malfunction if you try to jump them through hyperspace.
Reminds me of an aborted MegaMek tournament I was going to take part in a few years back. The premise was, instead of pointing WarShips at everyone's capitals and threatening Jihad over the dissolution of the Second Star League, the WOB instead approached the Inner Sphere and Periphery powers with a grand plan to finally kick out and/or totally exterminate the Clans--and everyone agreed with this plan. Sadly, the tournament never got past the preliminary stages (where we paired off to sort-of reenact the Word driving Wolf's Dragoons off of Mars), but that could have been a killer alternate timeline. Those of us who signed up were split into Spheroid and Clan sides, and within the teams, we got to pick practically every faction short of pirates and maybe mercs (I was going to represent the Taurians).
The first time someone tried to tell me about the wider Battletech universe - they were Dark Age fans. It took me over a decade to care about the franchise again.
It was always clear to me from the outset that Dark Age was about monetizing the "Clicktech" system with a bunch of "cool new 'Mechs" and then trying to backfill a reason for their existence afterward.
It's where I got my start in BattleTech. Before that I think I'd only seen some kids playing the NechWarrior rpg in my high school library at lunchtime. There were definitely a lot of clunky looking contraptions passed off as canon mechs. They may have been, if you were looking at them in a carnival hall of mirrors distorting their images
Grey Monday as it was written doesn't work. Grey Monday means everyone goes back to courier ships and the great house is as we know them cease to exist. It would be a second age of war. They just ignored the logistics of that plot point. It's bad writing to establish an entire era around.
Not to mention that the clans were not affected.. wich basically means the clans win. Since no single planet has any hope of withstanding a full clan assault on its own, wich it would have to do because no one would know its even under attack... its the grand central of plotholes
@@riptors9777 and you cant tell me the Diamond Sharks/Sea puppies wouldnt have cashed in by selling HPG tech to the IS...and the Fed Suns could still reconstitute the old fax system
@@riptors9777 don't forget, for some reason even the Clans downsized their military because Devlin Stone asked them to. Until Malvina Hazen was bored and mounted a full sized invasion that is...then all of a sudden the Jade Falcons had a full sized Touman again. It's quite magical how dark age writing worked.
Wizkids clearly didn't do it's homework. they completely missed the 4th succession war. in which house Davion was given a communication edict by Comstar and Davion used 'fax technologies' to communicate. bypassing the HPG system. I guess a hundred years later and IQs suddenly dropped off!
@@Alpha_Digamma Considering how often the Wolfs came back from the brink of anihilation without any explanation as to where they even got all the manpower and material thats not all that surprising
Yeah, but, when they showed up in the novels they usually didn't last long. Thinking of Mercenary's Star where the Grey Death had to run in and save the improvised "technicals" mechs because they were having their asses handed to them by the Kuritans.
Rebranding BattleTech as MechWarrior: Dark Age is not a bad idea in a void. Having the setting go into a soft reboot to handle it is not a bad idea in a void. Making a new game system is not a bad idea in a void. Making miniatures prepainted is not a bad idea in a void. However the way it was handled together along with everything else was so bad that people disliking it is to be expected and I'm shocked that Wiz thought this was a good idea.
I think the biggest miss was not designing the click units to fit the old hex spaces. If you'd had cool looking units (big if, I know) you could have gotten the old fans to buy some just to use in their own games.
DarkAge is to BT what DisneyWars is to the Galaxy far, far away: an example how NOT do do things with a glorious IP. Star Wars, like BT, will be carried by it's fans, not the IP holders.
the Dark Age Clix game never happened in my hometown, as BattleTech died prematurely back in the start of the 2000s. when the Comic shop that carried it at the time, closed down due to the owner finding work at Bioware. Eventually 20 years later in 2021, BattleTech did come back, only too be killed off again, due to the owner of the downtown game shop at that time, not only failing to stock the game properly, but also not allowing anyone to run demos nor events for it. Thankfully the store recently has a new owner. and BattleTech is back on its feet again and the community is starting to grow now.
The Wizkids click Mechwarrior game was my introduction to Mechwarrior/Battletech as whole and is the reason I'm still a fan today. So it's hard for me to hate it. To be fair though, I only played the game and got my lore fix from reading older battletech sources, I knew nothing about the lore of Dark Age... probably because there wasn't any and realise that to this day I still know nothing about Dark Age which is probably for the best. Blissful ignorance.
While working on my BT lore videos I always dread going into the Dark Age because of how flimsy it gets. I have piles of notes then "boom" scraps. It makes it difficult especially when stuff that doesn't make sense happens and I try to make it fit. I've given my share of mini rants in my videos and I feel your pain.
Well, you always have the option of simply making it plain as far as you're concerned, that was someone's bad acid trip and never happened.... Because we're the fans. If we say the lore ended before the Dark Age it ended before the Dark Age and they have no say in the matter.
I Started with dark age, granted I wasn't to deep into the lore since I was but a wee lad, I just saw robots and robots/mechs have always grabbed my attention as a kid. Still paint BT minis and play games when I can from time to time
Clan Wolf traveling through Steiner space and eating up what...like a quarter or third of their territory with like zero resistance just has to be my "favorite" piece of Dark Age lore out of the huge selection of "brilliant" Dark Age writing.
I was just getting into Battletech about a year or so before FASA announced that it was shutting down and being sold off to WizKidz/Topps. One of the things that I remember pissing everyone off was that WizKids basically unceremoniously announced that they were basically ceasing all production of the original game in favor of their 'new and improved' Mechwarrior dark age game. Which was just a crappy collectable mini game that were all blind box. And even worse the new canon didn't make much sense and the game mechanics were just a mess and almost no one played it. It's why that game died off very fast.
This reminds me of what Games Workshop is doing right now. They're slowly pushing Firstborn Marines out of official play, which has the largest model aftermarket in the entire community. They're trying to take some of the oldest and largest army collections and make them unusable. A lot of players are not willing to rebuy entire armies. Then they keep reworking the rules and can't seem to figure out how to actually balance the game.
@@diggman88 Well they're not going so far as to just toss the old models, but yeah they are trying to make these old armies less effective. I still remember when a friend tried to get me into the game. He was suggest I get a small Tau starter army and it was going to be like almost $300 all things considered. Warhammer is _not_ a cheap game.
@@diggman88 Or, you know, the unceremonious murder of Warhammer Fantasy, because their writers were literally too inept to think of any other plot than "the entire setting dies". Ten years on hold and that's still all they could do.
To be fair to GW, the older Space Marine lines were looking very, very dated and given the scale, there just wasn't a lot they could with the medium. I heard rumors about the actual dies wearing out, but I never bothered to look into it. Honestly, my heart has always been with my Imperial Guard. I even have a full platoon of Praetorians! Alas, I just lost interest with 40k over the years. Gave away my T'au army to one nephew, and all my spare Rhinos to another. I still have my Chaos, SM, and Eldar armies, plus a sizable Nid army sans HQ... but I don't have anyone to play with, and the new rules keep mucking 'em up.
@@Deridus I hadn't heard that about GW's dies wearing out, but one of the jobs I've had in the past was injection molding. Although for practical parts and not things like minis. I could see worn out dies being a real problem. Still, I don't see they they would need to completely invent a new units instead of biting the proverbial bullet and having new dies created.
thank you for articulating the reason why a majority of BattleTech fans don't move past the FedCom civil war. while some good ideas have been made since their shoddy execution as well as the general black hole of the dark age just kills most peoples interest in the IP. so instead we sit in our comfortable vertical slice of hard-science neo-feudalism and dream of a day when the universe will finally be respected and moved forward properly.
It would have worked if it happened shortly after the Helm Memory Core was discovered and disseminated. And sans a Clan invasion. Because Helm set ComStar up as the big bad....then did nothing with it. ComStar seeing the HMC spreading then panicking and pulling the plug would have made sense. Hell, even the name would make sense given it was the Grey Death that found the damned thing.
@@Wastelandman7000 Personally, I think Grey Monday (the HPG blackout, that is) was an awful idea. The basic idea of the Jihad, that is, WoB flipping out and going all attempted-genocide on the inner sphere is fine, and actually a sensible story beat. But the context of that story beat is that the inner sphere ISN'T THE INNER SPHERE OF 3025 ANYMORE. And this is what the writers seem to have forgotten. WoB going ballistic makes sense, but the thing is, the Inner Sphere is in the midst of a technological and political renaissance. They have recovered the lostech knowledge. They're starting to make new, improved designs even BETTER than lostech. The great houses have started making warships again, and definitely know how to make HPGs for themselves now. Comstar (and WoB) have, in this context, kind of losing their relevance and the method of power and control that they had. And the IS militaries are stronger than ever. They've increased their ranks of mechs since they now have the capability to design and build brand-new mechs, and they've had to build strength to fight the clans- and gained a lot of battle experience in doing so. Not to mention, the IS has become more unified as a result of facing an external threat. So... how TF am I supposed to believe that WoB, a little splinter faction of an organization that was never all *that* big to begin with, somehow manages to do so much damage to every great house? Like... WoB shouldn't stand a *chance* against the military might of the great houses in 3067. Given that the Helm Memory Core had "all the knowledge a Star League expeditionary force would need", it definitely had plans for HPGs in it. And in the earlier books, we see that the great houses do indeed have methods of interstellar communication (such as Hanse Davion's "black box"), so Grey Monday just doesn't make sense. The (quite silly) explanation that it somehow altered *physics itself* so that HPG communications no longer work (except the clan HPGs, because *reasons*) just falls *really* flat.
Really the worst sin committed by the Dark Age isn’t what it was, but rather what it failed to be. The core concept of an HPG blackout is rife with interesting possibilities. Where the clan invasion swelled the scope of the universe and game, dark age could bring it back to basics, albeit with a unique twist for the setting. Poor writing coupled with the click tech lineup meant this would never happen.
Those wizkids minis... look how they massacred my boys... even stormwind metal minis are high artistry compared to that. Anyways.. the answer to why its so hated is the same as with every beloved 80s-90s IP that got nuked and rebooted: The reboots where motivated by nothing more then corporate interests, they werent necesary, they didnt improve on anything, they just wanted to fleece you for more money. They couldnt be arsed to produce lore friendly products so they just wiped the table and told you to consume product and get excited for next product. The thing they forgot however is that people are not required to buy whatever you present to them. A lesson that certain developer studios are currently learning on the PC gaming market XD
While I like a few units from the Dark Age, the setting is so fundamentally broken I cannot see how it can be fixed. So much of it is just "things happen because we needed them to" that it breaks any functioning brain if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. Honestly, keep some of the nicer looking units as is, scrap everything post FedCom civil war, and restart the damn era as the 5th succession war. Put the nice stuff in there as new mechs for logical faction picks, and call it a day. Let us never think of that era again, please. It hurts me.
There are a few ways to rework it, but it would basically look like what disney did to the expanded universe: Cherry-pick the good things and yeet the rest like it's the Usurper's body behind a Golden Corral.
I like those jerry rigged Battlemechs. I'll happily concede that their reasons for existing might be dumb, but I could see something like that being used by a pirate army or desperate periphery nation. Mandaloregaming has a great video on Home World 2 where he discusses the ships you use. They're all industrial space ships meant for things like mining or cargo hauling, but with a war breaking out, the Clan you play as needs anything they can get. So they look at what they have and repurpose them. Sure, that's a mining ship, but we can complement it's respectable armor with actual weapons and shields. He said something like "it's like building an army out of catterpillar construction vehicles and soviet ww2 tanks. It's stupid and incredibly desperate, but has a rule of cool." And I personally love that. Which is why I also love the Ugly class star fighters from Star Wars. I don't care how shitty they are, I love the Tie-Wing. Also good job on explaining to people why age of sigmar is hated by Fantasy battles fans. Even if it's good, it's still not warhammer fantasy.
Now Mage, comparing pineapple pizza to communism is an insult so grand I demand satisfaction! When the greasy boxes with a weeping Italian on the cover start arriving on your doorstep, remember me!
To be honest i liked the idea of mad max meets battletech. I always thought of most of the armys being made up with franken mechs with only the more elite units having mechs that matched their vanilla record sheets. As far as dark age and beyond goes. I just couldnt make it past 3067. The fedcom civil war is just so much of a mess i have never been looking to look at anything after that in the timeline. With that being said im glad you where willing to research this stuff and keep up the good work.
In my opinion, the setting should’ve explored the first succession war. What was it like to pilot a mech that started out as a cutting edge piece of equipment only to slowly devolve over time as parts became rarer and the tech became more basic. Imagine playing in the setting where you start out in a SLDF Royal BattleMech and you’re kicking ass left right and center, but after a few engagements you have to start replacing parts. Small things at first like armor and then larger thinks like actuators and eventually weapons systems and even your neurohelmet. The progression of the game’s difficulty comes from the loss of advanced tech. Now that is a setting I’d love to play.
The only good thing about the Dark age is having more toys to play with. Which is mechs of course. The only good thing about any new "era" right now is having more stuff to mess with and ignore the lore for the dark age. Even with how shit the ilclan era is. I like the new toys but that is all.
I guess I don’t know any better because the only novels I read were ilclan era. As a novel, I really enjoyed “Hour of the Wolf”. I despised “a question of survival” and I found “Redemption Rites” to be decent but nowhere near Hour. I only got in a few years ago and trying to go through the whole back catalog seemed impossible. I’ve been really down on CGL though. But I enjoy the plastic mechs.
Okay, this is my VERY FIRST time hearing about this period in BT. I cannot believe a company pulled this reboot shit and actually demanded people start over from scratch. They didn't even develop the lore for the dark ages before throwing in everyone's faces. They redid the whole thing and acted like experienced players were complete morons. No wonder BT fans hate it so much.
As a more casual Battletech guy (the video games have always been my homeland for the universe. Tabletop has been Warhammer 40,000 Orks for me), what I'm hearing is that Wizkids somehow pulled off something WORSE than when Games Workshop dropped 'The End Times' on Warhammer Fantasy to force Age of Sigmar out (it took an entire leadership change for GeeDubs to realize that axing their biggest fantasy game in favor of something with ZERO lore but basically puppeting around the old factions like a ghoulish corpse marionette was a terrible idea). The only thing that makes Geedubs End Times/'Welcome to AoS! you get to buy new armies now!' bs suck less than Wizkids's Dark Age is that, for better or worse, Age of -Shitmar- Sigmar was a (mostly) clean break from -Warhammer Fantasy- the World-that-Was [Gotrek Gurnisson and Grey Seer Thanquol being some of the few exceptions who were plucked from the End Times and dragged into the Age of Sigmar]. Wizkids decided that trying to murder the setting's entire tech tree and go back to interstellar Stone Age... while keeping ALL of the stuff everyone knew and loved about Battletech in the background was a great idea! Just... how do you piss off a loyal customer base _that_ badly?!
Let me start with, I’m an Alpha Strike guy. CBT has its time and place for me, but I’d rather play two or three games with a company of mechs than spend a day rolling for every medium laser. Back in the day my friends and I welcomed a game of Battletech that didn’t take forever to play. The era itself was a mixed bag for us. We liked the combined arms aspect. Mechs were handled poorly and the kings of the battlefield were vehicles you could attach to a tow hitch. Industrial mechs made sense to us… if it were pre-Helm Memory core on a backwater planet… I personally didn’t like most of the mech designs from the period. They added too many spikes and exposed ammo bins, etc. The blind boxes were fun on some occasions, like when the local FLGS had a blind box tournament, but there’s nothing worse than getting a box of crap. I stopped playing shortly before they reset the game and made the first three lines unplayable outside of pickup games. I won’t lie to you, I still occasionally bust out the DA stuff for Alpha Strike games. The infantry look okay enough, as well as some of the smaller vehicles and VTOLs. There’s been a few times that a pair of industrial mechs and some civilians(on foot and on ATVs) armed with rifles had to form a militia to protect a small farming town from raiders. There’s nothing like taking a combine to your buddy’s custom quad with a medium laser turret and he looks at you like, “… Really…” It makes for laughs all around.
I can think of a way to keep that Jihad, still shatter the FWL, keep the Wars of Reaving, and prevent the Clans from getting within 100 LY of Terra. Have the Wobbies get stomped, the Clans pushed to the periphery and the former Free Rasselhague Republic. Make it to where the Warden Clans are hyper concentrated on their IS holdings, but thanks to the FedCom civil war, the setting is basicaly Post 1'st Sucession. Tonnes of advanced tech sitying around and no ComStar to mess everything up.
I was actually thinking about this today. I think it could have worked better if we'd had some sort of prelude to get us acclimated to the new setting before pulling the dark age trigger. Like some sort of crisis that the Sphere had to intervene in. Let Victor have an active role, hand off the baton to others, and let us see that the republic of the sphere was on a knifes edge. It looks like peace would prevail once and for all. And then the HPGs blow up.
the wizkids idea, was to set the dark age far enough forward that it didn't really impact the original game. what they failed to grasp, was that battletech was an evolving timeline. one actually year was approximately 5 years in game. starting from 3025 (1984), do the math. clan invasion 3050 (1990-1). ilclan 3150 (2018+) so wizkids thought they could skip 100+ years and then write the story to connect things - if it becomes necessary. what they overlooked, was the nerd factor. gamers like historical details and to discuss/argue historical decisions. by removing this, wizkids basically told the existing IP fanbase to f-off. it didn't sit well then and it still doesn't today.
I, however, can't stand them. The fact that they've been basically written out of the game because they just don't fit within Clan culture is merely another reason why I refuse to give them time of day.
@@Deridus They were written out because they were unpopular due to having weird rules that put them somewhere in-between battle armor and battlemechs. imho they should have just been treated as ultralight battlemechs as far as rules are concerned.
@@z3r0_35 I do love the in-universe reason, truth be told. But what you say is as close to the real-world truth as I can figure. The rule sets exist, sure, but I will not play them. When I think about it, I usually won't play anything post-Clan Invasion because I hate having to go B-Value over Tonnage. It's a lot faster to set up a game with Pre-Invasion tonnage.
I thought the "mass disarmament" was one of the dumbest idea. Devlin stone going "You need to give up your armies" and the IS not just laughing at him was one break in the suspension of disbelief.
In the original Dark Age, black box technology only worked temporarily. Hyperspace itself was scrambled, which made that tech fail shortly thereafter. That was retconned later.
@@Deridusoof all of that "wall" and jumbled hyperspace nonsense really annoyed me I've hated Devlin Stone and the RotS the moment I learned about them. I even like the Word of Blake more than that other garbage.
Jumpships work on the lower band of the hyper space spectrum. HPG stations send communications on the upper band and it was the upper band that was scrambled. That is why Tucker could get the HPG on Wyatt up and running whereas other stations would just burn out a new core.
As a Davion simp, I hated the Dark Ages for plenty of reasons, but I think the fact it feels so aimless and uninteresting compared to the earlier stuff from lore to politics means I don't hate it, I just... don't care about it.
Same, it feels as if they had to forcefully turn the Davion's into bumbling idiots instead of being consistent with how they are and somehow House Liao becomes super competent. Instead of being the punching bag that they should be.
@@Xfighter000 Capella should have fell during the 4th succession wars. The current writers fawn over it the same way a 20 year old college student fawns over communism from their professor who visited USSR in their early years.
12:29 Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but wasn't that 'notable exception' (who imo was wrongly ousted and the person behind it should've been fired instead, but that's a whole other can of worms) the guy who was basically fleshing out most of the il-Clan storyline for Catalyst as far as novels go?
He was given the task of novelizing the lore. The actual events were determined elsewhere. Essentially they would hand him their plan and say "Make a story out of these plot points."
Having been on a MechAssault binge lately I've been pleasantly surprised by the attention to detail and by what those games accomplished for their time, as well as their ambition. Structure lights flicker off as you blast them open and expose the understructure, glass shatters from windows, whole buildings crumble, and effectively everything could be demolished. For something made to run on 64 megabytes of RAM, MechAssault's destruction was surprising to see when stepping down from MW5. It was also interesting to see not just the glowing cracks and panel-lines as you got closer to death, but also the glowing radiator/heat sink strips on battlemechs since they both provided a way to read your heat and health level at a glance years before Dead Space's RIGs. Though it was lost in MA2, there was even limb health in MA1 allowing you to cripple legs, or blow off arms - though it's not easy to really dig into given the sluggishness of console and early aim assist. Even stuff like the ingame menu or the old Conquest mode feel ahead of their time with MA2 since faction-based warfare and galaxy maps have come to mind with Helldivers 2. MA1 brought BattleMech action to early Xbox Live and in general put BattleTech on a console, simplified as it was, and MA2 is where the game design became more ambitious and interesting. MechAssault will always live in the shadow of full-blooded MechWarrior titles, and unfortunately that tends to overshadow the fact that MA2 managed to be a multiplayer combined arms game - a first for BattleTech's videogames, if I'm not mistaken. Seamless transitions out of a mech, on foot, and into whatever else you want to pilot is something that only MWLL has done since, and consequently I don't think any other BattleTech videogame has captured scale the same way. I think when most people think of MechAssault, it's MA2 they picture. Unfortunately it tends to be MA2's weakest moments and poor writing which I believe aren't just a product of the Jihad/Dark Age, but also the sub-two-year development window that Day 1 had to work in against the ambitious scale they were going for. The production level is definitely higher with MA2, but the writing never catches up. MA1 benefits from being fairly simple and self contained and I think isn't too out there in most regards. MA2, though - It'd be easy to point at the data cores, travel distances, or basically anything else, but one super basic example of MA2's writing pitfalls is probably how they don't recognize the Wobbies until the player is basically halfway through the game, beat 9/22 levels, or alternatively has gone through 2/5 of the planets in the game. This is saying nothing of the boss fights. When I say MechAssault, it's not the combined arms teamplay that comes to mind - it's Korn while fighting the comically dumb 'ubermech', or Papa Roach and the huge-ass spidermech. MechAssault at it's worst, and at it's furthest from it's overshadowed potential. MA2's foundation and game design are ambitious in a good way, and properly developed presents an interesting exchange in sacrificing the depth of MW to represent a more 'complete' BattleTech game from mechs to VTOLs all the way down to infantry. On that note, I think a lot about how the GDL novels - particularly the first two - would be fantastic to translate to videogames and probably a good fit for a more grounded and polished take on MechAssault. Thunder Rift feels like it has the progression or arc of a videogame in particular - intro maybe as Durant Carlyle, get bodied by the Marauder, then over to Grayson and movement/stealth in the city before being introduced to the anti-infantry terror of Light Mechs. You get a taste of what you'll eventually fight, and then you're put in a position where even something like a Wasp is a 'boss' before working your way up over the course of the game. Granted I think it ends up a lot more Metal Gear than the arcade action of MechAssault, but I can dream.
I hate to be the barer of bad news, but your beloved Mechassault nearly killed Mechwarrior as a hole. We had 1,2,3,4, and all their expansions for the better part of a decade. I played Mechassault Demo and I knew it was gonna kill Mechwarrior and it nearly did as it took over a decade for MWO to finally show after 4 because of Mechassault and the desire for Microsoft to be hyper focused on the XBox. Not to mention all the meddling of Harmony Gold suing constantly just because they can. Didn't help that Crimson Skies on the Xbox failed as well. Microst didn't see any profit and promptly just dumped it all. Microsoft single handedly nearly killed Fasa Studios as a whole. I don't know what exec at Microsoft or Piranha Games got them to make MWO, but it saved Mechwarrior as a video game even though I'm not a fan of it.
@@sgt_s4und3r54 Interestingly it'd seem that MechAssault put MechWarrior on ice initially because of how well it suited the Halo-fueled dawn of the Xbox. MW4 and MechCommander 2 had released by the time the Xbox hit while MechAssault had kicked around conceptually since around October of '99, and out of these three options it was MechAssault that they pursued from 2001 'til release in 2002, and it was MechAssault that they chose to push on with in spite of all the acclaim MW4 garnered. It probably didn't help that the MW games have always had something of a tumultuous development history and that every other title seemed to be made by a new studio. There was even a FASA MW5 concept titled 'MechWarrior Prime', but it was struck down early on in 2003 presumably in favor of MA2, and from there you could probably more justly lay blame on it for bleeding Microsoft's interest in BattleTech with how it purportedly didn't sell well enough to warrant a third game. That MechAssault 1 and 2 are something of the debut of the Dark Age and Jihad probably doesn't help, nor the implication that both games were put together within the span of a year or two. When it comes to Microsoft, it's not like they sold the IP/license, though. Heck, they sat on it long enough for Jordan Weisman to take an interest in doing something with it again, which led them to working with PGI in 2008-2009 to make the initial pitch trailer for MechWarrior 3015/MW5, the pitch fumbling because of contract/platform restrictions (to say nothing of the economic recession), and then retooling it into MWO. It's funny in a sort of roundabout way that the dude responsible for making BattleTech is also the one who started the Dark Age, the one who got the ball rolling on MWO, and the one who made HBS and HBS BattleTech. Heck, HBS's studiohead is also one of the producers and executives from MechAssault 1 and 2.
The biggest issue for me as a fan BT from the 90’s which was completely missed by Mage, is that the scale was different with DA. If the click mechs had remained at classic scale, I think it would’ve done a lot better keeping older fans. Simply because we could use our old ral Partha minis with the DA ones.
A systems collapse causing a big regression isn't *the worst* idea for the setting, but you kind of have to go into more effort to explain it as well as understand that even the most drastic of these events tend not to hit all areas as hard at the same time. There was room for the new scrappy cobbled together mechs while not trying to erase the classic mechs, especially since those mechs (largely) survived the collapse of the Star League.
I blame Collectable Card Games (CCG) for a lot of this. Right around turn of the century, Magic the Gathering and Pokemon were making money hand over fist. Soon there was a CCG for just about everything: AvP, L5R, you name it. The cards themselves were relatively cheap to produce, and each year new and 'better' cards came out to trounce the older cards. Players continually had to pay for new cards to remain relevant in the game space. Jordan Weisman had sold lead miniatures and the occasional technical readouts to Battletech fans for decades, but they were expensive to make. Once you had the occasional sourcebook, it was hard to milk the player base for more revenue. So Weisman closed FASA and started up Wizkids to spin up Mage Knight and Battletech: Dark Age. Clix tried to combine collectable wargaming and collectable cards, but it really didn't catch on in my small college town. The only way to sell the new Clix miniatures was to invalidate the old classic ones. Gray Monday was the hard reset that came of it.
The half-assed attempt to explain away why there are so few Mechs is that people were so shell-shocked by the aftermath of the jihad that pretty much everyone agreed to some kind of disarmament. Besides parts and everything else becoming more rare the kings of the battlefield were so expensive, all of a sudden, that they became a rarity. This is absolutely garbage and lazy writing but that's what they shoehorned in later.
I was someone that was already playing HeroClix at the time. My uncles introduced me to Battletech years before. When the Dark Age hit, I picked up a bunch of packs. My Uncles hated it and my brother wasn't into it until we realized that we could cross over the existing HeroClix pieces into the game. We had the Hulk and Superman fighting Mechs and having a blast doing so. As a stand alone game, I did enjoy having a full army with 1-2 mechs per side and everything else infantry and tanks. A shame the lore was so trash. They could have called it "Periphery Wars" and it would have fixed a lot of issues.
In my country i missed a lot of the older novels but at the time with dark age they were much easier to get so i ended up with quite a few and thought they were 'fine' but for the life of me i can't remember any of the story except for the plot that the hpgs went down, i guess that says something.
So I'm a HUGE fan of Dark Age, but this video was hilarious. MWDA was responsible for getting me into Battletech, so even though I'm not naive to it's issues, still holds a substantial part of my heart. Good video
Tangibly, what the FREAK is the Wall? I mean, it sounds like some kinda super galactic shield that is ridiculously impossible, and it keeps the badies out. WTF!?! What the heck is it? How do you surround all those systems in a vacuum of space where no one else can enter (And I assume leave)?
It will always have a special place in my heart for better or worse because MW:DA blind boxes were the first minis I ever owned, back in elementary/middle school. MW3 and 4 were my intro to the setting so I recognized the MW name but not BattleTech lol. Don't know much about the lore, but one of these days I'll be reading and playing through that era so with the power of nostalgia your count might go from 5 fans to 6
A big company acquiring a beloved IP and, in a fit of astounding arrogance and blind greed, ruining what people loved about it to "make it their own" and find an ephemeral new audience who fails to materialize. Am I talking about Star Wars or Battletech? Even I don't know anymore.
Star Wars, Battletech, Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40k, Dungeons & Dragons, and the list goes on and on. And that's before you get to the nonsense EA does. Look at what they did to Dead Space and dozens of other franchises.
Mechassault was my introduction to battletech when I was around 6 or 7. It will always hold a special place in my heart, since I only had Mechassault, Halo, Star Wars: Starfighter. Mechassault taught me how 3rd person shooters work, and how to think tactically and use tge right tools. That said, knowing what I know now about the "lore" and history tied in to it, yikes.
You know what you’re describing you’re describing the whole timeframe between 2016 and present apparently WizKid was the first company to pull this shit and think they could get away with it apparently somebody somewhere so it was kids was doing and said that’s a great idea and plunged entire fandoms into chaos
The only thing I liked about Dark Age was that the Elementals were so prolific I managed to make a binanary of Elementals by buying the out of loose clearance bin in gameshops. Grabbed them, popped them off the click base and painted them to match my galaxy's standard artic camo
great organized play support for the first few years. prizes worth 50 bucks and we had play events at five stores a week. boom boom boom. I was a casual who would just meme army and troll the top tier players. good times.
A got a bunch of Dark Age models from a friend of mine who was cleaning out his parents basement. I'm glad it's stuff I can use on the tabletop as proxy models for the things I care about since I'm not giving CGL any more of my money but the digging that I did about the Dark Age just made me depressed.
I'm in a good mood, so I want to say something positive about the Dark Age. The Black Knight 5H design from that era is freaking badass. I love it. But that's about it. I have yet waaaay to much lore to dig into pre FedCom civil war, that never even tried to understand the jihad and the later eras. Considering that the jihad killed off my favorite subfaction with the Knights of the Inner Sphere, I don't think I will like it very much.
I dropped out (bootcamp) right as FASA was dying. When I finally got home after nearly two years of training and deployments, Dark Age was in full swing and I couldn't recognize anything. So I dropped it. I've only come back in the last five or so years, and while I'm having a blast playing and reading again, as far as I'm concerned, canon stops ~3067.
Dark Age was like WizK kicking in your door, jumping on your dining table and laying a metre long turd, bowing gracefully then leaping back into the night
At my LGS there was a box of "Mechwarrior Dark Age" mechs, it had been sitting on the shelves for months. Just when I began to get into battletech I went to go buy myself some kind of mech set. As I picked up the dark age box set, it felt.... "off" to me. Thank god I didn't.
I remember trying to teach a darkage player how to play battletech, they actually tried to stop my thug from going anywhere by placing a bunch of crunches in my path. We looked at him and asked what he was doing and he said while looking me in the eye "my infantry is preventing you from moving" I then proceeded to crush his troops under foot while using inferno ammunition on the hexes his other troops were in. Battletech master rules revised is the best. Told the kid to throw everything he knew from dark age into the trash and learn what real battletech was if he wanted to play with us. Tough love it was but we saved two from the dark ages. We started then with lvl 1 tech after that and slowly moved them to lvl 2 and later clans.
When clans came out my group ignored the clans for a while, infact we had our own timeline. Every weapon that came out after 3067 doesn't exist at all and stone's mother while he was within her was "accidently" stepped on by a random clan mech.
Im about to watch the video, but if you were around back then it's easy to know why the hate was real. They spent years building up the WoB and just skipped over it. Then they dropped so many bread crumbs that went absolutely no where. The biggest kick in the crotch? It had the exact same conclusion that EVERY major BT conflict has had over the last few events. Spoilers: the force that got defeated. They planned this all along.....
We didn't buy it as BattleTech but as something new to play. It was fun for a bit but we quickly got bored and moved on. Never slowed our table top play of the original, stopped our reading/collecring the old books or long running campaign game. Don't understad the hate,
I like the concept and really wanted to run a CBT ruleset campaign in the Darkage era (but with real mechs, not agromechntrash) but it never got off the ground. Maybe one day. The execution from Wizkid, scaling etc? Left a very sour taste.
as a player since 1984, I see the timeline in it's entirety. the era's give me book marks to explain things, but I see the story as a whole. man's early space exploration early factions form (first exodus) disputes in space (age of war) golden age (starleague) coup (Amaris coup) 2nd exodus (Kerenski) succession wars / clans form /comstar forms clan invasion Tukayyid truce second starleague/Davion-Steiner civil war Comstar civil war - blakist jyhad republic of the sphere dark age ilclan because I see this as a whole and not in pieces, I don't get caught up in the minutia. while individual leaders are important, at the same time, they really don't matter. while i don't care for clicky-tech, I don't have a problem making the era work within the overall story.
Okay…I’m sorta fascinated by little dark age type things. The one cool thing that intrigued me about Star Trek discovery was The Burn, where some shit went down and it caused a galactic chain reaction where most of the refined and in use dilitihium went super critical and pretty much wrecked galactic civilization. Call of Duty ghosts’ background of the US being a 2nd or Third World country was cool. Same with all the endings in Mass Effect 3 (especially the correct one where you destroy everything) where ALL tech based on mass effect technology gets popped, what happens next is the part I’m interested in narratively.
Unbeknownst to me, my first exposure to BattleTech was the MechAssault games. I loved those games, especially the 2nd one, but I always wondered if there was anything behind it. It wasn't until someone mentioned it in passing in a video about MechWarrior that I found out it was a non-canonical offshoot. It makes me sad that they weren't more successful. That arcadey action is what would make a ton of money in a gacha game these days.
I didn't have anyplace that I could get normal BT models, but the clix were everywhere. They worked ok for Alpha Strike. And keep Hawaiian pizza out of this!
Late-90's early 00's was a rough time to be a wargamer and miniature guy. Magic the Gathering radically altered the game market, turning it into a world of random starter decks and booster packs similar to baseball cards decades before; pre-painted soft plastic miniatures hit the market and were the future of the hobby, as they could be sold the same way collectible card games could be sold. MW: Dark Age is partly the result of those market forces at work. I don't miss that era one bit TBH. I might be enjoying watching WotC run itself into the ground for more than one reason.
Also the definite all top pilots were women very few if any were men also they said they would never retire sets 5 mins later they started retiring sets.
People who think the dark age as a "hard reboot" don't have the mental faculties to understand what a "hard reboot" means A reboot starts the franchise over, dark age doesn't do that in any form. So it literally can never be classified as a reboot
Reading around, I've been given the impression CGL keeps this era around because of licensing issues. Topps owns the IP and licenses it to CGL, and I think they don't want a setting reset. So they went and moved foward and made the Il'Clan era, which they were allowed to do.
I am wondering if what the Sea Fox are doing is restoring the HPG. Also wasn't there some Davion Tech that was similar, also not as well developed? I could see the ilClan era working its way back up to establish a working HPG Network again or at least something similar. I mean the first one to get back to a working structure of any kind of interstellar Network will be in a big lead over everyone else.
I had fun with Dark Age. May not have enjoyed it as much if one of my local stores didn't open boosters and sell single models. I did run tournaments at a store depending on player count, the owner officiated if my playing would give us an even player count. Many of ud tournament judges told Wizkids the bkind boosters were a problem. They didnt start coming out with faction starter packs until just as the gane collapsed
Quick correction. In this video I state that Battletech started losing popularity in the Clan Invasion. This isn't quite accurate. What I meant to say is that a lot of older fans began to lose interest around that time. Clan Invasion was when the franchise was at its peak.
I recently had a discussion with someone that began their view of the Battletech history from the year 2000. he didn't believe there was a strong following of the game during the fasa years. I enlightened him that Battletech was at it's all-time best from 1991 thru 1997. and that CGL can only dream of achieving what fasa had accomplished during those years.
that said, CGL b.s. aside, they have done a lot for the IP. but they have a long way to go before they surpass the true golden age of this game.
I honestly never cared for the clan invasion. And even less for Dark Age and the Word of Blake BS. The Clans were supposed to be an analog for the Mongols (if the use of Khan for their leadership didn't give it away) They weren't. The Mongols didn't really have any superior technology other than their bows. What they had was superior tactics and strategy. The Battletech Clans had superior technology and inferior tactics and strategy. And they acted way more like pre-shogunate samurai than unified and disciplined Mongol warriors. Further, Mongols survived on mare's milk on campaign so they had created their own food as they traveled.
The Clans were set up for dueling not total war which is the way the IS handles disputes. Once the Inner Sphere figured out they could grind them down and exploit their long supply lines the Clan defeat was inevitable. Attrition is what the Inner Sphere does best. And with their vast manufactuering base they could simply drown the Clanners with much simpler AFVs then finish them off with the mechs. Because how many Saracem. Harrasser or Savannah Master hover tanks can you buy for the price of one Clan mech?
In other words, the Clan invasion could have been done better.
I'd also say it wasn't needed. You could have generated more interesting stories by having the great houses fractured by the machinations of ComStar. You already had them set up to be the big villain by the Helm Memory Core affair. And since they controlled all communications they would have been a much more difficult enemy to defeat than the Clans ever were. It would have been like medieval countries trying to defeat the Papacy. The pope had lands and influence everywhere in the west. And vast amounts of money. Tough nut to crack. ComStar would have been even worse.
@Wastelandman7000 you make good points and have an interesting premise. not convinced about the Mongol hypothesis. Just using titles, doesn't mean they are using the same philosophies.
what I was getting at was to use some of the key dates/events from the timeline, but run your games history the way you like it. kinda the best of both worlds.
I absolutely agree that the J-war could have been for more devastating. with Comstar retaining a certain amount on anonymity and control of communication as well as banking (c-bills). they could have (and possibly would have) transformed each of the houses into their districts as individual power bases. (if you remember the Succession wars board game) the map was broken up by each house and within each house, the districts. even with the numerous factions throughout the battletech universe from the beginning thru fed-com civil war. now add in each district as a separate faction - no longer loyal to a house.
that would give rise to a renewed clan invasion.
then, a personality similar to the Cameron of the starleague founding could rise up to form the republic of the sphere.
also, after Tukayyid, the clans had to change their military doctrine to accommodate things like armor, artillery and infantry. some clan leaders were stubborn, but many had gone to limited combined arms.
This is the first video I've found actually talking about the Dark Ages a bit. Anyone I've talked to irl avoided the question or said they'd rather not remember. This little glimpse you've given me has helped me understand why.
Thank you.
Devlin Stone is why you never give up your firearms.
The success of the CC showed that greatly.
The way the Republic of the Sphere was just basically invented for Devlin Stone to rule over was one of the dumbest parts of the modern canon. The worst part was where they gave that clown massive amounts of power and the first thing he does is demand everyone scrap most of their mechs. Because... reasons. I half expected for it to be revealed that Stone was an ancestor of Steffen Ameris all along or something.
Even more idiotic is that not only did he make that demand, but the Great Houses and all the nobles and mercenary companies actually complied instead of saying "lol fuck you" and going back to slapping each other around like they have since the 24th Century.
@@z3r0_35 freakin' exactly. At least it sounds like later on it kind of revealed that not nearly as many mechs ended up scrapped as they said. But still, that entire concept was just a really dumb way to justify a new artificial scarcity.
@@dogofwar6769right? Which is ridiculous, because had the Kerfuffle been handled correctly, it could have easily created said Scarcity.
Alex jones was right… even in the 32nd century. Never turn in your weapons
I'm insulted. Devlin Stone was a communist.
Oh, the stories I could tell...
I would love to hear them.
@@mageleader3699 same. Sounds like it was a real cluster
Would love to hear them over a drink sometime.
Mr Welch's best known critique for these tabletop resets at the time was: "don't nuke your setting." For his favorite setting, Mystara, the reset basically killed off the main conflicts or replaced them with ones that paled in comparison.
For BattleTech, the conflicts after FASA always felt as though they had the depth of puddles compared to what came before. That and the ability for any given faction to suddenly have better-than-lostech equipment cheapened the consequences for sustaining catastrophic losses, despite having re-nuked a lot of the infrastructure to the setting.
BattleTech stops for me in October 3067... The Jihad. The whole setting just goes off the deep end and I frankly just didn't like it. I read a couple RotS civil war books, but they just lack scope.
@@Deridus Same here, honestly. When new creatives turn an IP into something it is not, I just write it off as a very expensive fanfic.
@@pit2444 I liked what they were trying to do, but they just didn't stick the landing. It had potential, but... I dunno. I just don't know what the disconnect was nor where.
@@Deridus From the accounts I have heard, much of the lore was rushed and/or forced to fit in new units/factions, which goes a long way to explaining the inconsistencies.
@@Deridus Concur. The lore just goes straight off the rails after 3067. Like... the Jihad is a neat idea, but the whole arc of Battletech was humanity climbing out of the technological dark age of the Succession Wars. So the Jihad/ Dark Age story arc was really just a regression back to the starting point of the story; basically erasing what came before. If they wanted to make a game with scarcer mechs and more primitive tech, they should have set it in like the 2900s, not throw the entire lore and story of Battletech straight into the trash.
As a more recent Battletech fan I don't have a lot of the same hate for the Dark Age as some BT veterans do. But the more I think about it the more this reminds me of how 343 industries took over and subsequently ruined Halo. Which I absolutely loathe them for. So at least on that point I can understand.
I will say this though. I do like the idea of super heavy mechs as a concept. I even own a few ironwind metals Aries miniatures. Which I think makes for great painting projects if nothing else.
Hopefully one day BT will find itself in the hands of true fans that give it the respect and reverence it deserves.
It already is, no matter what Catalyst or any other entity does moving forward, the old Battletch lore, books and even models are already out there, they can't take them away from you. I am new to the franchise, and i haven't gone past the clan invasion, in a way i have no need to, it's all there: the houses, the tech, the mechs and an epic conflict.
I absolutely despise the Dark Age, but I absolutely love the Aries and Poseidon super heavies
@phillipmorel5116 I love the super heavies and mobile fortresses as a concept. I do not appreciate how they were executed. The rule of cool is a great concept but if you need to trample all over the lore and its fans to do it. It becomes uncool and defeats the purpose of the rule of cool.
I may never use my super heavies on tabletop and I am ok with that. They look cool and that's enough for me.
As someone who's a bit older, the 90s/early 00s were filled with companies all too willing to shotgun their own settings for no real reason. TSR (Dragonlance), R. Talsorian (Cyberpunk 3rd ed), White Wolf (every single damn product), Games Workshop (WHFB/Storm of Chaos, it just took another decade to die). And of course, Battletech. Nothing makes me twitch harder than the setting altering nuke that takes away everything recognizable and worthwhile about it and turns it into a bland mush.
what? and pay royalties and settlements to every fan fic writer out there? reboots need to be 20-30% distinct to get insurance and investment due to IP liabilities.
@@WTFoolproof I mean, I'll give credit where credit is due - Mike Pondsmith realized people hated Cyberpunk 3rd so much he just shoved it into an alternate timeline.
Don't forget Traveller.
@@jaffarebellion292 Good one. I know I'm missing a few, because everyone did it. And it boggles me to this day.
@z2ei I never saw the pattern until you brought it up. Even Star Wars introduced the Yuuzhan Vong and flipped their own table, but I never noticed all of these things happened across different IPs in the same relative time frame.
They say you can still hear Pardoe's screams of anger as he tries to make the dark age canon fit.
*feint shouts of frustration echo in the wind*
Can you blame him? I can't.
@@Wastelandman7000 I would have liked the dark age more if it didn't have all the goofy shit and then the jihad happens to try and explain the blackout. Actually the blackout itself isn't a bad idea, I'd say it should have just been a quick affair that saw the borders redrawn and factions wiped out like the capellan's instead of say the FWL? Especially since their suppose to be the more stable nation as opposed to the Confederation where its top down managerial style of authoritarianism demands and requires monitoring of the public 24/7. It's should have put those nations foundational thesis to the test and instead all they did was just ridiculous shit.
I tend to fall into "the Dark Age was an interesting idea that was horribly executed" camp of Battletech fans myself. If I were to reboot it, I would write off everything after 3067 as being either an elaborate series of simulations and war games or in-universe speculative fiction, keep all the tech and stuff but write new fluff for it all so people can keep using their older stuff, and then instead of the WoB going apeshit I'd basically come up with a Fifth Succession War kicking off around 3070-ish, with the main factions being the allied Federated Suns and Lyran Alliance, the Trinity Alliance (Capellans, Canopians, and Taurians), the Draconis Combine (plus Clan Nova Cat), and the FWL and their Blakist allies. ComStar, the MRBC, other Periphery powers like the Marian Hegemony and Outworlds Alliance, and the rest of the Clans would be involved to varying degrees at varying points (I could see the Ghost Bears and Kuritans going at it again, for example), plus Rasalhague is still fighting a guerilla war for their territory.
I could get behind this!
That's good!
Throw in a self-replicating version of Ameris's AI powered ships and mechs returning on a rampage after centuries of replication in the deep in the phrepery. Do you have a campaign where everyone does everything they have but it never ending wave of robot mechs and ships while trying to find out who controls them. An rogue AI, Ameris's descendent, a excaped branch of the Cameron family? The rush to find out and stop the machines will be similar to the early clan days.
@@tsiefhtes Actually I already did come up with an idea like that, only it involves a Star League-era AI with access to automated factories and the resources of an entire star system. It is, however, contained to the system because apparently AI-controlled ships malfunction if you try to jump them through hyperspace.
Reminds me of an aborted MegaMek tournament I was going to take part in a few years back. The premise was, instead of pointing WarShips at everyone's capitals and threatening Jihad over the dissolution of the Second Star League, the WOB instead approached the Inner Sphere and Periphery powers with a grand plan to finally kick out and/or totally exterminate the Clans--and everyone agreed with this plan.
Sadly, the tournament never got past the preliminary stages (where we paired off to sort-of reenact the Word driving Wolf's Dragoons off of Mars), but that could have been a killer alternate timeline. Those of us who signed up were split into Spheroid and Clan sides, and within the teams, we got to pick practically every faction short of pirates and maybe mercs (I was going to represent the Taurians).
The first time someone tried to tell me about the wider Battletech universe - they were Dark Age fans.
It took me over a decade to care about the franchise again.
It was always clear to me from the outset that Dark Age was about monetizing the "Clicktech" system with a bunch of "cool new 'Mechs" and then trying to backfill a reason for their existence afterward.
The Dark Age made me the BT Player I am today.
I'm sorry to hear that 😅. Glad to have you on board.
Same
@@mageleader3699 🤣
It's where I got my start in BattleTech. Before that I think I'd only seen some kids playing the NechWarrior rpg in my high school library at lunchtime. There were definitely a lot of clunky looking contraptions passed off as canon mechs. They may have been, if you were looking at them in a carnival hall of mirrors distorting their images
Grey Monday as it was written doesn't work. Grey Monday means everyone goes back to courier ships and the great house is as we know them cease to exist. It would be a second age of war. They just ignored the logistics of that plot point. It's bad writing to establish an entire era around.
Not to mention that the clans were not affected.. wich basically means the clans win. Since no single planet has any hope of withstanding a full clan assault on its own, wich it would have to do because no one would know its even under attack... its the grand central of plotholes
@@riptors9777 and you cant tell me the Diamond Sharks/Sea puppies wouldnt have cashed in by selling HPG tech to the IS...and the Fed Suns could still reconstitute the old fax system
@@riptors9777 don't forget, for some reason even the Clans downsized their military because Devlin Stone asked them to. Until Malvina Hazen was bored and mounted a full sized invasion that is...then all of a sudden the Jade Falcons had a full sized Touman again. It's quite magical how dark age writing worked.
Wizkids clearly didn't do it's homework. they completely missed the 4th succession war. in which house Davion was given a communication edict by Comstar and Davion used 'fax technologies' to communicate. bypassing the HPG system.
I guess a hundred years later and IQs suddenly dropped off!
@@Alpha_Digamma Considering how often the Wolfs came back from the brink of anihilation without any explanation as to where they even got all the manpower and material thats not all that surprising
So basically what Age of Sigmar is to Warhammer Fantasy.
Yup. Came along after something dumb ruined everything (FedCom Civil War/Jihad = End Times) then offered a turd as a replacement
If they had wanted some sort of "Agromech refits" being used in combat it would have made more sense for a deep periphery nation.
Yeah, but, when they showed up in the novels they usually didn't last long. Thinking of Mercenary's Star where the Grey Death had to run in and save the improvised "technicals" mechs because they were having their asses handed to them by the Kuritans.
I appreciate the use of O Fortuna
Thanks for explaining dark age to me. I never looked into anything past 3060.
Dang Games Workshop decided to copy Wizkids' homework for some reason...
Rebranding BattleTech as MechWarrior: Dark Age is not a bad idea in a void.
Having the setting go into a soft reboot to handle it is not a bad idea in a void.
Making a new game system is not a bad idea in a void.
Making miniatures prepainted is not a bad idea in a void.
However the way it was handled together along with everything else was so bad that people disliking it is to be expected and I'm shocked that Wiz thought this was a good idea.
I think the biggest miss was not designing the click units to fit the old hex spaces. If you'd had cool looking units (big if, I know) you could have gotten the old fans to buy some just to use in their own games.
DarkAge is to BT what DisneyWars is to the Galaxy far, far away: an example how NOT do do things with a glorious IP. Star Wars, like BT, will be carried by it's fans, not the IP holders.
@@Deridus Amen.
Oooooh, Dark Age is like Age of Sigmar/End timesing, gotcha.
the Dark Age Clix game never happened in my hometown, as BattleTech died prematurely back in the start of the 2000s. when the Comic shop that carried it at the time, closed down due to the owner finding work at Bioware. Eventually 20 years later in 2021, BattleTech did come back, only too be killed off again, due to the owner of the downtown game shop at that time, not only failing to stock the game properly, but also not allowing anyone to run demos nor events for it. Thankfully the store recently has a new owner. and BattleTech is back on its feet again and the community is starting to grow now.
Welcome back Mage
The Wizkids click Mechwarrior game was my introduction to Mechwarrior/Battletech as whole and is the reason I'm still a fan today. So it's hard for me to hate it.
To be fair though, I only played the game and got my lore fix from reading older battletech sources, I knew nothing about the lore of Dark Age... probably because there wasn't any and realise that to this day I still know nothing about Dark Age which is probably for the best. Blissful ignorance.
While working on my BT lore videos I always dread going into the Dark Age because of how flimsy it gets. I have piles of notes then "boom" scraps. It makes it difficult especially when stuff that doesn't make sense happens and I try to make it fit. I've given my share of mini rants in my videos and I feel your pain.
Well, you always have the option of simply making it plain as far as you're concerned, that was someone's bad acid trip and never happened....
Because we're the fans. If we say the lore ended before the Dark Age it ended before the Dark Age and they have no say in the matter.
Despite all the controversy surrounding the Dark Age, I like some of the mechs introduced for the Era. Stuff like the Agrotera, Gun, Calliope, Anzu.
Hermit Crab fits in with the crab family pretty well
I Started with dark age, granted I wasn't to deep into the lore since I was but a wee lad, I just saw robots and robots/mechs have always grabbed my attention as a kid. Still paint BT minis and play games when I can from time to time
Clan Wolf traveling through Steiner space and eating up what...like a quarter or third of their territory with like zero resistance just has to be my "favorite" piece of Dark Age lore out of the huge selection of "brilliant" Dark Age writing.
Melissa's stupidity should have ended the monarchy for good, not die a "hero" and pass it off to her niece.
I was just getting into Battletech about a year or so before FASA announced that it was shutting down and being sold off to WizKidz/Topps. One of the things that I remember pissing everyone off was that WizKids basically unceremoniously announced that they were basically ceasing all production of the original game in favor of their 'new and improved' Mechwarrior dark age game. Which was just a crappy collectable mini game that were all blind box. And even worse the new canon didn't make much sense and the game mechanics were just a mess and almost no one played it. It's why that game died off very fast.
This reminds me of what Games Workshop is doing right now. They're slowly pushing Firstborn Marines out of official play, which has the largest model aftermarket in the entire community. They're trying to take some of the oldest and largest army collections and make them unusable. A lot of players are not willing to rebuy entire armies. Then they keep reworking the rules and can't seem to figure out how to actually balance the game.
@@diggman88 Well they're not going so far as to just toss the old models, but yeah they are trying to make these old armies less effective. I still remember when a friend tried to get me into the game. He was suggest I get a small Tau starter army and it was going to be like almost $300 all things considered. Warhammer is _not_ a cheap game.
@@diggman88 Or, you know, the unceremonious murder of Warhammer Fantasy, because their writers were literally too inept to think of any other plot than "the entire setting dies". Ten years on hold and that's still all they could do.
To be fair to GW, the older Space Marine lines were looking very, very dated and given the scale, there just wasn't a lot they could with the medium. I heard rumors about the actual dies wearing out, but I never bothered to look into it.
Honestly, my heart has always been with my Imperial Guard. I even have a full platoon of Praetorians! Alas, I just lost interest with 40k over the years. Gave away my T'au army to one nephew, and all my spare Rhinos to another. I still have my Chaos, SM, and Eldar armies, plus a sizable Nid army sans HQ... but I don't have anyone to play with, and the new rules keep mucking 'em up.
@@Deridus I hadn't heard that about GW's dies wearing out, but one of the jobs I've had in the past was injection molding. Although for practical parts and not things like minis. I could see worn out dies being a real problem. Still, I don't see they they would need to completely invent a new units instead of biting the proverbial bullet and having new dies created.
thank you for articulating the reason why a majority of BattleTech fans don't move past the FedCom civil war. while some good ideas have been made since their shoddy execution as well as the general black hole of the dark age just kills most peoples interest in the IP. so instead we sit in our comfortable vertical slice of hard-science neo-feudalism and dream of a day when the universe will finally be respected and moved forward properly.
Exactly 💯
So is the solution to retcon everything after the FedCom civil war?
The worst part, as I see it, is that Gray Monday could have *worked* if it was the main show rather than just a quick note to start things off.
It would have worked if it happened shortly after the Helm Memory Core was discovered and disseminated. And sans a Clan invasion. Because Helm set ComStar up as the big bad....then did nothing with it.
ComStar seeing the HMC spreading then panicking and pulling the plug would have made sense. Hell, even the name would make sense given it was the Grey Death that found the damned thing.
@@Wastelandman7000 Personally, I think Grey Monday (the HPG blackout, that is) was an awful idea. The basic idea of the Jihad, that is, WoB flipping out and going all attempted-genocide on the inner sphere is fine, and actually a sensible story beat.
But the context of that story beat is that the inner sphere ISN'T THE INNER SPHERE OF 3025 ANYMORE. And this is what the writers seem to have forgotten. WoB going ballistic makes sense, but the thing is, the Inner Sphere is in the midst of a technological and political renaissance. They have recovered the lostech knowledge. They're starting to make new, improved designs even BETTER than lostech. The great houses have started making warships again, and definitely know how to make HPGs for themselves now. Comstar (and WoB) have, in this context, kind of losing their relevance and the method of power and control that they had.
And the IS militaries are stronger than ever. They've increased their ranks of mechs since they now have the capability to design and build brand-new mechs, and they've had to build strength to fight the clans- and gained a lot of battle experience in doing so. Not to mention, the IS has become more unified as a result of facing an external threat.
So... how TF am I supposed to believe that WoB, a little splinter faction of an organization that was never all *that* big to begin with, somehow manages to do so much damage to every great house? Like... WoB shouldn't stand a *chance* against the military might of the great houses in 3067.
Given that the Helm Memory Core had "all the knowledge a Star League expeditionary force would need", it definitely had plans for HPGs in it. And in the earlier books, we see that the great houses do indeed have methods of interstellar communication (such as Hanse Davion's "black box"), so Grey Monday just doesn't make sense. The (quite silly) explanation that it somehow altered *physics itself* so that HPG communications no longer work (except the clan HPGs, because *reasons*) just falls *really* flat.
Really the worst sin committed by the Dark Age isn’t what it was, but rather what it failed to be. The core concept of an HPG blackout is rife with interesting possibilities. Where the clan invasion swelled the scope of the universe and game, dark age could bring it back to basics, albeit with a unique twist for the setting. Poor writing coupled with the click tech lineup meant this would never happen.
Those wizkids minis... look how they massacred my boys... even stormwind metal minis are high artistry compared to that. Anyways.. the answer to why its so hated is the same as with every beloved 80s-90s IP that got nuked and rebooted: The reboots where motivated by nothing more then corporate interests, they werent necesary, they didnt improve on anything, they just wanted to fleece you for more money. They couldnt be arsed to produce lore friendly products so they just wiped the table and told you to consume product and get excited for next product.
The thing they forgot however is that people are not required to buy whatever you present to them. A lesson that certain developer studios are currently learning on the PC gaming market XD
While I like a few units from the Dark Age, the setting is so fundamentally broken I cannot see how it can be fixed. So much of it is just "things happen because we needed them to" that it breaks any functioning brain if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. Honestly, keep some of the nicer looking units as is, scrap everything post FedCom civil war, and restart the damn era as the 5th succession war. Put the nice stuff in there as new mechs for logical faction picks, and call it a day. Let us never think of that era again, please. It hurts me.
There are a few ways to rework it, but it would basically look like what disney did to the expanded universe: Cherry-pick the good things and yeet the rest like it's the Usurper's body behind a Golden Corral.
@@Deridus Basically. Although considering what we're throwing back there, is it truly comparable?
@@asimplenobody7797 It's as close as I can get. Perhaps a reverse or mirror image?
I like those jerry rigged Battlemechs. I'll happily concede that their reasons for existing might be dumb, but I could see something like that being used by a pirate army or desperate periphery nation. Mandaloregaming has a great video on Home World 2 where he discusses the ships you use. They're all industrial space ships meant for things like mining or cargo hauling, but with a war breaking out, the Clan you play as needs anything they can get. So they look at what they have and repurpose them. Sure, that's a mining ship, but we can complement it's respectable armor with actual weapons and shields. He said something like "it's like building an army out of catterpillar construction vehicles and soviet ww2 tanks. It's stupid and incredibly desperate, but has a rule of cool."
And I personally love that. Which is why I also love the Ugly class star fighters from Star Wars. I don't care how shitty they are, I love the Tie-Wing.
Also good job on explaining to people why age of sigmar is hated by Fantasy battles fans. Even if it's good, it's still not warhammer fantasy.
Now Mage, comparing pineapple pizza to communism is an insult so grand I demand satisfaction! When the greasy boxes with a weeping Italian on the cover start arriving on your doorstep, remember me!
You're right. Comparing the two is an insult to communism.
@@mageleader3699
Pineapple on pizza with bacon is great!
It's fruit just like the tomatoe and taste great!
To be honest i liked the idea of mad max meets battletech. I always thought of most of the armys being made up with franken mechs with only the more elite units having mechs that matched their vanilla record sheets.
As far as dark age and beyond goes. I just couldnt make it past 3067. The fedcom civil war is just so much of a mess i have never been looking to look at anything after that in the timeline.
With that being said im glad you where willing to research this stuff and keep up the good work.
In my opinion, the setting should’ve explored the first succession war. What was it like to pilot a mech that started out as a cutting edge piece of equipment only to slowly devolve over time as parts became rarer and the tech became more basic. Imagine playing in the setting where you start out in a SLDF Royal BattleMech and you’re kicking ass left right and center, but after a few engagements you have to start replacing parts. Small things at first like armor and then larger thinks like actuators and eventually weapons systems and even your neurohelmet. The progression of the game’s difficulty comes from the loss of advanced tech. Now that is a setting I’d love to play.
As much as i hate Dark Age as an era, they did introduce some of my favorite looking Battlemechs, like the Xanthos
The only good thing about the Dark age is having more toys to play with. Which is mechs of course. The only good thing about any new "era" right now is having more stuff to mess with and ignore the lore for the dark age. Even with how shit the ilclan era is. I like the new toys but that is all.
I guess I don’t know any better because the only novels I read were ilclan era. As a novel, I really enjoyed “Hour of the Wolf”. I despised “a question of survival” and I found “Redemption Rites” to be decent but nowhere near Hour.
I only got in a few years ago and trying to go through the whole back catalog seemed impossible.
I’ve been really down on CGL though. But I enjoy the plastic mechs.
I think it's hated because it was such a radical departure from the franchise, coupled with gimmicks to capitalize on trends like "hero clicks"
Okay, this is my VERY FIRST time hearing about this period in BT. I cannot believe a company pulled this reboot shit and actually demanded people start over from scratch. They didn't even develop the lore for the dark ages before throwing in everyone's faces. They redid the whole thing and acted like experienced players were complete morons. No wonder BT fans hate it so much.
Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast can give them a run for their money. Or rather a run for loosing money.
If it were not for Dark Age, many of us would not be here to enjoy this stuffy old game.
As a more casual Battletech guy (the video games have always been my homeland for the universe. Tabletop has been Warhammer 40,000 Orks for me), what I'm hearing is that Wizkids somehow pulled off something WORSE than when Games Workshop dropped 'The End Times' on Warhammer Fantasy to force Age of Sigmar out (it took an entire leadership change for GeeDubs to realize that axing their biggest fantasy game in favor of something with ZERO lore but basically puppeting around the old factions like a ghoulish corpse marionette was a terrible idea).
The only thing that makes Geedubs End Times/'Welcome to AoS! you get to buy new armies now!' bs suck less than Wizkids's Dark Age is that, for better or worse, Age of -Shitmar- Sigmar was a (mostly) clean break from -Warhammer Fantasy- the World-that-Was [Gotrek Gurnisson and Grey Seer Thanquol being some of the few exceptions who were plucked from the End Times and dragged into the Age of Sigmar]. Wizkids decided that trying to murder the setting's entire tech tree and go back to interstellar Stone Age... while keeping ALL of the stuff everyone knew and loved about Battletech in the background was a great idea!
Just... how do you piss off a loyal customer base _that_ badly?!
Let me start with, I’m an Alpha Strike guy. CBT has its time and place for me, but I’d rather play two or three games with a company of mechs than spend a day rolling for every medium laser. Back in the day my friends and I welcomed a game of Battletech that didn’t take forever to play.
The era itself was a mixed bag for us. We liked the combined arms aspect. Mechs were handled poorly and the kings of the battlefield were vehicles you could attach to a tow hitch. Industrial mechs made sense to us… if it were pre-Helm Memory core on a backwater planet… I personally didn’t like most of the mech designs from the period. They added too many spikes and exposed ammo bins, etc. The blind boxes were fun on some occasions, like when the local FLGS had a blind box tournament, but there’s nothing worse than getting a box of crap. I stopped playing shortly before they reset the game and made the first three lines unplayable outside of pickup games.
I won’t lie to you, I still occasionally bust out the DA stuff for Alpha Strike games. The infantry look okay enough, as well as some of the smaller vehicles and VTOLs. There’s been a few times that a pair of industrial mechs and some civilians(on foot and on ATVs) armed with rifles had to form a militia to protect a small farming town from raiders. There’s nothing like taking a combine to your buddy’s custom quad with a medium laser turret and he looks at you like, “… Really…” It makes for laughs all around.
HOW DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE GOBLINS WHO ARE YOUR SCOURCES
I have people.
@@mageleader3699 *sighs and cocks his Claymore Heavy Pistol* looks like i have too do some internal reorganization
Sounds like it was a... dark age in the Battletech lore.
I would like to see a video on how you would rewrite the lore Post-FedCom.
I can think of a way to keep that Jihad, still shatter the FWL, keep the Wars of Reaving, and prevent the Clans from getting within 100 LY of Terra. Have the Wobbies get stomped, the Clans pushed to the periphery and the former Free Rasselhague Republic. Make it to where the Warden Clans are hyper concentrated on their IS holdings, but thanks to the FedCom civil war, the setting is basicaly Post 1'st Sucession. Tonnes of advanced tech sitying around and no ComStar to mess everything up.
I was actually thinking about this today. I think it could have worked better if we'd had some sort of prelude to get us acclimated to the new setting before pulling the dark age trigger. Like some sort of crisis that the Sphere had to intervene in. Let Victor have an active role, hand off the baton to others, and let us see that the republic of the sphere was on a knifes edge. It looks like peace would prevail once and for all.
And then the HPGs blow up.
the wizkids idea, was to set the dark age far enough forward that it didn't really impact the original game. what they failed to grasp, was that battletech was an evolving timeline. one actually year was approximately 5 years in game. starting from 3025 (1984), do the math.
clan invasion 3050 (1990-1).
ilclan 3150 (2018+)
so wizkids thought they could skip 100+ years and then write the story to connect things - if it becomes necessary.
what they overlooked, was the nerd factor. gamers like historical details and to discuss/argue historical decisions. by removing this, wizkids basically told the existing IP fanbase to f-off. it didn't sit well then and it still doesn't today.
To be fair, I really like Protomech.
I, however, can't stand them. The fact that they've been basically written out of the game because they just don't fit within Clan culture is merely another reason why I refuse to give them time of day.
@@Deridus They were written out because they were unpopular due to having weird rules that put them somewhere in-between battle armor and battlemechs. imho they should have just been treated as ultralight battlemechs as far as rules are concerned.
@@z3r0_35 I do love the in-universe reason, truth be told. But what you say is as close to the real-world truth as I can figure. The rule sets exist, sure, but I will not play them. When I think about it, I usually won't play anything post-Clan Invasion because I hate having to go B-Value over Tonnage. It's a lot faster to set up a game with Pre-Invasion tonnage.
protomechs were introduced in the 3060 TRO, well before wizkids took over.
I thought the "mass disarmament" was one of the dumbest idea. Devlin stone going "You need to give up your armies" and the IS not just laughing at him was one break in the suspension of disbelief.
Most of the IS. The CC pushed back and when they couldn’t they outsmarted him.
One way to get around the hpg blackout at least for House Davion and Steiner. Is for them to us Black Box Fax Machines Ie K series Transmiters.
In the original Dark Age, black box technology only worked temporarily. Hyperspace itself was scrambled, which made that tech fail shortly thereafter. That was retconned later.
@@mageleader3699 Would that not mess up jump drives on jumpships then?
@@thunberbolttwo3953that's whyvit was retconned. Same with the stupid RotS 'wall.'
@@Deridusoof all of that "wall" and jumbled hyperspace nonsense really annoyed me
I've hated Devlin Stone and the RotS the moment I learned about them.
I even like the Word of Blake more than that other garbage.
Jumpships work on the lower band of the hyper space spectrum. HPG stations send communications on the upper band and it was the upper band that was scrambled. That is why Tucker could get the HPG on Wyatt up and running whereas other stations would just burn out a new core.
As a Davion simp, I hated the Dark Ages for plenty of reasons, but I think the fact it feels so aimless and uninteresting compared to the earlier stuff from lore to politics means I don't hate it, I just... don't care about it.
As a proud Marik supporter I also hate the Dark Age. The only reason the League broke apart. Is so clam mary sue can conquer earth.
Same, it feels as if they had to forcefully turn the Davion's into bumbling idiots instead of being consistent with how they are and somehow House Liao becomes super competent.
Instead of being the punching bag that they should be.
Ugh... Comstar is my faction. At least you guys still have factions lol.
@@grygaming5519 Laio has always been competent since Sun Tzu came into power. 😏
@@Xfighter000 Capella should have fell during the 4th succession wars.
The current writers fawn over it the same way a 20 year old college student fawns over communism from their professor who visited USSR in their early years.
12:29 Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but wasn't that 'notable exception' (who imo was wrongly ousted and the person behind it should've been fired instead, but that's a whole other can of worms) the guy who was basically fleshing out most of the il-Clan storyline for Catalyst as far as novels go?
He was given the task of novelizing the lore. The actual events were determined elsewhere. Essentially they would hand him their plan and say "Make a story out of these plot points."
Having been on a MechAssault binge lately I've been pleasantly surprised by the attention to detail and by what those games accomplished for their time, as well as their ambition. Structure lights flicker off as you blast them open and expose the understructure, glass shatters from windows, whole buildings crumble, and effectively everything could be demolished. For something made to run on 64 megabytes of RAM, MechAssault's destruction was surprising to see when stepping down from MW5. It was also interesting to see not just the glowing cracks and panel-lines as you got closer to death, but also the glowing radiator/heat sink strips on battlemechs since they both provided a way to read your heat and health level at a glance years before Dead Space's RIGs. Though it was lost in MA2, there was even limb health in MA1 allowing you to cripple legs, or blow off arms - though it's not easy to really dig into given the sluggishness of console and early aim assist. Even stuff like the ingame menu or the old Conquest mode feel ahead of their time with MA2 since faction-based warfare and galaxy maps have come to mind with Helldivers 2.
MA1 brought BattleMech action to early Xbox Live and in general put BattleTech on a console, simplified as it was, and MA2 is where the game design became more ambitious and interesting. MechAssault will always live in the shadow of full-blooded MechWarrior titles, and unfortunately that tends to overshadow the fact that MA2 managed to be a multiplayer combined arms game - a first for BattleTech's videogames, if I'm not mistaken. Seamless transitions out of a mech, on foot, and into whatever else you want to pilot is something that only MWLL has done since, and consequently I don't think any other BattleTech videogame has captured scale the same way. I think when most people think of MechAssault, it's MA2 they picture.
Unfortunately it tends to be MA2's weakest moments and poor writing which I believe aren't just a product of the Jihad/Dark Age, but also the sub-two-year development window that Day 1 had to work in against the ambitious scale they were going for. The production level is definitely higher with MA2, but the writing never catches up. MA1 benefits from being fairly simple and self contained and I think isn't too out there in most regards. MA2, though - It'd be easy to point at the data cores, travel distances, or basically anything else, but one super basic example of MA2's writing pitfalls is probably how they don't recognize the Wobbies until the player is basically halfway through the game, beat 9/22 levels, or alternatively has gone through 2/5 of the planets in the game.
This is saying nothing of the boss fights. When I say MechAssault, it's not the combined arms teamplay that comes to mind - it's Korn while fighting the comically dumb 'ubermech', or Papa Roach and the huge-ass spidermech. MechAssault at it's worst, and at it's furthest from it's overshadowed potential.
MA2's foundation and game design are ambitious in a good way, and properly developed presents an interesting exchange in sacrificing the depth of MW to represent a more 'complete' BattleTech game from mechs to VTOLs all the way down to infantry. On that note, I think a lot about how the GDL novels - particularly the first two - would be fantastic to translate to videogames and probably a good fit for a more grounded and polished take on MechAssault. Thunder Rift feels like it has the progression or arc of a videogame in particular - intro maybe as Durant Carlyle, get bodied by the Marauder, then over to Grayson and movement/stealth in the city before being introduced to the anti-infantry terror of Light Mechs. You get a taste of what you'll eventually fight, and then you're put in a position where even something like a Wasp is a 'boss' before working your way up over the course of the game. Granted I think it ends up a lot more Metal Gear than the arcade action of MechAssault, but I can dream.
I hate to be the barer of bad news, but your beloved Mechassault nearly killed Mechwarrior as a hole. We had 1,2,3,4, and all their expansions for the better part of a decade. I played Mechassault Demo and I knew it was gonna kill Mechwarrior and it nearly did as it took over a decade for MWO to finally show after 4 because of Mechassault and the desire for Microsoft to be hyper focused on the XBox. Not to mention all the meddling of Harmony Gold suing constantly just because they can.
Didn't help that Crimson Skies on the Xbox failed as well. Microst didn't see any profit and promptly just dumped it all. Microsoft single handedly nearly killed Fasa Studios as a whole. I don't know what exec at Microsoft or Piranha Games got them to make MWO, but it saved Mechwarrior as a video game even though I'm not a fan of it.
@@sgt_s4und3r54 Interestingly it'd seem that MechAssault put MechWarrior on ice initially because of how well it suited the Halo-fueled dawn of the Xbox. MW4 and MechCommander 2 had released by the time the Xbox hit while MechAssault had kicked around conceptually since around October of '99, and out of these three options it was MechAssault that they pursued from 2001 'til release in 2002, and it was MechAssault that they chose to push on with in spite of all the acclaim MW4 garnered. It probably didn't help that the MW games have always had something of a tumultuous development history and that every other title seemed to be made by a new studio. There was even a FASA MW5 concept titled 'MechWarrior Prime', but it was struck down early on in 2003 presumably in favor of MA2, and from there you could probably more justly lay blame on it for bleeding Microsoft's interest in BattleTech with how it purportedly didn't sell well enough to warrant a third game.
That MechAssault 1 and 2 are something of the debut of the Dark Age and Jihad probably doesn't help, nor the implication that both games were put together within the span of a year or two.
When it comes to Microsoft, it's not like they sold the IP/license, though. Heck, they sat on it long enough for Jordan Weisman to take an interest in doing something with it again, which led them to working with PGI in 2008-2009 to make the initial pitch trailer for MechWarrior 3015/MW5, the pitch fumbling because of contract/platform restrictions (to say nothing of the economic recession), and then retooling it into MWO.
It's funny in a sort of roundabout way that the dude responsible for making BattleTech is also the one who started the Dark Age, the one who got the ball rolling on MWO, and the one who made HBS and HBS BattleTech. Heck, HBS's studiohead is also one of the producers and executives from MechAssault 1 and 2.
As a proud Marik Supremacist I hate the dark age
I imagine the Taurian Concordat looking at the whole thing from the outside going, "What is wrong with you people???"
As a proud battletech player I hate the dark age as well.
The biggest issue for me as a fan BT from the 90’s which was completely missed by Mage, is that the scale was different with DA. If the click mechs had remained at classic scale, I think it would’ve done a lot better keeping older fans. Simply because we could use our old ral Partha minis with the DA ones.
A systems collapse causing a big regression isn't *the worst* idea for the setting, but you kind of have to go into more effort to explain it as well as understand that even the most drastic of these events tend not to hit all areas as hard at the same time. There was room for the new scrappy cobbled together mechs while not trying to erase the classic mechs, especially since those mechs (largely) survived the collapse of the Star League.
I blame Collectable Card Games (CCG) for a lot of this. Right around turn of the century, Magic the Gathering and Pokemon were making money hand over fist. Soon there was a CCG for just about everything: AvP, L5R, you name it. The cards themselves were relatively cheap to produce, and each year new and 'better' cards came out to trounce the older cards. Players continually had to pay for new cards to remain relevant in the game space.
Jordan Weisman had sold lead miniatures and the occasional technical readouts to Battletech fans for decades, but they were expensive to make. Once you had the occasional sourcebook, it was hard to milk the player base for more revenue.
So Weisman closed FASA and started up Wizkids to spin up Mage Knight and Battletech: Dark Age. Clix tried to combine collectable wargaming and collectable cards, but it really didn't catch on in my small college town. The only way to sell the new Clix miniatures was to invalidate the old classic ones. Gray Monday was the hard reset that came of it.
The half-assed attempt to explain away why there are so few Mechs is that people were so shell-shocked by the aftermath of the jihad that pretty much everyone agreed to some kind of disarmament. Besides parts and everything else becoming more rare the kings of the battlefield were so expensive, all of a sudden, that they became a rarity. This is absolutely garbage and lazy writing but that's what they shoehorned in later.
I was someone that was already playing HeroClix at the time. My uncles introduced me to Battletech years before. When the Dark Age hit, I picked up a bunch of packs. My Uncles hated it and my brother wasn't into it until we realized that we could cross over the existing HeroClix pieces into the game. We had the Hulk and Superman fighting Mechs and having a blast doing so. As a stand alone game, I did enjoy having a full army with 1-2 mechs per side and everything else infantry and tanks. A shame the lore was so trash. They could have called it "Periphery Wars" and it would have fixed a lot of issues.
In my country i missed a lot of the older novels but at the time with dark age they were much easier to get so i ended up with quite a few and thought they were 'fine' but for the life of me i can't remember any of the story except for the plot that the hpgs went down, i guess that says something.
The Dark Age = CGL era of control over the licence :)
So I'm a HUGE fan of Dark Age, but this video was hilarious. MWDA was responsible for getting me into Battletech, so even though I'm not naive to it's issues, still holds a substantial part of my heart. Good video
Tangibly, what the FREAK is the Wall? I mean, it sounds like some kinda super galactic shield that is ridiculously impossible, and it keeps the badies out. WTF!?! What the heck is it? How do you surround all those systems in a vacuum of space where no one else can enter (And I assume leave)?
It will always have a special place in my heart for better or worse because MW:DA blind boxes were the first minis I ever owned, back in elementary/middle school. MW3 and 4 were my intro to the setting so I recognized the MW name but not BattleTech lol. Don't know much about the lore, but one of these days I'll be reading and playing through that era so with the power of nostalgia your count might go from 5 fans to 6
A big company acquiring a beloved IP and, in a fit of astounding arrogance and blind greed, ruining what people loved about it to "make it their own" and find an ephemeral new audience who fails to materialize. Am I talking about Star Wars or Battletech? Even I don't know anymore.
Star Wars, Battletech, Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40k, Dungeons & Dragons, and the list goes on and on. And that's before you get to the nonsense EA does. Look at what they did to Dead Space and dozens of other franchises.
Mechassault was my introduction to battletech when I was around 6 or 7. It will always hold a special place in my heart, since I only had Mechassault, Halo, Star Wars: Starfighter. Mechassault taught me how 3rd person shooters work, and how to think tactically and use tge right tools.
That said, knowing what I know now about the "lore" and history tied in to it, yikes.
I love the dark age Era because it was my introduction into battletech universe
You know what you’re describing you’re describing the whole timeframe between 2016 and present apparently WizKid was the first company to pull this shit and think they could get away with it apparently somebody somewhere so it was kids was doing and said that’s a great idea and plunged entire fandoms into chaos
The only thing I liked about Dark Age was that the Elementals were so prolific I managed to make a binanary of Elementals by buying the out of loose clearance bin in gameshops. Grabbed them, popped them off the click base and painted them to match my galaxy's standard artic camo
great organized play support for the first few years. prizes worth 50 bucks and we had play events at five stores a week. boom boom boom. I was a casual who would just meme army and troll the top tier players. good times.
A got a bunch of Dark Age models from a friend of mine who was cleaning out his parents basement. I'm glad it's stuff I can use on the tabletop as proxy models for the things I care about since I'm not giving CGL any more of my money but the digging that I did about the Dark Age just made me depressed.
I'm in a good mood, so I want to say something positive about the Dark Age.
The Black Knight 5H design from that era is freaking badass. I love it.
But that's about it. I have yet waaaay to much lore to dig into pre FedCom civil war, that never even tried to understand the jihad and the later eras. Considering that the jihad killed off my favorite subfaction with the Knights of the Inner Sphere, I don't think I will like it very much.
I dropped out (bootcamp) right as FASA was dying. When I finally got home after nearly two years of training and deployments, Dark Age was in full swing and I couldn't recognize anything. So I dropped it. I've only come back in the last five or so years, and while I'm having a blast playing and reading again, as far as I'm concerned, canon stops ~3067.
Dark Age was like WizK kicking in your door, jumping on your dining table and laying a metre long turd, bowing gracefully then leaping back into the night
At my LGS there was a box of "Mechwarrior Dark Age" mechs, it had been sitting on the shelves for months. Just when I began to get into battletech I went to go buy myself some kind of mech set. As I picked up the dark age box set, it felt.... "off" to me. Thank god I didn't.
my hottest take is i think Jihad era is Overhated.
I remember trying to teach a darkage player how to play battletech, they actually tried to stop my thug from going anywhere by placing a bunch of crunches in my path.
We looked at him and asked what he was doing and he said while looking me in the eye "my infantry is preventing you from moving"
I then proceeded to crush his troops under foot while using inferno ammunition on the hexes his other troops were in.
Battletech master rules revised is the best.
Told the kid to throw everything he knew from dark age into the trash and learn what real battletech was if he wanted to play with us.
Tough love it was but we saved two from the dark ages.
We started then with lvl 1 tech after that and slowly moved them to lvl 2 and later clans.
Big Red 40 tech likes this era. I don't. Never have.
When clans came out my group ignored the clans for a while, infact we had our own timeline.
Every weapon that came out after 3067 doesn't exist at all and stone's mother while he was within her was "accidently" stepped on by a random clan mech.
Im about to watch the video, but if you were around back then it's easy to know why the hate was real. They spent years building up the WoB and just skipped over it. Then they dropped so many bread crumbs that went absolutely no where. The biggest kick in the crotch? It had the exact same conclusion that EVERY major BT conflict has had over the last few events. Spoilers: the force that got defeated. They planned this all along.....
We didn't buy it as BattleTech but as something new to play. It was fun for a bit but we quickly got bored and moved on. Never slowed our table top play of the original, stopped our reading/collecring the old books or long running campaign game. Don't understad the hate,
I like the concept and really wanted to run a CBT ruleset campaign in the Darkage era (but with real mechs, not agromechntrash) but it never got off the ground. Maybe one day.
The execution from Wizkid, scaling etc? Left a very sour taste.
as a player since 1984, I see the timeline in it's entirety. the era's give me book marks to explain things, but I see the story as a whole.
man's early space exploration
early factions form (first exodus)
disputes in space (age of war)
golden age (starleague)
coup (Amaris coup)
2nd exodus (Kerenski)
succession wars / clans form /comstar forms
clan invasion
Tukayyid truce
second starleague/Davion-Steiner civil war
Comstar civil war - blakist jyhad
republic of the sphere
dark age
ilclan
because I see this as a whole and not in pieces, I don't get caught up in the minutia. while individual leaders are important, at the same time, they really don't matter.
while i don't care for clicky-tech, I don't have a problem making the era work within the overall story.
Okay…I’m sorta fascinated by little dark age type things. The one cool thing that intrigued me about Star Trek discovery was The Burn, where some shit went down and it caused a galactic chain reaction where most of the refined and in use dilitihium went super critical and pretty much wrecked galactic civilization.
Call of Duty ghosts’ background of the US being a 2nd or Third World country was cool.
Same with all the endings in Mass Effect 3 (especially the correct one where you destroy everything) where ALL tech based on mass effect technology gets popped, what happens next is the part I’m interested in narratively.
Unbeknownst to me, my first exposure to BattleTech was the MechAssault games. I loved those games, especially the 2nd one, but I always wondered if there was anything behind it. It wasn't until someone mentioned it in passing in a video about MechWarrior that I found out it was a non-canonical offshoot. It makes me sad that they weren't more successful. That arcadey action is what would make a ton of money in a gacha game these days.
I didn't have anyplace that I could get normal BT models, but the clix were everywhere. They worked ok for Alpha Strike.
And keep Hawaiian pizza out of this!
Late-90's early 00's was a rough time to be a wargamer and miniature guy. Magic the Gathering radically altered the game market, turning it into a world of random starter decks and booster packs similar to baseball cards decades before; pre-painted soft plastic miniatures hit the market and were the future of the hobby, as they could be sold the same way collectible card games could be sold. MW: Dark Age is partly the result of those market forces at work. I don't miss that era one bit TBH. I might be enjoying watching WotC run itself into the ground for more than one reason.
To this day I swear a friend of mine still claims to have cursed the star wars franchise for all most ending Battletech in its infancy.
Also the definite all top pilots were women very few if any were men also they said they would never retire sets 5 mins later they started retiring sets.
This is probably why phasing out first born is happening over decades rather than immediately. Hard resets are just such a risk.
People who think the dark age as a "hard reboot" don't have the mental faculties to understand what a "hard reboot" means
A reboot starts the franchise over, dark age doesn't do that in any form. So it literally can never be classified as a reboot
Novels, some of which were even readable
My sides good sir, my sides
The only way Dark Age makes any sense is as an in universe soap opera that some academic mistook for history 1000 years after it was cancelled.
Reading around, I've been given the impression CGL keeps this era around because of licensing issues. Topps owns the IP and licenses it to CGL, and I think they don't want a setting reset. So they went and moved foward and made the Il'Clan era, which they were allowed to do.
Just remember John Connor taught us to storm the wire and fight the Wobbies oh I mean Stone
I am wondering if what the Sea Fox are doing is restoring the HPG. Also wasn't there some Davion Tech that was similar, also not as well developed?
I could see the ilClan era working its way back up to establish a working HPG Network again or at least something similar.
I mean the first one to get back to a working structure of any kind of interstellar Network will be in a big lead over everyone else.
I had fun with Dark Age. May not have enjoyed it as much if one of my local stores didn't open boosters and sell single models. I did run tournaments at a store depending on player count, the owner officiated if my playing would give us an even player count. Many of ud tournament judges told Wizkids the bkind boosters were a problem. They didnt start coming out with faction starter packs until just as the gane collapsed