I got one of those keys and tried it this morning. I absolutely hate the art style compared to MWO (what the fuck is up with the Hunchback??? and the Commando for that matter), and gameplay/interface-wise this is so very not ready for public consumption. I hope that's not NDA breaking!
Piranha Games made a good decision hiring Alex Iglesias (flyingdebris) to do the concept art for MWO. His style pretty much blends wanzers (from the front mission games) with aspects of previous mech design. He manages to mostly keep their signature looks without recreating some of the more awful designs of the time. Whoever's in charge of Tactics obviously don't care to the extent that Piranha does. They don't look like they're keeping much of the old designs at all. I'm not in beta and I've only seen a few mechs, but I hardly recognise some of them.
I feel many of them are much closer to the source material than Piranha's. The MWO Centurian is not at all recognizable as the Battletech Centurian, in my opinion.
This is not a Commando. Oh my god, Hunchback, what did they do to your head? And why do you have World of Warcraft shoulders on???
Yeah, the Tactics mechs, many of them the proportions feel off. The hunchback, the commando, the dragon. Even the awesome looks a little weird to me. Oh man, and the Stalker? That's a Stalker? Though to be honest, that one looks better, since the original stalker looks lame.
This actually happens a lot. I don't really get it. Why is it that people get a license for some old, popular IP, then feel the need to get in there and change everything?
You're saying that this mech: is not recognizable as being the same as this mech: Some parts of it are definitely exaggerated, like the head fin and the claw hand (which is just Yen Lo Wang in tabletop BT but whatever). There's a reason for that: quick visual identification is important in MWO in a way it isn't in tabletop BT. There are an awful lot of blocky humanoid mechs with a gun for a hand in Battletech. In just the 3050 mech book, I count the Wolfhound, Assassin, Clint, Hermes II, Vindicator, Centurion, Enforcer, Victor, and Highlander. In silhouette, the only major difference between these mechs is the head. Lots of reasons. In this case, a desire to distinguish this game from the rest of the Battletech games, and because MWT's mechs are designed to show custom builds on the mech model themselves. For example, in this image, the mech doesn't have any weapons showing, because it doesn't have any. This does lead to situations like the Stalker where they're using goofy-assed mechs and redesigning them to be a bit less goofy. Who knows why they're doing that.
Wait, there are people that actually like the crappy line art in tabletop battletech? The only good looking mechs I recall were the ones they stole from anime.
Right, because trying to show dissimilarity is the same as saying I think it's great art. Regardless, that style was very authentically reproduced in other games, which helps reinforce it being the iconic look for that mech. Look at both the intro and in-game art assets for the Centurion in MechCommander, or MW2: Mercs, for example. The ridge on the helmet is the only similarity between the original art and MWO's Centurion. I would never have guessed it was supposed to be that mech unless I was told, because I always think of the Centurion as being tall and slender for the size.
Looks like a few beat me to it, but I'll point out the catapult and stalker, which are two mechs that could be mistaken as the same on a passing glance to the unfamiliar. What Tactics has done is changed the stalker torso shape into a horseshoe crab with catapult-style arms, and made the catapult have an almost raven-style torso with horizontally stretched arms. That's a lot of swapping around to get them to look different, and it came at the expense of the catapult, which just barely looks like its namesake. Something I've noticed with the overall art direction is the consistantly thinned and spaced out legs. A lot of the humanoid types have thin arms, too. Many of the joints in the arms and legs are exposed to a higher degree than what MWO does. Both the atlas and awesome just don't look heavy enough to be an assault, and their legs look like they could buckle under the stress of a few machine gun bullets. Ironically, that art direction has lead to the clint, commando, and grasshopper looking a little too similar to eachother, if you painted them the same color. As far as adhereing to the source material goes, I think it would be wise to avoid exact copies. Moving away from the low-poly, blocky look is a good thing. It is possible to take elements of their look and translate them to a modern design. Tactics does not do this well. MWO does, even with something as "dramatically" different as the centurion.
Regardless, you're complaining about what is strictly an improvement. Sure the Mechwarrior Tactics mechs are lackluster, but all the MWO ones are an improvement and still recognizable enough. And as an added bonus most mechs don't look very nearly the same.
I thought that was kind of the point. BT is a lot less grimdark than Warhammer, say, but more than most anime. Setting aside the issue of whether humanoid robots make sense as war machines in the first place, the mechs are supposed to be mostly ugly and utilitarian, at least the Inner Sphere ones.
okay, then i politely disagree with jasper's aesthetic tastes, if that is not-shitty enough for folks here.
Then I don't even know what point you're trying to make. Hell, you even mentioned Mechcommander, which seriously expects us to tell, at a glance, which model these three mechs are:
And they are a perfect illustration of why slavishly adhering to BT TRO illustrations is a terrible idea for any game where you need to identify things at a glance.
Because they all look like vaguely blocky robot-men and it's a pain to tell them apart at a glance. They just aren't distinct enough to quickly identify. It's not because of Mechcommander's graphics, either. It's easy to tell a Summoner from a Catapult from a Mad Cat from a Vulture. It's hard to argue that a design is iconic and thus shouldn't be changed at all, when it isn't even iconic enough to quickly identify in a game where quick reactions matter.
There are a lot of humanoid mechs in the lore and generally speaking the games have gone out of their way to only pick a few of those style and have more unusual looking ones like the Jenner or Blackjack as a way of getting those distinctive silhouettes that I think you're looking for. MC's Firestarter does look similar to the other humanoid mechs but is still distinct from the Commando and a fair bit smaller than the centurion. Maybe it's unusual that I find them plenty distinctive? I can identify pretty much everything at a glance in World of Tanks and there are some pretty similar designs there. Is that not typical? The Centurion was made more squat for MWO to fit within the constraints that the animators had to work with, but even if the look were more similar to the classic Centurion I still don't think it would be confused with the Commando.
But it would be easily confused with the Vindicator, Enforcer, or Victor, 3025 fan-favorites all. Do you not understand that MC had problems with quick visual identification of visually-similar blocky robot men? Do you not understand that MWO could easily have the same problem if they ever used fan-favorite designs which are also visually similar to the Cent?
MC had nametags over everything, didn't it? And anyway I never had any trouble telling Centurions apart from Firestarters and Commandos. Firestarters and Commandos could be hard to distinguish from each other but it didn't really matter because you'd smear either of them all over the landscape in about 5 seconds.
Do you mean that you had problems with quick visual identification of mechs in MC? I never had a problem with it which makes me thing it was not MC's problem. Other Mechwarrior games have followed the original designs and I've never seen complaints about thinking one mech was another despite design similarities.
There has never been any problem identifying mechs in previous Mechwarrior games. For example, Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries: All perfectly clear and distinct.
