jacobkosh

One of the things I really like about HBS's Shadowrun games is how your studio managed to take the core experience of Shadowrun and repackage it, refocus on the important parts, in a way that made the setting feel modern and relevant in the present day.

What I'm really curious about is to what degree (if any) you and Mitch and Jordan have talked about this with regards to Battletech. I love the core concept of Battletech (feudal war with robots? heck yes!) but from my perspective as a grown-up in the year 2015 there are things that kind of make me suck my teeth a little bit. Like, okay, take the Draconis Combine: when I was ten, everyone knew that katanas were the sharpest swords ever and were folded a million billion times and could cut through a tank and omg ninjas were totally tubular - but that was the 80's, and now the idea of an entire country and ethnicity being represented by samurai movies feels kind of...at odds with the gritty sci-fi quasi-realism the rest of the setting tries to go for. Or the way 3/5ths of the Inner Sphere seem to be populated by European-influenced cultures.

I need to be very clear that I'm not like, mad about this or DEMANDING ANSWERS or whatever and I'm definitely not looking to pick a fight with any fans - I'm a fan too! I am literally reading a Mike Stackpole novel right now! As far as I'm concerned, it was the 1980s, it was a different time, and the people who both made and played wargames and sci-fi RPGs were not the kind of global audience we have now. What I'm curious about is if this is something you guys have mulled over at all, given that this game is the first visual-media Battletech product in...ten years? It seems like going back to 3025 and back to basics is a great opportunity for HBS to chart a course for how to tell Battletech stories in the 20teens and forward.

Thanks for the answer! I know this is a subject that can be potentially really fraught with difficulty for games developers, but it's really exciting to know that this is something on your team's mind.

And the art really does look terrific. That's one of the neat things for me personally about revisiting these properties is getting the chance to see new visual interpretations and spins on the material. It can often help you think about it in a whole new way.