BATTLETECH!

[Chimaera]

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So you've successfully outed yourself as a bigot.  Cool, I'll know to attempt to avoid you in org business from now on.  Meanwhile you've made six posts in this thread alone.  Can you stop trolling this thread and leave it to the people who like this game? Try not to be triggered by how untriggered we by the pronoun "they".

@Boildown feel free to think of me what you will, but my original post was talking about how my final straw was when my review was flagged for violation of Steam guidelines simply because I had included a line about the social justice themes in the game seeming very poorly done and ham-fistedly implemented. 

My further posts were explaining to @DASKOMMTDAWEG what a specific term meant that he didn’t understand. Feel free to project whatever image of me makes you feel good about pre-judging me or justifying breaking our forum guidelines. I am not a bigot in any sense of the word, I just prefer that if something like social justice-related themes are inserted into an established lore, that they are done so intelligently (a la Dragon Age 3), and if a developer doesn’t do that, they accept constructive criticism without censorship. I’ll leave you to re-read my OP and get the proper context before you reply.

Sorry for the bad formatting, trying to post quotes from phone. I see you edited your original post away from what you had written. Maybe you already reread and realized you were wrong? Either way, I left this thread alone after explaining things to Das. Enjoy the game if you like, man, I freely admit that I was pissed that my review had been flagged for no reason other than Dev triggeredness. Below is a video from a youtuber I watch periodically and he sums up pretty much my experience and my annoyance at the developers' reactions.

 

[Boildown]

So its ok when from the beginning of computer gaming, developers made all protagonists look like themselves (white, male, likes boobies).  But when a "they" developer does it, its distracting, jarring, political, and social justice warrior dog whistling?

If you're in the power-class its ok, but if you're a discriminated minority, its offensive.  That is what hypocrisy looks like.  And we should all strive for social justice in this world, not actively diminish those who only ask for the same privileges the majority gets by default.

By the way, I looked it up on Sarna, and Battletech Sourcebooks going back to the 1980s state that all major Earth religions survive to the game era.  So the Muslim woman engineer character is perfectly lore-abiding, the only reason to be triggered by that is your own bigotry.

P.s. I edited my previous post to avoid the impression that I was violating forum rules against insulting others, not because I thought I was wrong about what I wrote.

P.p.s. The Streisand Effect is going to sell way more copies of this game than they ordinarily would.  From that perspective alone, "they" was a brilliant move.

 

[Chimaera]

2 minutes ago, Boildown said:

P.s. I edited my post to avoid forum rules against insulting others, not because I thought I was wrong about what I wrote.

Then you completely misunderstood the entire point of my criticism and my annoyance, but feel free to continue to label someone whose opinion you disagree with.

3 minutes ago, Boildown said:

P.p.s. The Streisand Effect is going to sell way more copies of this game than they ordinarily would.  From that perspective alone, it was a brilliant move.

Depends on their target audience. Star Wars has been facing a ton of backlash over how they've handled Episode VIII and constructive criticism of Episode VIII to the point that a lot of major fan outlets are talking boycotts of Solo. Don't know how it will pan out, but we'll see.

Anyhoo, the thread has been derailed enough, and I regret any part I played in the derailment. As I said before, the "final straw" for me was having my first review flagged on steam and then finding out the developers were flagging anyone who even mentioned the ham-fistedness of their insertion of social justice narratives. (By ham-fistedness, I mean it is half-assed and is poorly implemented, making something as important as a constructive social narrative seem like a tacked-on afterthought.)  I hope people like the game and that they can enjoy it being stable because gaming needs more games of this genre.  

If you'd like to have a constructive chat on the topic of social justice in games, feel free to ping me when you're on TS!

[Boildown]

Just another example of this: https://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks/videos/413953252415451

Newsflash: Social justice is a worthy cause.

[LowZone]

*Enters forum to add a game review*

*Checks last few posts*

*Backs away slowly towards the exit...* 

[J. Coren]

It's almost like both sides of this argument are easily triggered snowflakes who need to sit down and have a beer together.

From the tap in Solo cups though, don't want any glass bottles ending up in someone's orbital.

[Gremlich]

On 5/4/2018 at 2:51 PM, Boildown said:

Chimaerism in humans is one of the main ways someone can be simultaneously female and male at once,

Your position is not true in any biological sense. Think of the lowly earthworm - it is a hermaphrodite (both male and females sex organs), not a chimera. A Chimera is of two definitions:

1. (in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.
2. a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.

Chaimaerism has absolutely NOTHING to do with sex: Chimaerism is the occurrence in an organism of two or more genetically distinct cell populations derived from more than one individual. For example, in mouse genetics, embryonic stem cells may be aggregated with an 8-cell embryo to form a mouse from both cell types.

If people are using this as you suggest, they are fantastically ignorant.

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That's no reason to rail against this game, unless you're a bigot.  Are you a bigot?  It would be sad if Imperium had a bigoted sub-commander, for the record.

It has nothing to do with bigotry, but with the games heritage. Like saying Twain's book "Tom Sawyer" is racist. Today you could say that, but not when it was written because social morays were so very different. Things have to be taken in their historical context. Like in the 1960's Al Sharpton would never be called a racist, now you can call him one because it's true. However, he was never a snapshot in time. Twain's stories and the BT-milieu are. Companies want to update the story, they can go too far at their peril of lost dollars. Frankly Chimaera is correct in many ways, whilst you are not. I am not going to play Battletech because it's a game that already exists as MechCommander, just with updated graphics. I've played the later and don';t need to play the new one. PGI turned me off on the last attempt at a Mech game, not wasting my time or money again.

[DASKOMMTDAWEG]

Oi, lots of drama here..:)

I always liked that most conflicts in BT were not religion- or race-based.

There are some....namely Word of Blake Jihad or racist behavior in Kurita-Space(Pure Japanese heritage against "Gaijin"), but in total
every person, regardless of heritage or believes could play any House or Periphery-Member without any bad feelings.

That was quite refreshing, almost like Startrek if you forget that there is constant war among the human race.

LGTB has never been a matter in BT, I believe such animosities have been solved before mankind left their cradle.....and as long you fit in the cockpit
of a Spider noone cares about your preferences.

Only time I encountered dissense in sexual practices came with the arrival of the Clans. I.e. Geschko(Geschwisterkompanie)....I believe its Sibko(Sibling Company?) in english.

Phelan Kell was quite unhappy with that if I recall it correctly.

 

[Gremlich]

4 hours ago, DASKOMMTDAWEG said:

LGTB has never been a matter in BT, I believe such animosities have been solved before mankind left their cradle.....and as long you fit in the cockpit
of a Spider noone cares about your preferences

This. Which is why PC and SJW supporters need to tread lightly when it comes to existing fictitious canon.

[Chimaera]

7 hours ago, DASKOMMTDAWEG said:

I always liked that most conflicts in BT were not religion- or race-based.

Which is why a lot of people found inclusion of the non-canon elements of current-day religions as something that didn't fit the game. I, personally, disliked that they didn't actually provide any reason - via lore or chat from the character - as to why BT universe suddenly has some of these elements. The most glaring example was the hijab-wearing engineer, which is an example of a sexist requirement from a religion of which there are MANY countries and sects that don't require head-scarves. It'd be similar to having the Amish be classified as the primary version of "Christians" represented in the future.  Speaking of which, where were the crucifixes or kippahs? If the devs wanted to be "inclusive", why only focus on one group?

7 hours ago, DASKOMMTDAWEG said:

LGTB has never been a matter in BT, I believe such animosities have been solved before mankind left their cradle.....and as long you fit in the cockpit
of a Spider noone cares about your preferences.

Which is why the "they" being tossed in there was kinda ridiculous. The devs could've included a tooltip or description of each of the choices where they gave a reason why "they" was used. Was it because Mechwarrior's families (most coming from noble houses according to the game) chose to genetically design some of their children to be androgynous? That would make all kinds of sense, as androgynous warriors could take all of the positives of physiology and get rid of the pitfalls associated with certain genders. Little things like that can reframe all the drama into a lore-based reason, while also being "inclusive", and that's what I was talking about when I said they were ham-fisted in their implementation of their "social justice" themes. But hey, at least it's not Warhammer 40k...

Like I said, though, I hope people enjoy the game in spite of the issues with the devs, I just take huge issue with ANY people, be it game developers or movie studios, who will take any form of constructive criticism and try to censor it, while labeling anyone who doesn't like their product as some form of "-ist". (I'm looking at YOU, Disney/Lucasfilm)

[DASKOMMTDAWEG]

Maybe we should agree to disagree here...😁 

No conflict by religion doesnt mean that there is no religion. 

In BT-Universe it is just too natural to mention it seperatly.

I thought the hijab as quite original and fitting. And the lady would certainly smile in disbelieve about our medieval expectations towards her private matters...😁

Same goes for “THEY“...its a gimmick, nothing more. And I see no harm done if its integrated in all future games.

Personal views...☺

[Boildown]

14 hours ago, Gremlich said:

Your position is not true in any biological sense. Think of the lowly earthworm - it is a hermaphrodite (both male and females sex organs), not a chimera. A Chimera is of two definitions:

1. (in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.
2. a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve.

Chaimaerism has absolutely NOTHING to do with sex: Chimaerism is the occurrence in an organism of two or more genetically distinct cell populations derived from more than one individual. For example, in mouse genetics, embryonic stem cells may be aggregated with an 8-cell embryo to form a mouse from both cell types.

If people are using this as you suggest, they are fantastically ignorant.

It has nothing to do with bigotry, but with the games heritage. Like saying Twain's book "Tom Sawyer" is racist. Today you could say that, but not when it was written because social morays were so very different. Things have to be taken in their historical context. Like in the 1960's Al Sharpton would never be called a racist, now you can call him one because it's true. However, he was never a snapshot in time. Twain's stories and the BT-milieu are. Companies want to update the story, they can go too far at their peril of lost dollars. Frankly Chimaera is correct in many ways, whilst you are not. I am not going to play Battletech because it's a game that already exists as MechCommander, just with updated graphics. I've played the later and don';t need to play the new one. PGI turned me off on the last attempt at a Mech game, not wasting my time or money again.

 

Actual study showing an example of Chimerism in a human resulting in an inter-sexed individual: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199801153380305

You're absolutely wrong that it has nothing to do with sex.  On the contrary, its reasonable to assume that ~50% of all tetragametic chimers have cells with both male and female genetic code (flip a coin twice and half the time one will be heads and the other tails).  Most of the time, the sex organs are not involved, so nothing is really different. But even when so, maybe the brain is affected even if the sex organs are not.  (This is where you backtrack and say it usually doesn't have anything to do with sex gender.)

 

9 hours ago, Gremlich said:

This. Which is why PC and SJW supporters need to tread lightly when it comes to existing fictitious canon.

 

As I previously pointed out, Battletech sourcebooks back up the lore in the new game.  Not new lore either, lore going back to the 1980s.  Just because all previous games in the Battletech series mostly white-male-washed their casts doesn't mean the lore says it has to be that way.  In the example of the female Muslim engineer, you can talk to her in-game and learn about her heritage.  It isn't lore-breaking.  Having people who identify as "they" 1000 years from now, when people do it today, also isn't lore breaking.  Companies like Apple, Aston-Martin, Boeing (I'm gunna stop even looking, there's a lot) still exist 1000 years from now in the lore, its not unreasonable to assume that some people might still identify as "they" 1000 years from now.  It would be far more unreasonable to assume that no one does.

 

I've already established in previous posts how railing against the game for not making all the characters the same tribe as most historical computer games in the series is a good sign of bigotry.  Fact is that that sourcebooks are canon, the old Mechwarrior games are not.  If none of these other groups showed up in the games before, its a weakness of historical game development (when all protagonists were white and male, similar to TV and movies prior to the 1970s), as they were in the actual lore and sourcebooks all along.

 

On a side note, I'm very familiar with the Mechcommander series, I actually started a new campaign in the final days before the new Battletech's release.  The games are very little alike.  To say that you won't play it because you played Mechcommander is, frankly, ridiculous.  Probably would rank on my list of 200 dumbest things I've ever heard, if I were to make that list. 

And PGI is just the publisher, a completely different studio made this game (Harebrained Schemes).  Hell, Trendane, one of the more famous Star Citizen personalities, voiced one of the main villains in the new Battletech game.  You're just coming up with bullshit reasons for disinterest in this game, when the real reason is prejudice and some insane need to be anti-"sjw".

[Chimaera]

I'm going to have to clean this thread up if it continues to get out of hand. Ironic, yes, as my opinion posts apparently helped lead to derailment. Please keep all posts civil and within the rules of the forums.

[J. Coren]

Ya'll are getting your your jimmies rustled over a grimderp universe of giant robots punching one another.

Step back and imagine how this looks to someone like me who doesn't know shit about Battletech, and how this reflects poorly on the property I could potentially buy into.

[Chimaera]

1 minute ago, J. Coren said:

Step back and imagine how this looks to someone like me who doesn't know shit about Battletech, and how this reflects poorly on the property I could potentially buy into.

Honestly, I wonder if the developers actually intended to create a lot of buzz (negative and positive) for this game by what they did with it.

To be honest, if the game functions well and doesn't crash, it's a decent game for the whole XCOM with Mechs stuff. If you can ignore the decidedly "meh" story-line and aren't bothered by some of "creative" lore choices they made with some characters, it's actually a pretty decent TBS + Management game. What I really wanted to see (and what was the core of my flagged review) was that the management system and reputation system actually led to something more substantial than "higher paid missions and access to shops". If I was going to build up my reputation with a certain faction, I wanted to see it actually cause an impact on the in-game map. I wanted my mission selections and choices to actually matter independent of the main story-line. Maybe I didn't get far enough in the game, but that didn't happen, and I haven't seen any evidence of that the missions are meant for anything more (at their core) than money/equipment generation for kitting out mechs. That, in and of itself is a pretty cool feature of the game, but it wasn't enough for me to want to keep trying to play despite crashes and bad storytelling. 

I'm guessing if you focused on the missions as skirmishes, and did a lot of online multiplayer, it'd be a lot of fun.  I know a lot of people enjoy it, and I still watch Geekdomo play it when he's on, hoping that I'll see something in the game that'll help me get past my gripes and my despising the developers. 

[Metternich70]

5 hours ago, Chimaera said:

I'm going to have to clean this thread up if it continues to get out of hand. Ironic, yes, as my opinion posts apparently helped lead to derailment. Please keep all posts civil and within the rules of the forums.

Hah you are such a civil and nice person ... so, just let me tell you a joke that applies to someone else: "burn the bigot! burn the bigot! ... oh wait "

An Italian medieval poet wrote: non ti curar di lor ma guarda e passa (do not care about them but look and go further)

[DASKOMMTDAWEG]

I just completed the campaign and I want MORE!

More content, more battlemechs, more of that epic soundtrack...😁

[Boildown]

9 hours ago, DASKOMMTDAWEG said:

I just completed the campaign and I want MORE!

More content, more battlemechs, more of that epic soundtrack...😁

Nice, I beat it just yesterday, myself.  Was considering improving my lance until I could find a couple of Atlases but I decided not to wait and just go for it.  I think the key to the game is to use mechs that take most advantage of the initiative break points... 35, 55, 75, 100 ton mechs that maximize the usable tonnage for the initiative you get. Oh, and jump jets. The third-to-last mission that tells you to put jump-jets on all your mechs did me a huge favor, game got a lot easier instantly. Never did get my 100 ton mech before the final missions though.

Gunna use the Unity Assets Bundle Extractor to see if I can dig out the songs like I did for BSG: Deadlock.  Also, thinking of going again with no save game loading this time, whatever happens, happens.  Also, not sure if the Argo is worth it, I wanna try it again without doing any upgrades and just keeping my cash.  It gets expensive!

[Boildown]

The music in this game is more complicated by far to decipher than it was for Deadlock.

Useful instructions here: https://owdev.wiki/Tutorial/Convert_Sound_files_to_Ogg

I found the \Steam\steamapps\common\BATTLETECH\BattleTech_Data\StreamingAssets\Audio\GeneratedSoundBanks\Windows\music.bnk file to have all the music in it, instead of the assets files.  But there's 400 some "music" files of various usefulnesses inside that one music.bnk file.  Probably worth it to just buy the digital download.

 

Edit:  Bought the soundtrack.  Now I know the name to the song that plays whenever shit is getting real:

 

Edited May 8, 2018 by Boildown
bought soundtrack

[Gremlich]

On 5/7/2018 at 2:33 AM, Boildown said:

To say that you won't play it because you played Mechcommander is, frankly, ridiculous. 

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You're just coming up with bullshit reasons for disinterest in this game, when the real reason is prejudice and some insane need to be anti-"sjw".

Thanks for being insulting. Why would I play a game I've already played and really didn't enjoy all that much? Cuz that's all this new game is, just updated. It isn't new. You wanna spend $40-$60 go ahead. take up my slack. I just don't have the need to play every single game that comes out. And I'm not prejudiced at all, in fact, I could care less which characters they bring in, whatever nationality, religion, ethnicity, orientation, etc. Don't care. But there should be some discretion as to how things are presented or added with respect to the canon and the rest of the lore and that it fits and ADDS to the game. This is where you're being ridiculous, making a supposition about me. Being Anti-SJW is okay, because it is an opinion, which we can express. You are also entitled to tell me I'm wrong, but if you do, you better have a good rational argument why which might serve to change my mind. The insulting isn't working for me.

I said "needs to tread lightly" with respect to modifying canon, I didn't say anybody was wrong.

Thanx for the link to the article. I hope you read the whole thing, too. And as far as the Chimaera is concerned, your example was not a natural occurrence (IVF with a few variables) and not indicative of a naturally occuring Chimaera. Find me a person conceived and born like this naturally, without Human Gods and I'll agree with your use of the term. But it's still a hermaphrodite. If someone has both sex organs, that's what they are. But, if you've read the article, they excised the odd bits and provided injections which ultimately rendered the male child "Normal" human male. So, born as a Chimeric hermaphrodite with underdeveloped gonads and vaginal/fallopian bits, but selected by Human Gods to be male. I maintain, and I add this proviso, that non-science people are using this term incorrectly, pre-empting for their specious use.