Why I Love Battletech (and Netflix's Outlaw King)
I'm taking something of a slow week to try and rebuild stamina and deal with day job stuff, but I want to talk about Battletech for a minute. It's one of my favorite games and it's a major inspiration, and it's also something that manages to cut into pretty much every element of my life in one form or another.
I was introduced to Battletech through the MechWarrior video games, and it's probably (alongside Shadowrun on the Genesis) what I owe to getting me into roleplaying games. I've still never played the tabletop RPG for it (though I have collected several of the editions through DriveThruRPG or in print).
Basically, mine was a FASA childhood (I'm dating myself here, since MechWarrior 4 came out when I was pretty young), and I didn't have a whole lot of exposure to much else (my parents weren't huge fans of D&D for various reasons, and I was generally pretty sheltered).
However, I think Battletech does world-building right. There are places where you can nitpick, sure, but it's got one of the most expansive and coherent universes out there without jumping the shark, and it draws really deeply on the sort of medieval political intrigues that Game of Thrones would later rocket to popularity on.
The real fundamental reason why I love Battletech, however, is that it was my first real experience of the Hero's Journey. Yeah, as a twelve-year-old I also idolized a lot of the masculine bravado, but I think the storylines of the video games stuck out to me as being full of sacrifice and purpose.
It's a feeling I got when I watched Netflix's Outlaw King this week (I liked it), which is in turn what motivated me to write this.
Outlaw King trailer courtesy of Netflix, since most of the MechWarrior stuff up there is technically not copyright compliant.
I think what really stands out to me about Battletech is the notion that it's not just about heroes and villains, but people who are realistically motivated.
The idea of humanity's incredible cruelty toward other humans stemming from ordinary motivations is a common one; it is original sin writ large. Witnessing the betrayals and greed that go into war and conflict in the gritty (but still T-rated) world of Battletech gave me an opportunity to enjoy something that went beyond what you ordinarily experience.
Much like the plotline of Outlaw King, these stories focused on betrayal, loyalty, and honor. The notion that choices you made, as an individual, would determine life or death not only for yourself but for your companions was something that really weighed on me; I won't lie and say I never cheated, but I certainly never lost a lance-mate (and finished the mission, at least) throughout the whole game.
That level of emotional connection that I felt to the characters is one of the things that motivates me as a game designer and a world-builder. To be able to feel like you belong, but also to have ties and bonds not only to the characters and the world, to be able to make decisions about right and wrong and do so in such a manner that it brings catharsis, is what I hope to do as a game designer.
That's why I love Battletech.
Trivia: I believe the somber music that plays throughout the start of the trailer for Outlaw King is actually a very heavily modified piano arrangement of Albinoni's Adagio in G.
Trivia 2: Albinoni's Adagio in G was largely recreated from a segment that Remo Giazotto claimed to have found following World War 2. This is believed by some circles to be a hoax, but it's still one of my favorite songs for its haunting depth.
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I don't have experience with Battletech, and I still haven't watched Outlaw King (although it's exactly my kind of movie) but I have played a trillion games and would develop relationships with mt team in games like XCom and would be devastated if I lost a favorite. I haven't played The Witcher or the like, but relationship building is a big part of those types of games, with no two players having the exact same experience.
You're absolutely right though, using realistic motivations is so much more compelling than simply, this is a goodie, this is a baddie, and if you can create a scenario where the player actually cares about decisions made, well, you've created something special.
I feel like MechWarrior hit me even deeper than something like X-Com. I'm generally a little bit of a perfectionist and hate losing units, but something about the depth of the world made the struggles more real. Of course, MechWarrior is a simulator (if that title really applies to piloting a futuristic giant robot), so there's the additional element of personal skill involved.
I think that the real problem is that writers like having villains who you can hate. That's not bad (boy, can you hate the Prince of Wales in Outlaw King), but the real trial is creating villains who are interesting. It requires an intersection of evil (or at least amorality, which you could argue is the same thing) and deeper motives, because just having evil or just having complex motives doesn't work by itself.