It's pretty simple...
Classic Battletech is pretty high fiction, with amazing political intrigue and deep characters and stories that make sense. Up until the Jihad (the beginning of the fall of BattleTech writing standards), you can literally track armies, characters, and mercenary outfits across the galaxy and through the timeline and it is a damn near bang on. And then in Jihad, we enter the starting comic book writing...
BattleTech (age of war) to Civil War are seasons 1-6 of Game of Thrones. Jihad is a weird mix of season 7 and 8 at the same time... Dark Age is season 9 and the showrunners doubled down on the worst aspects of S8.
Jihad.The bad.Jihad you see wholesale destruction of everything build up before the series, and this was in the new creative directors whacky/zany attempt to "revitalize" Battletech, which at the time was doing fine still. It wasn't growing but it wasn't dying... but someone figured a shakeup would create growth. Instead of keeping Battletech at a sustainable interest level, it ended up beginning the slow march to BattleTech's death. The director dubbed "the lord of nukes" would go on to turn factions like Jade Falcon into comic book villains, random clans would completely about-face and would become completely different entities. The deepest characters with amazing potential and ongoing stories were all killed in a shitty peace summit scene, the best 'Mechwarrior in the galaxy at the time was wiped out in a shuttle explosion on said summit (Diana Pryde) with every single fan reading her story now left with "she died in an explosion."
All while the "lord of nukes" literally gleefully laughed when he admitted he forgot about the GDl and wiped them out with a nuclear-armed Urbanmech... because he forgot they existed. Jihad put a knife in the collective back of the longtime fans. It turned into comic book writing, and comic books are crap. It read like cheap fan fiction and the intent was clear. The "lord of nukes" had no idea how to continue the setting and was not the correct creative director of the setting. If you need to destroy everything people loved just to start your own fan-fiction level storyline maybe you shouldn't be the one taking creative control.
It represented a complete knee-jerk reaction from morally grey characters, realistic politics, to unrealistic one-note comic book villains. MOST factions turned into either GI Joe or Cobra. There wasn't the same nuance as there was before. I'm going to use Jade Falcon as an example again because they were the faction to suffer the worst at this hands. Jade Falcon was a Crusader clan and they were pretty agro, they went after the InnerSphere, they wiped out garrisons, AFFCs, they were involved in very shady politics and tore Wolf into two factions with Marthe Prydes brilliant maneuvering. But InnerSphere populations didn't mind being under them very much... why? Because despite being Crusaders they were pretty chill with civilians. They even had a merchant cast, Marthe Pryde made a semi-elite unit with Freebirths and even gave a Freebirth Mechwarrior the go-ahead (and a pep-talk) to fight for a blood-name. They even came to a diplomatic resolution to stop attacking the Lyrans to the Tukayyid line so long as they had a planet to fight with the Lyrans over, the planet changing hands month after month depending on who won the fight that month. They had some nuance to them before the Jihad, they refused to outright nuke or slaughter civilians and they HATED Smoke Jaguar for doing so.
And then the Jihad happened and you had Jade Falcon slaughtering civilians left and right, wiping out all of their scientists (despite the fact they specifically set bloodnames aside for scientists and Marthe Pryde had a deep relationship with a scientist caste member and respected her greatly), crashing Soyuz' into planets and nuking people. Some of the competent writers tried their darndest though, more on that later. They had some Falcons' objecting, and they
tried to make believable justifications for their actions... but they all fell far short because none of the reasons given were believable for one of the most nuanced political entities to slip so far into GI Cobra territory.
The good.Later. Jihad kept a few characters alive... not all the best ones mind you, those were wiped out not for narrative integrity but to make it easier to start new storylines. This was... awful. But enough characters that were recognizable and many who already had satisfying ends to their stories were kept around and now forced to get back in the saddle. Enough of these were good, and some of the competent writers did their best to keep the old spirit of Battletech alive. Luckily enough was recognizable that some fans stuck around but without denial, this was a massive population loss in Battletech. Tournaments, MegaMek, etc, you saw a lot of Battletech fans leave.
Dark Age.The Bad.My god... the bad. That's... putting it lightly. Where Season 7/8 of Battletech had some redeeming qualities of a few notable characters and a bit of nuance left to the story. Dark Age saw fit to completely wipe any nuance out of the setting, to erase every remaining character, and to be a shameless cheap marketing tool to sell gacha-level plastic. Honestly, Dark Age was made to be the most predatory and hellish version of a tabletop. I saw people spend more on Dark Age models than they did for WH40k, IN A MONTH... in a desperate attempt to get just a playable unit down on the field. Scalped figures online were insanely expensive, there were normal Battlemechs on ebay for Dark Age which was brand new, outselling Ral-Partha
lead models. Dark Age was extremely effective at a short-term success, though we saw how fast the tournament and playing scene died for it (In Germany I can only find venues running Dark Age for 3 years max, where-as
Classic BattleTech is still played to this day.)
And the entire fiction/canon was written with one objective. Sell. Plastic. To. Teens. That's it. There was no nuance anymore, there was no political intrigue, there were no grey characters etc, I know people tease Michael Stackpole for black hat and white hat characters and he deserved
some of that teasing for his work in CBT. But Dark Age was so black hat vs white hat it was embarassing. It was like reading a cape hero comic book about stompy robots. I wasn't a teenager anymore but a young adult.
Dark Age didn't mature with its audience, it immatured. In an attempt to attract younger players instead of adults it kiddified the stories and simplified the characters, and invented extremely predatory sales tactics that I have still never seen a board game ever replicate in the same way Dark Age had. There are D&D miniatures sold in blind boxes right now but they are ASSURED to at least have one useable model in them. I wasted $800 and got NINE useable battlemechs. To this day I feel like a complete sucker and an idiot for doing that, especially since I hated how the game played and I hated the stories I hated the novels I hated everything about Dark Age but I wanted to get a little bit of that old Battletech glory and feel... I love Battletech, more than any other fiction ever. I have re-read Freebirth, Falcon Rising, Exodus Road, Grave Covenant, Operation Audacity, Prince of Havoc... many times. I have some of my favourite BattleTech books on display to my left right now. I feel that Dark Age was an
outright betrayal.
Let's go back to Jade Falcon as an example. There were justifications for what they were doing to the scientist class in the Jihad, however weak they may have been. They were still not evil, not by a long shot, but they were getting there into the comic book levels of evil. Jade Falcon in the Dark Age are
sunday morning cartoons evil in Dark Age. Seriously, Jade Falcons feel like a 6 year old pitched these ideas.
"We will have some bad guys, with birbs, the birbs are big'an green with a sword. They are the bad guys. This girl, she's evil and nasty, girls are gross, and she becomes the boss of the jade falcons. So they launch these missiles at ALL the planets and they go like KABOOM and wipe out everything! And now they just stop because they have no space ships now but they blew up everything'an now the good guys they are going to build up their good guys faction and the good guys they are gonna go beat up the bad guys who wait, and there will be like the traps and more big missiles and giant robots twice the size of other robotts and then they fight and the evil girl will be really mean to all the people and then KABOOM blow up HER OWN PEOPLE! An then the good guys win a few fights but she get away."Tell me that's not exactly what happened. Someone talked to their 6 year old and asked them what they would like to see in BattleTech and the kid said exactly that I guarantee that's what happened. The entire direction of the story feels like it's directed by a 6 year old. And no matter how many competent writers you hire to handle the meat of it, if the foundation is ridiculous and comical then it's always going to seem like a pale imitation of what we once had before the Jihad era of battletech. Whereas Jihad could be redeemed with re-writes and re-direction, there's nothing salvageable in Dark Age, and I will never- in my life contribute a singular damn cent to Dark Age ever again.
Also, I sold those 9 battlemechs for $80 apiece and the huge bucket of pointless worthless units for $100 so I at least made my money back on plastic. I had to just throw the books out for Dark Age. They were the first books in my life of any kind (including instruction manuals, I have instruction manuals for things I don't even own) that I literally just threw in the trash. But seriously... $80 a piece, that's how awful Dark Age's business model was. It actually taught me a lot about buying limited edition/rare things and selling them for a profit, I am sitting on over $40,000 of pokemon cards right now. So I'll thank Wizkids for that at least it was a very valuable lesson.
Actually, it taught me another lesson. Never to really love any kind of fiction that is an ongoing series. Because it will become awful. It's why even though I really enjoyed game of thrones I could never get into it and love it because Jihad and Dark Age are always in the back of my mind. Dark Age literally killed that youthful love of stories and writing for me. I wanted to be a writer even after Jihad uselessly killed characters like Diana Pryde off with. I wanted to do better. When I read Dark Age... I literally lost all the will and love in writing, I didn't even use my scholarships for English literature, I went into the military and criminology after that.
Luckily I actually recovered that, eventually. It took a long time for me to trust any written literature after what Dark Age did to me... I write for video games now, and I promise any of my readers I will NEVER betray them as Jihad or Dark Age did. We authors have a MASSIVE responsibility and duty to our fans not to completely and outright backstab them. The "lord of nukes", D. Benioff, D.B Weiss, O.S. Card, never learned that lesson. I remember "the lord of nukes" even laughing at people when they said how hurt they felt about the Jihad and how they erased their favourite characters for seemingly no reason. That taught me to respect my readers... respect the audience. Because it could be like BattleTech, and kill the love people have for your franchise off. Just like that Star Trek discovery show or, the JJ Abrams movies, or the new star wars movies.
It's a late post... but Battletech is the most important bit of fiction to me and was the last time I could let myself fall in love with fiction the way I did. So, I really needed to get this off my chest.
I believe it was disliked because they tried moving away from mech vs mech and more to combined arms combat.
I dont think a lot of the fan base was ready for that type of move.
Err... no? Everyone in our club was playing combined arms. Almost a quarter of the players at my club actually only played infantry and armour, without any battlemechs at all (a Hells Horses and FedSun player). Even as a FedSun, then GDL, Jade Falcon, and Fedsun player, I rolled combined arms in every single outfit.
Try finding a game of BattleTech.... ::) 8)
(Or even better, try to find a game store that actually stocks BattleTech...)
Multiple venues kept running BattleTech here, it was ironically Dark Age that killed BattleTech games. It gutted us, the entire community of loyal fans. We felt like nothing more was coming for BattleTech and at the time were right, there was nothing going to come no progression, no new models. We felt abandoned, so we moved on to WH40K, Heavy Gear, etc.
But guess what? BattleTech started to pop up again. Annual games kept it alive, then we started doing it every once in awhile, and tournaments kept going. Dark Age lasted 2 years in North America for tourny scene here, three years in Germany which is a far more concentrated and dedicated market. Guess what? BattleTech tournaments and venues never stopped in Germany. Here in Canada we're still playing it. So yeah, I can find a game of BattleTech. I can't find find any for Dark Age... and to be honest, that's a good thing in my eyes. Dark Age killed my favourite universe and board game.
I didn't really notice the Hero clix Mechwarrior stuff, and certainly didn't realize there was background info explaining the jihad and formation of the Republic until later. And even then, all it seemed to be to me was a board wipe of everything that was being built up prior to the Jihad. I didn't really like Devlin Stone, David Lear, or the architects of the Republic- and I hated what Victor Steiner-Davion turned into. All I could see was how it killed anything I liked about the setting. And I walked away.
My gosh, I don't even want to get started on what they did to Victor Davion... I don't think it's hyperbole to say that literally, every decision with the canon they made was trash writing only rivalled by how terrible GoT fell apart. There are MANY series that have worse writing etc, but few take something so amazing, so fun, so well thought out and deep... thought-provoking, and then just... ruin it. Completely, and without any regard or care for what they are doing. And then you have people going "hey don't be mad about this! You're just being sour!" You're darn right I'm being sour. And when people go "it didn't kill Battletech!" no it literally did, do you not remember how long Battletech just languished and slept until this Kickstarter directly after Dark Age? It was MEANT to kill BattleTech, I have no doubt about that. It was MEANT to erase BattleTech, and it nearly did.
/// EDIT ///
I wanted to, after quoting that last quote in an edit... I was too glum in the ending. I am now for the first time really hopeful that BattleTech can once again rise above the damage that Dark Age has done. I'm introducing avid Warhammer40k players to both CBT and Alpha Strike and they are coming around. Ten players here backed the Kickstarter, and I not only backed Galaxy Commander pledges, but a merchant one just to
give people free lances and starts that are local to get them into the game. And keep all the extra goodies for myself of course... haha.
My dream would be for them to completely retcon all of Dark Age, move it off into its own universe. And begin re-writing the Jihad era from the end of Civil War, don't just kill off people's beloved characters. Don't betray their backstory and make them into completely new and alien people either... and don't make factions go nuts for little-to-no-reason. Honestly, there's an easy way to jumpstart this series again from Clan Invasion and move into Civil War again.
You could write new books in the Civil War era easily without interrupting too much with the core framework. And then re-do a Jihad era, move it way WAY, way forward, and don't just have WOB win as they did, have them needing to ally with someone who would align with their goals *cough* Liao *cough cough* Capellans *cough* and write in political divisions and maneuvering between the two factions and give them more solid motivations than the WoB was written to have in Jihad. Ditch the all-out "nuke erases this inconvenient character/faction" and give people the endings they want for their characters. Archer Christiphori died, and it was a FANTASTIC story and an amazing narrative element to it. Characters can die but it has to be earned.
I'm sorry to fans of Dark Age... but some people even here are suggesting we treat it like an "alternative universe." Hell yeah, I'm down for that. Let's do that.
