I am BEYOND excited about this.
But I must agree with my esteemed colleague above- please do include a simple conversion to P/G for standard Battetech or Alpha Strike.
Now, that said- I love the homage to the original Jim Holloway piece on the cover. If this is spiritually in line with MechWarrior 1e and 2e, I can see our group putting together a campaign pretty quickly. Faster character gen, faster and simpler task resolution, plenty of MechWarrior flavor- I hope that's what's in store for us. Heck, even the return to the title "MechWarrior" bodes well.
I thought the return of the missing Legendary designs as high quality plastic minis was the most excitement I'd get from Battletech this year- but this? This is just as awesome.
Back in the late 80s, we played MechWarrior 1e and loved it. It was quirky, clunky, and the xp mechanic was a bit burdensome- but holy hell did we have a blast trying to become Knights or Barons though our exploits. In 1995, we founded the gaming club I'm still a part of now- the Royal Dragoon Guards, and we founded it on a massive MechWarrior 2e/BattleTech campaign that stretched through the Clan War following the trials and tribulations of our struggling mercenary battalion. That campaign had thirty players/Game Masters running the PCs and the OPFOR. It was quite a thing- in the climactic battle to unseat a usurper Baron, we had the battalion XO going sword-to-sword with a PC who had defected to the enemy while the BattleMechs mixed it up outside the castle walls. Epic stuff. When I got married, it was in the uniform of our unit, with the ushers and groomsmen likewise uniformed.
We playtested for MechWarrior 3rd Edition, and enjoyed some of those campaigns as well- but hit our stride with Time of War where we had a 17-player campaign in which the PCs formed their own Houses Minor banded together under their Duke in exile to take back the planet Royal from House Kurita after it fell in the Fourth War. We still talk about those Houses Minor to this day, and a couple of them are still entities within our gaming club.
So, when you announce a new version of MechWarrior that takes us back in complexity and theme- well, you've got my full attention.