O-kay.
I honestly didn't expect this to get this far.
Full disclosure; I meant this thread as satire. I fully expected one of the BattleMasters to come in here and smack me down and tell me how silly I was for even suggesting something like a 3145/3150: Revised.
Here's the thing; I've been poo-pooing the naysayers for a few years now that the products have become too much about selling a visual and that fluff and plot in particular have suffered as a result. The products have been getting increasingly expensive; basically for chrome. I've had to come over to the opinion that the PDFs are the best value for money, with their often-reused art, simply because the dead-tree-enabled main products, with their fancy borders and backgrounds and stylish art are so much busier than I need in something I am actually trying to read.
My personal opinion is that there is nothing wrong with the old art. I think things like the recasts of the Clan Omnis and the Centurion basically prove that; making the old image look better is the way to go. A ton of mechs, specifically would look better with just a smaller freaking cockpit and a move-away from that big-head toy soldiers mileau some of the minis seem stuck with.
That's all subjective; here is the objective: whether we have a standard, such as; "Art of a certain vintage will be effectively discarded and re-done as time passes." Or a principle, like; "Everytime a new computer game comes out; we will copy that aesthetic." or simply; "Old art; bad. New Art; good." we don't have any way off this train. TPTB have ensured that this IP is now an art-generating oroborus, forever eating itself.
You're doing that thing GW does where you are looking for a way for old players to want to replace their old miniatures. GW normally comes out with new rules that upset old paradigms of the way the game was played and force players to buy new and different armies and units to stay competitive. Recently, GW opted to do an art-reboot alongside the rules and fluff and re-imagine what a space marine is and looks like. The new Primaris Marines are true-scale proportioned; aping the most popular custom parts and kitbashes online and benefit from the latest in techniques and technology to produce the miniatures. They look different enough that older models simply don't fit on the table with them anymore.
I just dropped about a grand in accumulated store credit on minis. You're probably doing as well as you can be. This isn't necessary.
Someone once told me that a picture was supposed to be worth a thousand words, but when turning out these products; I should probably figure they are worth more like 10-100 thousand words in terms of expenses. That seemed far-fetched at first. But I can look at any recent product I have and do that math roughly in my head. If that much resources is going to art and so much less to the actual text that is the lifeblood of the universe; now in context I understand why products take so very, very long to come out, why they cost what they do to produce and why; despite how much I love it: we are showing a marked preference for new products rehashing old material or filling in the blanks vs advancing the plot.
Maybe I'm late to the party, but I used to think that it was awesome to be doing a "Year of the Star League" and Succession Wars products, because those things interested me, personally and the Dark Age was stupid; so why do I want to go there? Now it's making more sense. If the resources and creative consciousness is going to the visuals; it isn't going to story. And it's easier to write within an already-established framework than do something new.
More clearly; how are we supposed to get any progress when we're consumed with endless re-released and updates of old material with new art? We've done some of this before with compiling TRO entries from plot-products into the new Technical Readout Books, but TRO; Succession Wars really seemed like a stretch when we already have perfectly good TRO: 3039 and 3025r, 3026r and 2750 weren't terrible, either.
The best product I have ever seen for BT is TRO: 3026. Besides the cool-factor of the attention to detail of the infantry weapons; the art was what it needed to be; plain pages with simple boarders and full-page splashes of the units profiled. That art was on-point and original; the Demolisher, in all it's turtle-backed implacable glory and the Behemoth making me wonder how I pissed off that suspiciously-well-armed elementary school. Never since has art so perfectly followed stats and fluff. But the Fluff was what had me re-reading my copy until it literally disintegrated. It was gritty, realistic military-SF, with an emphasis on MILITARY.
At the end of the day, is endless cycles of art-revision really what we want this hobby to be about? Games like BT have not survived because they followed trends (and they tended to lose their way when they tried to), they have survived by being original, sticking to their strengths and staying the course.
If you're really about the new shiny. Okay. Fine. I'm happy for you. But what if the next computer game is another Mech Assault as has been rumoured? And it has a new style, different from MWO/BTPC and you don't like it; or maybe it's even objectively bad?
Another point I will make is that I see a trend for a lot of this new art to be revisonist in the features of the mech it portrays; in particular adding a torso-twist. Or hands. Just my opinion again; not a fan of that. I prefer the flavour of individual designs having those kinds of quirks.
Finally; I'll make a point I've made again and again: If we want to attract new players, we need to emphasize the unique. I used to crow about changing the marketing; but we have done that. I have both the new boxed sets and they are excellant. If was doing intros to wargaming; I would use these. What we still do not have (and this is not a criticism of recent efforts: this should have been done years ago) is official automatic of the construction rules from top to bottom. The BattleMech Manual was ann excellant offering; but what it needed was a companion program or set of programs offering the construction rules. No other game even has those rules, not like we do. But we bury them in the core rule books and take something awesome and leave it as *exclusively* a labour-intensive effort, when what we need is an *offical* companion product so we can market that aspect of the game better.
