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Killionaire wrote:
I really like Heavy Gear Blitz. My local area picked it up, and we have some 14 regular players.

It's honestly a very good game, despite some (historically) poor company support. Things are getting a lot more cleaned up with basically 'new codexes'.

It plays to me at least, like what Battletech ought to be when you go beyond 4 mechs per side. Maneuver is way more important than better weapons, since a crappy gun with a good setup is more powerful than a super cannon just standing there and plinking at enemies in cover.

Yeah, Battletech isn't the only mech game that has been historically mismanaged. HG hit the scene in the mid-90's and quickly became very popular with Activision licensing two video games and Sony snapping up the rights to the cartoon but then the company just kept making serious mistake after serious mistake. Edition flip flops every 2-3 years for a decade, a switch in scale of the minis coinciding with the first premature edition swap making everyone's entire collections obsolete, and DP9 even taking a break for a few years to focus on television and movie production (not kidding unfortunately) with no RPG books coming out during that time. I really like the art style and core ruleset but definitely not the history of squandering consumer good will. They've been focusing on the right things for a few years now and trying to fight their way back but it's obviously an uphill battle. The minis though look very nice since the introduction of the blitz variant of the game and people do play it (but unfortuantely not in my area). Hopefully the reintroduction of a video game (consoles and PC supposedly according to a gencon video) will help increase the visibility of the game.

 IceRaptor wrote:
Hudson, MRondeau and Brandon all on the same thread? Outside the protective DP9 walls?

Indeed! Its nice to see some familiar names (including yours) outside the walls of dp9forum's Woodbury and the prison of a single rpg.net thread. And, yes, I just finished watching the Walking Dead.

BrandonKF wrote:


..... and what's a Woodbury? God bless!

It's a small southern town in the TV show I referenced (Walking Dead). It's filled with a bunch of people trying to live "normal" pre-zombie lives oblivious to the dangers of the zombie apocalypse; they're surrounded by guarded walls that keep them physically safe from the dangers outside but also keep them involuntarily locked in as well except for a chosen militant few. Think Mayberry mixed in with the Alamo led by a mid-war Stalin. The prison is the other setting currently in the season.

Yeah, I'm expecting an indie Steam type game along with console arcade downloadable versions as well if the Gencon Video commenting about it is still accurate and it hasn't gone PC only. This is an indie studio with an as yet unknown publisher to my knowledge and not the AAA (for it's time) release done by one of the largest developers/publishers like Heavy Gear 1 and 2 were.

I don't think they've got the funding to do a full on shooter (whether 1st or 3rd person) with a full storyline. I'm completely fine with a smaller scale Rollerball meets Gladiator multiplayer robot shooter. I'd personally prefer a 3rd person viewpoint like Gears of War (the roadie run would be a good SMS mechanic as long as you could shoot in some fashion).

No, not yet. The mektek site now redirects to a heavy gear labeled one but nothing actually shows up.

The site is working and now shows a homemade crowdfunding effort with only part of the details you need to make an informed consumer choice (and initially almost none till hours later). It sounds vaguely like a freemium type game of unknown perspective (first, third, isometric, who knows) with an unknown release date on unknown formats (pc? ps3? ps4? xbox 360? nextbox?) from a relatively unknown company that wants more money than industry giant Valve to make a AAA game when the only previous company experience is with some mods and they couldn't get the site working properly for an hour or two after the countdown ended.

The initial version of the site mentioned a blurb about publishers believing the mech genre is dead as why they're going for crowdfunding instead but frankly somehow Mechwarrior and Hawken (a 4-man outfit initially when they posted their first gameplay video) got funded through traditional methods. I wish them well but I've seen too many video games get cancelled even with backing to throw money at a nebulous product like this that is likely in the pre-production phase at best. I hope they do get put out a finished product that I can later buy and use (my current PC crop can't support much gaming). I guess my original hope of a simple xbox arcade/PS store/steam indie game wasn't ambitious enough...

 kenshin620 wrote:

 warboss wrote:

The initial version of the site mentioned a blurb about publishers believing the mech genre is dead

They have never heard of Japan before have they

I wonder when the next dynasty warriors gundam is coming out.....

In their defense, it's a Western company catering to Western style mech games. I agree that their (now gone) statement was incorrect but for different reasons than gundam.

GBL wrote:

Now I have been very negative, so here is how I believe it should have been run.

Developed until they can release early in game footage.

Kickstarter with a goal of 100,000 and if you play the stretch goals correctly, it could exceed 1mil

Remove the MekTek moniker completely. The name is dirt. But Stompy Bot is an awesome name without any attachments.

Scope Down. Under Promise Over Deliver. Coming in talking about how you are going to redefine gaming, is a lofty goal.

Some games have successfully kickstarted just their betas. How about we get 2 Gears fighting in an arena with a handful of mod parts. Sell just that, and when it works, add features and ask for more support.

While I completely agree with the above, I suspect that they decided it wasn't financially possible since the first version of their page said they have no publisher that would normally fund that (they have since removed that statement). I wish them luck and will likely buy/try any HG product that they eventually come out with as long as they support a format that I own (no gaming-worthy PC so console for me)... but this homemade high apple pie in the sky crowdfunding venture is just way too risky for me to throw money at years in advance.

 Dullspork wrote:
I hope this goes better for them than the Warmachine video game.

I hope so too but the warmachine game (despite my love for heavy gear and dislike for steampunk personally) is based on a more popular IP and had major publisher funding... and is still apparently in limbo despite those advantages compared to HG. I posted earlier in this thread that I was expecting an arcade type game but that was also with the expectation that they had a publisher backing them up. If they're truely doing this with no backing other than crowdfunding, they should have started with a freemium HG iOS/android/flash game instead and then moved onto a paid xbox arcade/steam title with paid DLC and THEN to a AAA release for the final step. They're a company who has basically made a few appetizers for someone else's dinner party and now thinks that they're ready to open up a chain of restaurants.

 IceRaptor wrote:
Simply not using kickstarter makes me think they aren't even sure of their own success - 5% of the total isn't that much, and the protections that kickstarter provides everybody are missing. That makes me extremely nervous about funding them.

Ironically, Kickstarter doesn't actually give you any real protection despite the public viewpoint that it does. What it does give you is some transperancy to the whole offer with current funding totals and information about the number of backers in a public venue that is not able to be manipulated easily after the fact by the kickstarting company. You're also not signing away your right to a refund as well as legal recourse like you do with their TOS. The way they have it set up is that you basically just hand your money behind the curtain ("Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!") and hope something comes of it in the end with no real recourse due to the terms of service you agree to with the pledge. They couldn't get the website working for the end of the countdown and forgot to include paypal as a payment but they certainly managed to cover their own butts right off the bat.

I would have loved (as I said earlier) an arcade/steam arena fighting title in 3rd person perspective with relatively modern graphics; that's not possible without significant funding that is substantially less than what they're asking for. What is possible with crowdfunding and limited time is maybe coming up with a Civ Revolutions style orthographic 2.5d downloadable game that largely automates the tabletop one. That doesn't require top notch graphics or animation but I'd have thrown $10-15 at them for something like that with the polar factions and $5 DLCs for other factions.



I believe Edison once said that invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Unfortunately, it seems Stompy Bot believes in the inverse with the combination of lofty goals and lack of preparation shown so far.

He's an assistant line developer according to the FIF credits and the 1st person mentioned after the "big three" of Robert, autel, and mason (assuming you put any importance on that order).

BrandonKF wrote:
There's a 'big three'? : )

It seemed appropriate. I don't think the term needs to be restricted to automakers or allied war leaders, do you?

Enthusiasm is nice but attention to detail is more important and they don't seem to be demonstrating that. The website wasn't working for hours after the end of the 20 day countdown and I don't buy the "sudden demand crashed the server" excuse for a game with less than 1,000 likes (unless their server was an original iphone on a 2g network). The video they posted still has a typo in the little text that they bothered to put in it (seriously, no body spell checked the 3 lines of information they put in???). They did however finally answered some but certainly not all the initial important points that should have been addressed at the very start of the campaign before taking the first pledge... I guess that's progress...

Attention to detail is a huge part of what makes a game sink or swim. If they can't apparently to put correct spelling in their lackluster promo video and have trouble setting up a simple website given 20+ days of notice, how can they be trusted to publish a good AAA game that isn't riddled with bugs on their first attempt out of the gate? Like I said, 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration is the key but they seem to be going for the inverse ratio.

Either way, Brandon, I sincerely hope that your optimism ends up trumping my realism in the end like a Kodiak stomping on an Asp.

BrandonKF wrote:
Well, three weeks after this soft launch, the pledge is at 100,000 and the ticker is up. They are also open now on PayPal, for all those of you who were concerned about putting in your money into a site that wasn't secured. So congratulations.

Thanks for the update. I'm glad to hear that they've been making some progress on the items that realistically should have been working at launch. I suspect that they'll get a big surge of donations when they show in game screenshots as opposed to concept art.

While that's more cutscene than gameplay, it's good to see something working and not just the intro teaser with the typo. The hunter does look spiffy and I do hope they'll make a completely new sculpt that resembles it as the Hunter XMG in the tabletop game. Hopefully the video will spur some donations as the last two weeks have netted less than $1000 (they were at $104,400ish on 3/12/2013).

As I said before, I wish them well but I also wish they had set more realistic starting goals like a small dowloadable 3rd person isometetric action game. The odds are stacked against winning the the Indy 500 with your first race as a team.

They have some people that have worked on big name games (like Jack Mamais specifically as they focus on him alot... although he has a 5+ year gap though where he was teaching prior to joining this project from his bio). The problem is that the goals they've set both in funding and the type of game they're attempting are more appropriate for famous studios led by gaming celebrities, not new studios with no prior work who just hired some experienced people working together for the first time (and apparently telecommuting from pre-crowdfunding press releases). I really wish they would have chosen a less ambitious project to start with and then (after it's success) moved on to the moby dick of gaming (the "AAA game").

Hey Brandon, as the original poster here in the thread can you update the title and text of the first entry with links to reflect that the kickstarter is now live? Only you can do that... and fight forest fires.

No worries... I just figured that you don't really post here much and maybe thought it was like the DP9 forums where you can't edit posts after a day or so. When I saw you post a few days in a row, I figured I'd mention it.

 HudsonD wrote:


Given the KS numbers so far, I think it's "Game over".

The post would have been so much more awesome if you had written "game over, man! game over!" instead.

The probable failure of the kickstarter brings up the question of what they'll do with the money that was raised during the private crowdfunding they did on the website. That money was technically raised with the TOS fine print disclaimer that refunds are only at the sole discretion of Mektek/Stompy.

BrandonKF wrote:
I'm willing to wait and see what comes of it.

And the reason why they released this content during the Kickstarter was because they have been creating the bulk of it for the past two months. It's difficult to release content that you are working on from the ground-up.

Which brings up the question of how successful they could have been if they had worked on more content before starting the crowdfunding... I realize it might be a chicken and egg scenario (they need crowdfunding to afford to work on content but the crowdfunding won't succeed unless they have content to show off first) but the last minute pulling an all-nighter to bang out the term paper overall feel of the crowdfunding is a bit disheartening. I keep coming back to the (IMO) bad decision of setting such an unrealistic goal in the first place instead of a smaller but more attainable goal like a smaller indie HG game. What's better.. What's worse? Failing at an unrealistically grandiose goal or succeeding on a much more mundane project? It's obviously a judgement call without an absolute right or wrong answer but I'd personally prefer having *any* working Heavy Gear game out sometime in the near future.

BrandonKF wrote:
The men of Stompy Bot and MekTek have shown they are trying to make this game, and not merely in it for tons of money.

So what gives with folks?

I think the issue lots of people have is that they don't feel they're proven that they're capable of making the holy grail mega expensive "AAA" game they want to do at OTHER PEOPLE'S cost. They've shown little technical expertise and attention to detail in their initial crowdfunding efforts; responsiveness to fan input is a laudible trait to a degree for a company but it isn't a replacement for either. They've simply bit off more than the community thinks they can chew and the (lack of) funding shows it. Like I said, I would have preferred if they had succeeded at both funding and accomplishing a more mundane goal than failing at such a grandiose one right out of the gate.

BrandonKF wrote:
I understand that it was a pretty high level to be asking, but when you consider the rest of the boardgames/RPGs/miniature games that have been presented over Kickstarter, and their tremendous success, isn't it actually to be expected that a computer game which would span 4 different systems and use the most recent game engine contrived require some extra funds?

I agree with you about there being an inherent difference in funding scale between board games but I think other video game kickstarters are a better comparison. Companies with years of continuous experience together, long histories of successful (both critically and commercially) games, and "rockstar" personalities leading them aimed for lower goals than Mektek did as a new startup with no history of successful independent products staffed by a few veteran (although a bit out of the loop) telecommuting staffers working together for the first time. Those same companies that have all those good things going for them compared to mektek/stompy still weren't able to raise more than half the lofty goals mektek set for themselves. Ambition is one thing but the goals for this were much closer to hubris especially with the incredibly poor effort put into the website funding campaign.

In the end, we keep coming back to the same thing... we have a company (company... not discrete individuals) that hasn't proven itself in any way asking in an initially very amateurish fashion that inspired no confidence for money that companies that have proven themselves in every way haven't been able to raise.

BrandonKF wrote:
Except they are trying to complete it.

I can try to win the Kentucky Derby as a jockey in my first race but, at 6'4" and more pounds than I care to admit, it's about as likely as this getting funded.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BrandonKF wrote:
Even still, I'll keep trying to put it out there. Maybe with enough exposure and enough recognition folks will realize they are not actually trying to steal their money (which is practically the entirety of the argument that's been presented all along).

That's not even close; the vast majority of points presented here point out that we don't believe they've shown us they're capable of completing this. Your consipiracy been mentioned in passing by one or two people but calling it "practically the entirety of the argument" is plainly false.

BrandonKF wrote:
Why don't you guys go to their forums on MekTek and discuss it with them? Ask them, and they'll answer you.

Here's the link:

http://www.mektek.net/forums/forum/234-hga-discussion/

Brandon, I don't think anyone here means to take out their Mektek frustrations out on you as a proxy punching bag so hopefully you don't feel that way. That said, I think almost everyone who posted in the last couple of pages (including yourself) has already made up their minds about the crowdfunding after following the game for several months and won't be swayed barring some shocking world changing disclosures.

BrandonKF wrote:
That's pretty much exactly how I feel when I get hammered by experts with every possible factoid to try and dispel excitement about the game, warboss.

While I can't speak for others, I feel incredibly disappointed by the whole endeavor. My own personal excitement about the project was dispelled by Mektek. There was a reason that when I didn't see any news after the initial license announcement that I started a thread asking if anything was going on. There was a reason that I was clicking (or technically tapping on my phone) at the end of the countdown after counting down the days with the timer. I *was* excited. What dispelled that excitement was the initial crowdfunding that felt like it was planned on a cocktail napkin and executed by high school freshman computer science class students. I've tried to not comment on it on the dp9 forums as much as possible out of respect to DP9 (who have little to do with this project) during the kickstarter but the ridiculous initial goals coupled with piss poor execution initially have dispelled any excitement on my part. No amount of video blogs will fix that. IMO they need to start from scratch and come up with a completely different *reasonable* goal/business plan commensurate with their resources and abilities.

BrandonKF wrote:

warboss, I don't think that what you describe is going to happen.

On that we unfortunately agree... :( But a man can dream (about XCOM: Heavy Gear on consoles...)

 Killionaire wrote:

 warboss wrote:

BrandonKF wrote:

warboss, I don't think that what you describe is going to happen.

On that we unfortunately agree... :( But a man can dream (about XCOM: Heavy Gear on consoles...)

I like the way you think. Alas

Yeah... the idea of a gear squad fighting it out in turn based combat with some choice animations would indeed be great for consoles... Uh... I wish they had gone that route.

On a more positive note, the "opt out" option quasi-buying the game upfront is a nice addition but I'm kind of confused how that fits in between the other pledge levels. The full $60 opt out bundle that contains all the north/south gears.. how does that interact with the premium membership? What is the difference between a well stocked arsenal and a fully stocked arsenal? How does the $500 pledge level containing all "core gears" compare with the opt out benefit of northern/southern gears? I'm glad they added that option (although I'm not sure how you'd get it via pledges as I don't see an option for just that) but it seems like they added that without really considering how that $60 opt out affects the other pledges' relative values. In the end, it's a bit esoteric for me personally as I'm not a PC gamer and don't plan to be. I don't know if they can actually change the pledge levels that people have already chosen in kickstarter.

 IceRaptor wrote:

 warboss wrote:

Yeah... the idea of a gear squad fighting it out in turn based combat with some choice animations would indeed be great for consoles... Uh... I wish they had gone that route.

I totally vote for a https://mwtactics.com/ approach. That would make me soo happy. I'm pretty sure I'd throw hours away just killing off Jagers in the badlands...

Lol, the site is down for maintenance. Perhaps its not the greatest example at the moment. Is that basically the program that is a much prettier and more automated version of vassal specific for MW?