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 Zaku212 wrote:
Are their QA guys (If they exist) just sitting around drinking milk from bags?

I doubt that there are enough people on staff to say that there is a QA guy separate from the author/editor(-in-chief!)/publisher...

... assuming they even had the money, to pay for one. Which the last few updates suggest they surely don't.

It's been crowdsourced for years. Heck, the it's/its issue was one that I submitted over a dozen corrections for PRIOR to the release of the first publicly shown alpha version of the rules 2 1/2 years ago. It's a common mistake and one I'm certainly guilty of at times... or worse! I found the mistakes in that initial document using an arcane process of technosorcery called "search" after I noticed the first two or three in the alpha rules back when I was ostensibly playtesting.

They haven't had a QA guy since the last one ran away, sometimes before the southern book release...

 HudsonD wrote:
They haven't had a QA guy since the last one ran away, sometimes before the southern book release...

Wonder who that would be...

We'll never know, he was smart enough to have his name removed from the credits before the book's release

http://dp9forum.com/index.php?showtopic=17512&hl=

I think I can safely say that this will be one of the best giant-antigravity-land-battleship games around.

Well, Albert, it was nice seeing you post on the dp9forums all these years but I suppose that era will soon be coming to a close. That at least explains the sudden interest in revamping Space Landship Yamato for interstellar combat beyond just a one page fluff blurb in the upcoming rulebook.

 warboss wrote:
http://dp9forum.com/index.php?showtopic=17512&hl=

I think I can safely say that this will be one of the best giant-antigravity-land-battleship games around.

Well, Albert, it was nice seeing you post on the dp9forums all these years but I suppose that era will soon be coming to a close. That at least explains the sudden interest in revamping Space Landship Yamato for interstellar combat beyond just a one page fluff blurb in the upcoming rulebook.

Yeah, I saw... as you can expect, I'm not too thrilled, setting wise, about that development >_>.

I don't plan on pledging for the KS (duh), but eh, it's removed enough for me to treat it like an alternate reality and be done with it. I've been doing that since the NuCoal book after all, so...

And if the game is fun enough, who knows. I'll just wait for retail, and if they actually manage to get an EU dealer I might even buy it, who knows.

Just close your eyes and think of the Republic when you see the fluff. As for backing the KS, you'll probably be better off waiting for retail regardless given the current 70% markup for shipping on the HG kickstarter. I'm guessing the rates won't magically get better in the next year or two.

 warboss wrote:
Just close your eyes and think of the Republic when you see the fluff. As for backing the KS, you'll probably be better off waiting for retail regardless given the current 70% markup for shipping on the HG kickstarter. I'm guessing the rates won't magically get better in the next year or two.

"Better". Heh.

I already have fleet scale minis of the old kind, so if the ruleset is decent I might buy the pdf. I don't really need anything else.

Well, at the very least Wunji seem to be thinking about the stuff in setting, which is good ^^

I think I'm more interested in tiny scale Heavy Gear combat if they make the ground units at 3mm hopefully (6mm being too big for my tastes.. I'd like a whole squad of gears on a 40mm base!).

 Albertorius wrote:
Well, at the very least Wunji seem to be thinking about the stuff in setting, which is good ^^

I'm just happy he finally made a go of it. I know every time we talked at Gencon fleet scale was his passion - I'm glad to see him taking it further.

 warboss wrote:
I think I'm more interested in tiny scale Heavy Gear combat if they make the ground units at 3mm hopefully (6mm being too big for my tastes.. I'd like a whole squad of gears on a 40mm base!).

Fleet scale ground units were smaller than equivalent Epic ones, IIRC, although the Gears were bigger (basically Epic dreadnought scale), so probably the rest of the ground units would probably be ok-ish as is. That combined with the scale change (from 1:3500 to 1:2500), the landships should probably feel more to scale.

Oh, look, another chibi Gear. I was just thinking to myself that it was exactly what the game needed Z_Z

2018's KS will be Heavy Gear Super Deformed.

The fleet scale helicarrier, oops I men landships, game sounds interesting, but I'm too old to find 'chibi' or super deformed anything of much interest to me.

 Firebreak wrote:
2018's KS will be Heavy Gear Super Deformed.

Well, I would find them more interested if they were actually more SD and less just squished.

IOW, more like these:




...and less like these:



On the technical side, the HG ones look perfectly OK, but in the aesthetic side they look... well, as if someone had sat on them.

WTF is wrong with the KC & Kodiak hands? That's not how hands work!

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
WTF is wrong with the KC & Kodiak hands? That's not how hands work!

They have two opposing thumbs (EDIT: well, the original ones have).

I do love when Barbe turns on the old magic.

Indeed! It's so nice to see a new pic of a classic gear that isn't a chibi version.

Ghislain WAS Heavy Gear (and Jovian Chronicles) in many respects, there really was no replacing him. Too bad his online portfolio seems to be down, though he has a Tumblr.

Absolutely, John. He defined a look, and that's a big thing for a game or setting. I think my biggest complaint with modern Heavy Gear is that there has been no attempt at style. The style set by Barbe has not been modernized or built on, or even drawn from for inspiration. We've just had purely modern, purely digital art, with none of the feel of what was created 20 years ago.

Barbe's original art can certainly be called "dated" (a term I hate but understand), but the fact is, it STILL stands out. Very, very little of the new art is capable of that. It all just looks like another mecha speedpaint from deviantArt, or, much worse, a poor render job.

I did like some of the art from the waning blitz years. The Parajagers dropping in from FIF, the duelist characters from arena, and the technical drawings from the TPS and FIF were ones that I liked. I didn't think the actual human art (all round cherub faced) was particularly good though as well as the fauna/landscapes or covers. It wasn't all bad but it definitely lacked the cohesion and consistent quality that the Ghislain era had for its time.

That's the difference an art director can make, I suppose. Someone to maintain a consistent vision. Warhammer's a great example of that. There is some HORRENDOUS effing art in 40K, but even the worst offenders are still immediately identifiable as 40K. Even the original Rogue Trader stuff still looks like the property.

 Firebreak wrote:
Absolutely, John. He defined a look, and that's a big thing for a game or setting. I think my biggest complaint with modern Heavy Gear is that there has been no attempt at style. The style set by Barbe has not been modernized or built on, or even drawn from for inspiration. We've just had purely modern, purely digital art, with none of the feel of what was created 20 years ago.

I wouldn't go quite that far. Mariko did some decent work, though her strength was more character art than mecha, and I don't think she had tons of room to be creative, because the mecha design was handled by other people. I feel that the mecha design is still good; NuCoal has some really good looking units and the newer Southern stuff is good too. Pretty much all the gearstriders are over-designed messes, though. Not EVERYTHING from the old HG worked either - looked at critically, the Mammoth just wouldn't work, and the Kodiak and King Cobra are also overdesigned to the point that they can't physically fit all their weapons and still move.

Probably part of the magic of Ghislain was he designed mecha from his style of art, which was largely derived and inspired from Votoms and Gundam. DP9 developed into a mecha RPG company pretty organically (Protoculture Addicts, Mekton Zeta version of Jovian Chronicles, then HG Card Fighter and finally Heavy Gear) around his artwork.

 Firebreak wrote:
That's the difference an art director can make, I suppose. Someone to maintain a consistent vision. Warhammer's a great example of that. There is some HORRENDOUS fething art in 40K, but even the worst offenders are still immediately identifiable as 40K. Even the original Rogue Trader stuff still looks like the property.

I thought that went to Battletech for horrible art especially mech art.

John Blanche is what happens when somebody has H.R.Giger's creativity with far less talent at drawing. Tons of great ideas, terrible execution. The Rogue Trader edition of 40K inspired so much, but the art is generally terrible.

The early mech designs in Battletech - once they were forced to stop using the good ones they stole from anime, yeah, they were pretty terrible.

John Prins wrote:
John Blanche is what happens when somebody has H.R.Giger's creativity with far less talent at drawing. Tons of great ideas, terrible execution. The Rogue Trader edition of 40K inspired so much, but the art is generally terrible.

The early mech designs in Battletech - once they were forced to stop using the good ones they stole from anime, yeah, they were pretty terrible.

Battletech didn't steal anything, they got the rights to use them but then Harmony Gold rescinded on them or some sorts like that. They were used Legally. Funny enough that is what got me into Battletech and the horrible artwork after the "unseen" I left Battletech.

While I didn't really care for John Blanche art work style, it sure did set the MOOD what 40K was. It's not all unicorn and rainbows, unlike the art GW is showing for 40K now.

Well I for one was enjoying the socioeconomic and manufacturing discussion.

One of the things that always made Heavy Gear stand out was it never asked you to believe in space magic. The V-engine is a real thing. It's kinda crappy, but with some blurry around the engines, why not use it on a giant robot? The robots' guns fire bullets. The robots are only a few metres tall. And the robots themselves, well, mechs make no sense. Ever. So we've got a planet with limited space capability, dangerous, confusing atmospheric conditions, and broken terrain. That's just about the only place walkers could ever work. So, believably not strained. Not too much.

But all this careful, meticulous work was done before smartphones. We had a different picture of the future, 20 years ago, however fictional that future may be. Look at Star Trek. Today there would never be a sci-fi show with an android main character who didn't have to hack something every other episode.

I guess what I mean is when we have conversations about things like, "Why can't Terra Nova X? We can already X!" it's worth remembering that a different picture was in mind when Terra Nova's Set of Rules* was created. The fact is we're going to see a day with better technology and manufacturing than Terra Nova has - because it was designed that way.

Knock-off Hunters don't break the Rules, and maybe hoverjet ferrets made by 3 guys and a cow don't either, but they sure do seem to stretch and confuse the issue.



*Not the in-game rules, the rules the universe runs on.