Mech Mercs and a Dragon Crown

 Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is... a Mechwarrior game, and I hadn't played one of those in a long time. It gets most things right, but it doesn't strike me as highly revolutionary or a great improvement over older entries to the series beyond natural graphic updates.

The strategic layer covers handling of finances for a mercenary lance - pay and salvage versus repair, travel, salaries, and upgrades. Travel time is, I guess, "realistic" within the setting, though I find it a bit disturbing to watch months roll by for a major refit or travel more than a couple systems away on the map. And my quest for revenge (the main story) took something like twenty years. Mech modification and design is restricted by the newer (in relative terms) hard point limits beyond just tonnage and space, which can make acquiring certain variants of mech models important.

The tactical play of the missions is fairly routine, though gets mixed up enough that I didn't really feel bored by it. It's still a handful or two of biomes and terrain tiles put together into a finite area with one or more targets and enemies that spawn in. That spawning (though I'm given to understand it was much worse on initial release) still is only really passable. I only had enemies spawn "right on top of me" a couple times, but I could moderately-often seen them appearing at long ranges. The AI is not particularly smart, but it can be highly accurate, which made some of the most devastating encounters the ones with lots of smaller vehicle enemies appearing at once. 

I do like how the Inner Sphere map changes at points in the timeline, borders shifting and new nations cropping up.

What I really want out of these games, though, is something more. HBS's Battletech plotline was more compelling to me. I find it a bit ironic that the Mechwarrior games tend to be more sim-focused when the original Mechwarrior was an RPG based on the Battletech tactical game (while Battletech computer games tend to have more RPG elements/story). I found myself in the neighborhood of Solaris and thought, "It would be cool if you could pop in and do some arena-fighting missions," but nope. The timeline news mentioned when the Dragoons opened up Outreach as a major mercenary hub, but again - nothing to actually do there. And it may be difficult to make a good game out of, but I still wish there could be a combination of doing stuff on foot and in person as well as in mechs.

But as a Mechwarrior game, it was fine, and I may play some more on-and-off.

I also went through Solasta: Crown of the Magister.

I hadn't heard much about it, but I don't really follow much crowdfunding these days. So I was surprised to hear it was closely following D&D 5E. Looking closer, I saw it was based on the 5E SRD, which is limiting in some ways, but they also didn't cover everything - dragonborn and tieflings missing was about the first thing I noticed. The biggest mechanical lack to me, however, is probably the absence of multi-classing. They adapted it to a setting, which is fine and sort of what you're supposed to do.

Still, while some parts are removed, it does adhere pretty darn closely to the 5E ruleset and it does so remarkably effectively. I never really got the hang of flying/spiderclimbing movement, but just having those things supported in a CRPG is noteworthy. It also makes it a pretty interesting basis for mods.

But it was also a bit disappointing in some respects. The party banter is cute, but the voice work itself is far from top-tier. The map starts to open up, but then feels very linear, revisiting some locations for side quests with little new. Random encounters pop up in travel, but there was nothing particularly interesting about them. Too much of the back half of the campaign feels rushed to me. And while there's some potential in the variety of craftable enchanted items, the limitations of needing special "primed" weapons/armor as well as a special ingredient make it possible to get locked out of making a thing you might want until (maybe) the last few missions of the game. Plus there seem to be some weapon types that aren't even covered.

I enjoyed it well enough in spite of a few frustrations and I'm impressed by the framework built. It does feel like it missed out on being great, however, due to lack of funds, time, and/or development skill/energy. I do hope it was successful overall and I think there are things even a high-profile game like Baldur's Gate 3 could probably learn from it.