Quote:
Originally Posted by unipus
I'm real curious what some of you guys were expecting.
I don't think it's a big shock that almost no RPG today is built on the foundation of the old GDW games. They had some interesting systems (certainly for character generation), but not a lot of elegance in those rules and not much you could push them before they were completely unwieldy. They're great reference (with a grain of salt), but I feel no nostalgia at all for the task of actually gaming with them. The "instant gratification" I am looking for (as a '90s gamer) is a system that is intuitive, quick, rich in theme tied to mechanics, and detailed enough to generate great, specific stories.
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Hmm lets see - what we were expecting was Twilight 2000 - you know the game and timeline we have been playing since the mid-1980's - my first campaign started three months after the game was released for instance as soon as my GM got his copy and digested it enough to be able to run it - and that it would be faithful to the timeline and the things that made the game so good that it survived not being supported or having new things released for it for nearly 21 years with a lot of faithful adherents
In other words what we expected was a reboot that was faithful enough to still be recognizable but with some changes - i.e. what they did to Star Trek for instance - it was still Starfleet, Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al but slightly different - and thus it was accepted.
This is a rip it up and start over reboot - its like trying to reboot Star Trek and its Earthfleet, no Federation, no Kirk, no Spock, no McCoy and telling the fans to accept it because at least you get some Star Trek. That is 100% not the right way to do it.
There is a great History Channel show right now called The Food That Built America - the Coke episode is a perfect example of what is going on here - Coke tried to fight Pepsi and was losing - so what did they do - they put out a new version of Coke that was supposed to be superior to the old version - and no one liked it - and it almost killed Coca Cola. They only saved the company by bringing back the old version. Lets hope that V4 doesnt turn out to be the New Coke of Twilight 2000 - a reboot that is supposedly going to bring a whole new bunch of customers - but in doing so manages to lose the fan base that kept the game alive for nearly 25 years after GDW died.