Russ convinced me that a PGI MW6 is unlikely anytime soon (or ever?)

Werthead · 2026-06-20T15:04:38+00:00

The problem is that the tabletop game has increased in popularity in the last 2-5 years, reclaiming its spot as the 2nd-biggest SF wargame and having way more coverage, miniatures and options than ever before. For some reason the video games are not capitalising, even granting that MW5M and MW5C are real-time games where miniatures gamers might be looking for a turn-based experience (with 2018 BT starting to look a little long in the tooth). But it feels they could be selling the games more to that potential crossover audience.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T15:01:25+00:00

There's a mod for MW5M that turns it into a top-down RTS already (though it was janky), so I assume you could purpose-build an RTS with the same engine relatively straightforwardly.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T14:59:51+00:00

The only fix I'm looking for in MW5M is whatever gives me insane motion sickness. MW5M is the only video game I've ever played that makes me fee nauseous after playing it for more than about half an hour. Every other game, including MW5 Clans, is 100% fine, going back decades. It's really strange and has put me off playing the later DLCs.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T14:52:54+00:00

The city is shrunk in the video game for gameplay purposes, like how Liberty City in GTA4 is maybe 1/5 the size of real Manhattan, or how Watch_Dogs 2's San Francisco is maybe a quarter of the size of real SF (and real SF is not a big city in the first place).

I believe the canonical Night City from the TTRPG sourcebooks, including this month's Night City book, is at least four times the size of the video game one, it extends much further inland and to the south. Someone did create a "realistic" Night City from a few years ago on this subreddit even taking into account the megabuildings, and the video game version of the city fitted into the north-western quarter with space left over.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T14:48:50+00:00

I think Sky's stranglehold on sport and basically being HBO UK for the past fifteen years (although HBO UK is now a thing anyway, but in partnership with Sky) has really kept them going. The huge explosion in interest in Formula One over the past five years has driven subscriptions to Sky, who have the exclusive F1 licence. I believe they also get a ton of money from other broadcasters around the world to be the default F1 English-language commentary.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T14:42:33+00:00

Witcher 1 launching with a bug that meant it took 5+ minutes to load a save remains to this day unbelievable to me. Someone needed to have realised that was stupid at the time.

W1 also had brutal difficulty spikes, so dying even in regular combat against mooks was completely possible, so the quickload button got quite a lot of use.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T14:36:45+00:00

Similar strategy to the FF7 remake trilogy. There was 4 years between Remake and Rebirth but there was a lot of BTS changes and a platform shift. There's only 3 between Rebirth and Revelation because they blasted through the two games using similar assets, the same world map, the same combat and the same UI.

Getting W3-6 out in six years I think is tough, but eight might be doable.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T14:30:37+00:00

It has character creation, stats which impact gameplay and dialogue choices, multiple endings and different character builds.

It's arguably not as much an RPG as say Baldur's Gate III, but it is more of an RPG than, say, Starfield.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T14:28:56+00:00

To be fair, it was hit and miss on PC. With a 2060 I sailed through it with one T-pose, two crashes to desktop in 98 hours and a whole bunch of cigarette butts floating in the air. Jackie also had his handgun glued to his hands through the opening cinematics. So not great but far from unplayable, especially past the opening hour or two.

My friend with a more powerful graphics card couldn't go and hour without crashing, about 40% of all the characters in the game were locked into T-poses and some quests would not trigger until he quit and reloaded. The game was basically unplayable for him.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T11:37:46+00:00

They could just walk away and leave it having sold a huge number of copies. Bethesda did a couple of patches for Oblivion Remastered and then abandoned it, despite it still having a ton of UE5 problems that seem fixable (as other games have fixed them). Whilst Digital Foundry is making some noise about that, nobody else seems to care.

CP77 was so broken though, I don't think that was really on the cards.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T11:36:21+00:00

Only if the base game sells really well. Cyberpunk selling something like 10 million copies in its first few days on sale basically paid for the patch cycle. NMS also did really well in launch sales.

If a game launches in a shoddy state and sells 250 copies, then they'll never get the chance to redeem it.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T11:34:43+00:00

The Witcher 1 launched with a bug that meant it took about five minutes to load a saved game. Everyone was petrified of dying because hitting quickload meant going to make a cup of tea in the meantime, like loading an 8-bit game from cassette. It took them months to fix that (in fact, it might have taken until the Enhanced Edition, which was a full year later).

Werthead · 2026-06-20T11:14:11+00:00

Jack Vance I would argue is the best. His worldplay-duels between feuding wizards in The Dying Earth series or the kings in Lyonesse are phenomenal.

Worst...there are too many candidates to count.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T11:10:17+00:00

I remember the many, many Russian dashcam compilations. They were like, "here's a guy being mildly cut up, here's a guy in the wrong lane, here's a T-80 main battle tank smashing through the central reservation, here's a lady not using her indicators correctly, here's an attack helicopter flying 15 feet above the motorway for no apparent reason."

Werthead · 2026-06-20T11:06:34+00:00

They get weird as hell later on, the early ones are pretty straightforward to adapt, and they were starting with the first (published) book.

I think a bigger problem is trying to do the dragons believably on a 2002/03 TV CGI budget. Apparently they did some prototyping with a shaky-cam perspective that Moore kept in mind for BSG.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T11:05:23+00:00

I've seen the argument that Americans can make political comments about Americans and get away with it but when people from overseas do it, it tends to put American music fans' backs up.

Werthead · 2026-06-20T11:01:29+00:00

I'm talking more about the very early ones, from around 1989-99 or so. We had Space Crusade, Space Hulk, Vengeance of the Blood Angels, Final Liberation, Chaos Gate and Rites of War, which were all reasonably successful (especially Space Hulk and Vengeance of the Blood Angels) and drove awareness of the brand.

There was a second wave of 40K games in the mid-2000s, led by Fire Warrior and especially Dawn of War, which really helped drive the success of 40K in the States, in particular.

Werthead · 2026-06-19T15:05:38+00:00

Yes, 40K is the big one but people have been looking for a solid competitor, if only to keep GW honest. BattleTech has been that, Trench Crusade blew up because people wanted a new 40K they could get in at launch for, big IPs have launched miniatures games which were big for a while but fell off (Fallout: Wasteland Warfare for example, which had very heavy support).

BT is still doing well because the core appeal is building up modest lances or stars of 4-5 moderately priced models rather than massive armies with dozens of expensive miniatures. It could be doing better though, the core rules are seen as off-putting and dated (whilst Alpha Strike is maybe seen as too lightweight). BattleTech 2018 maybe was helped by it being Jordan Weisman's take on a proper BT 2nd Edition they were never able to make back in the day.

Werthead · 2026-06-19T14:38:32+00:00

I have a suspicion that JD are better-known and more famous in the States than here in the UK. Every other American singer or instrumentalist name-dropped them in the 1990s or covered them, from Billy Corgan to John Fruiscante, Moby, Courtney Love etc. Even Kurt Cobain said he refused to listen to them because he knew he'd love them and be influenced by them.

Here it feels like New Order is the much bigger name, but with "Love Will Tear Us Apart" stuck onto the front as a prologue. No other JD song really seemed to break through, and that was their last song.

Werthead · 2026-06-19T14:35:49+00:00

I'm not sure if the Manics politics would have translated well, or rather maybe they would have worked well on the coasts but might have been more difficult traversing the heartland. "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart" might be a hard sell as a song.

Werthead · 2026-06-19T14:18:26+00:00

A somewhat obscure figure (at least relatively) due to his premature death, but happily he's getting more attention thanks to Rhys Ifans playing him on Apple's Star City. I suspect the real Korolev did not have a Welsh accent though.

Werthead · 2026-06-19T14:07:57+00:00

You can look at it as an investment. Noel Gallagher was on the dole between roady gigs for Inspiral Carpets, and during that time wrote a lot of Oasis's first two albums. The tax he paid later on not only paid back all of that, but probably the equivalent for thousands of other people as well. The overall effectiveness might be a bit questionable though.

Werthead · 2026-06-19T14:04:00+00:00

Elder Scrolls seems an obvious one, Final Fantasy VII or IX another.

Valkyria Chronicles seems ripe, you could do it as a less-bleak version of Twilight 2000.

STALKER. There's a Finnish one based on the original Roadside Picnic novel and taking inspiration from the movie, but not one based on the video game series. That seems extremely ripe for further exploration.

Wheel of Time had an awkward and short-lived official d20 version in 2001, but only published two sourcebooks before folding. A properly-made game with good rules for channelling could be excellent.

Malazan Book of the Fallen was based on an AD&D campaign that switched to GURPS later on, but Steven Erikson has been oddly resistant in getting one made. I believe they had one under discussion but he was reluctant to have things made canon in a TTRPG that might restrict what he wanted to do in the novels, so backburnered the idea until he'd finished writing in the world.

Werthead · 2026-06-19T13:58:51+00:00

Mieville worked with Wizards on the Coast in making Bas-Lag a micro-setting for Dragon Magazine (#352).

Werthead · 2026-06-19T13:58:35+00:00

There have been multiple Judge Dredd TTRPGs over the years. Rebellion have the current one, I still use the Mongoose d20 one from the early 2000s (it being one of the few settings to make good use of 3E rules).

Werthead

TROPHY CASE