Phlox is possibly my favorite medical officer.

Honestly the episode Dear Doctor shoots that prospect straight out the airlock for me. Condemning a whole species to extinction because it, let me check the notes here, “wouldn’t be ethical”. Now the living conditions between the Valakians and the Menk are sure as shit not anywhere close to good, that much I can agree with. But let’s even get into how the episode states that wouldn’t be ethical to cure the Valakians of a genetic disease that they somehow evolved into, the reason given is that the Menk are about to have a ‘evolutionary leap’ but will only have it if the Valakians go extinct. Yes a straight up appeal to letting nature/god sort it out, and that interfering in a alleged cosmic plan would be oh so horrible a sin to commit. Good god I hate this episode, and I hate how it’s the origin story for the prime directive.

If it wasn’t any indication, I hate Prime Directive episodes from TNG onwards, especially the ones that seem to make the high ranking characters of the shows all of a sudden afraid of consequences from out of nowhere for no discernible reason.

For me, every single armored core game after last raven. Like there is just a lot lost when the series becomes designed around a regular twin stick control setup over the “bad” control scheme that the game was designed around before 4/FA.

Like it just feels much more rewarding to play and beat, and every time I play 4/FA or 6, I almost always want to go back and play 3 and Silent Line again.

I haven’t played formula front, and I don’t remember when that released.

Okay, SC is for better or worse is supposed to be what Chris Robert wanted Freelancer to be. And about Freelancer itself, it is part of the space sim lite milsim type of games like X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Wing Commander were back in the day. Now there is another game series that sorta shares the same lite milsim type gameplay loop, just with this thing called a Battlemech, and yes it’s Mechwarrior.

Since we covered the basics of what SC is intended to be, let’s go back to the context of the original kickstarter, 2012-13. Nearly every single developer was going very far out of their way to strip down games in a way that made them feel very disposable, and nobody (except for a canadian studio by the name Pirhana Games with Mechwarrior Online) had any interest in making any sort of game in the vein of the lite milsims of the 90s and early 2000s. And imho judging by the stuff made in the recent years in the space these developers also bent over backwards for mass appeal that was honestly never going to happen. So of course Star Citizen took off like it did and never looked back.

Honestly I want to say that on some level people knew Chris Roberts was on some level going to be a problem for the development of the game, but the idea of having a new space lite milsim that out right said “learn to play or don’t play at all” makes that issue a lot easier to ignore in a way. Not gonna lie, I want a lite milsim game that makes zero accommodations for new/casual players, but that doesn’t make any money for the most part.

that have long made LAMs themselves just about a forbidden concept.

Right now given that HG doesn’t have any real grounds to come after BT ever again, the only thing that is keeping LAMs from being messed with right now per the current BT line developer is the aerospace rules themselves, like he wants to completely redo them as they are uniquely dogshit for a lot of reasons.

I didn’t say MWO was dead.

To be fair here, your post was about 95% indistinguishable to the group of people that went around in late 2013 to early 2014 that MWO was a “dead game”. I’ve been playing MWO since closed beta, and was pretty active in the community then (and still am now), so I remember a lot of the major stuff that happened back then and throughout the years. Like there’s a lot I can give shit towards PGI, but at the end of the day I can’t be too hard on the people that finally told Harmony Gold to legally fuck off.

I misheard, then, if what you say is true.

Everything I said there only came out shortly after PGI bought themselves back from IGP so around 2015 I think it was, and they stopped just short (but still absolutely were) of throwing IGP under the bus.

(particularly the CEO that pushed that “Star Citizen but worse” grift with MWO’s kickstarter funds called “Transverse”)

Okay so that’s flat out wrong, like not even close to what happened. Now before you make an ass of yourself, Transverse was an absolutely terrible tone deaf idea from Russ, but it wasn’t made from the money that was gotten from the Founders packs. That honor goes to Mechwarrior Tactics, something that PGI had really nothing to do with as IGP who was PGI’s publisher at the time decided to funnel a lot of the money gotten from the MWO Founders packs into MWT.

peddled gold-plated 'Mechs

Again that was IGP who pushed them to do that.

Also good lord I didn’t have seeing actual 2013 MWO dead game nonsense on my bingo card this year.