FASA Studios Now Out of Business 72
PhoenixOne writes "Another chapter in the long and sometimes-frustrating history of the name 'FASA' comes to a close today, as Microsoft's FASA Studio has closed its doors. 'It is my sad duty to announce that FASA Studio has officially closed its doors. Today was the official last day of employment for those of us who had not moved on to other positions within Microsoft Game Studios. While the rumors have been circulating forever, we chose to wait on an official announcement because we didn't want people's attention distracted from our last product, Shadowrun, a game we love.'"
Not Surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
FASA Interactive has long been dead, with no new Mech games for a number of years and certainly none on the horizon at any point after MW4. It's sad, that all traces of Battletech have been wiped off the face of the Earth - between the death of FASA itself and now its spinoff companies. I really wished someone would do something great with those properties - even Mech Commander wasn't such a bad game despite its flaws.
I really do wish someone would translate the original Battletech table top game into computer form, but with some concessions made for easy multiplay and quicker learning - i.e. something X-Com style.
Kinda sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, there are some funny comments about it already, but I would like to say how this is a bit sad for me. Me and friends played some seriously neat Mech games, with me acting as GM. We read all the books and noted the makes and models of the parts, and I'd invent "issues" that the techs needed to solve to make certain parts work with other parts, and garage facilities that they needed in order to implement various repairs. The players always had to be thinking about risking their mechs because of repair issues, and when they got damaged it spawned mini-quests to secure the necessary parts to make things right again, or mini-mini-quests for parts to fix the interoperability problems.
So although the main game revolved around mech pilots, I focused on the repair techs, ammo specialists, tankers, cooks, construction teams, radar ops, MASH units, etc. that made the expeditions a success, and threatened them and the adventures practically wrote themselves. Really good times.
Re:This is sad, but... (Score:2, Interesting)