What makes it boring is that the engineers optimize for the arena, and the arena is boring.
They made it an almost perfectly flat metal surface with no features of any kind. Robot Wars was more interesting. Not only did they have house robots which looked like The Shrieking Maimer, the arena was also more interesting with pits, house robots, flame areas, etc.
IMO a more interesting arena would lead to more interesting battles, especially if the arena weren’t perfectly flat so it wasn’t optimal to have one that had a 2mm clearance. Even better would be if you had a variety of arenas, and the contestants didn’t know until the day of the battle which one they’d be in. Some might be flat, some might have a water hazard, some might have sand, some might have a dirt floor. Then you’d have more walking robots, more tank-tread robots, etc. so they could tackle a variety of terrain.
This always baffled me. It really was so lazy and boring with the sets. It is weird when you think about how they had all those creative engineers making frickin’ killbots at their disposal. Let them eat… But no, just flat areas and stupid hammers and floor saws too slow and weak to do anything… so everyone makes indestructible wedges to push other bots up on the edge, or a spin-hammer that is undefeatable.
What makes it boring is that the engineers optimize for the arena, and the arena is boring.
They made it an almost perfectly flat metal surface with no features of any kind. Robot Wars was more interesting. Not only did they have house robots which looked like The Shrieking Maimer, the arena was also more interesting with pits, house robots, flame areas, etc.
IMO a more interesting arena would lead to more interesting battles, especially if the arena weren’t perfectly flat so it wasn’t optimal to have one that had a 2mm clearance. Even better would be if you had a variety of arenas, and the contestants didn’t know until the day of the battle which one they’d be in. Some might be flat, some might have a water hazard, some might have sand, some might have a dirt floor. Then you’d have more walking robots, more tank-tread robots, etc. so they could tackle a variety of terrain.
This always baffled me. It really was so lazy and boring with the sets. It is weird when you think about how they had all those creative engineers making frickin’ killbots at their disposal. Let them eat… But no, just flat areas and stupid hammers and floor saws too slow and weak to do anything… so everyone makes indestructible wedges to push other bots up on the edge, or a spin-hammer that is undefeatable.
another easy fix would be to let the audience vote on style, so a sufficiently awesome robot can win so long as it does okay in the fights.