The lack of localized armor sections is a limitation, as is the lack of mech customization. But the game FEELS good. They absolutely nailed the feel of a giant robot. And for a team that was creating new IP, it was a pretty impressive achievement.
Although the Respawn guys (the old IW guys) have always been really awesome at isolating how to make a game “feel” right.
Honestly though, to me, the thing that was perhaps most impressive about Titanfall was how they managed to actually balance being on foot with being in a titan. That’s a really impressive achievement, in that most attempts at combined arms in that kind of environment would either make the giant robots feel way underpowered, or way overpowered. The fact that they managed to make the titans feel super powerful, while ALSO making it so that you could still kill them as a lone pilot… that’s something worthy of praise, in terms of game design.
Ya, I poked around in there when MWO was starting up, and I recall there being interest, but I think that a big part of it was that, if I recall, there was no capacity for private matches originally, right? I might be mis-remembering though.
So for a long time, you couldn’t actually run the NBT stuff as the backend for a league.
Eventually, once that stuff was added in, I think NBT had kind of withered away, and stuff went more into the ladder leagues.
This was one of the proposals. It has some interesting issues that come up though, as a result is that different mechs have different hardpoints, which would make certain chassis more favorable than others.
Like a H6p would likely be favored in such a systenm, as a bunch of its torso hardpoints are in its hunch.
To some degree, this might be balanced out though by the fact that it’d be harder to disarm mechs with wider spread patterns… but in practice, there were actually tactical benefits to loading all your weapons into a single region, and then just shielding that section… like there were builds where you’d intentionally load everything into one side of a mech, and then just show the enemy your OTHER side when you weren’t shooting, which made it so that you would generally not lose any weapons until way late in an engagement.
This is true, although you could convey any necessary information via compound reticles. Hell, MWO already does this for arm vs. torso guns.
Did you ever play Chromehounds? That game had a very interesting way of handling weapons spread, that was totally predictable and understandable to pilots, but was much more complex than just perfect convergence.
That was another of the truly great giant robot games, that never really had a chance because XBox Live just wasn’t capable of handling it at that point.