Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5: Single player inside!

They had grossly incompetent developers, and they eventually pushed everything aside in favor of monetization in the most offensively pay 2 win form possible. At one point, when they were getting ready to introduce the clans, testers told Paul, their head designer jackass, “Hey, you can’t make a variant of the Timberwolf with Jumpjets. It’s going to be entirely broken.” Paul told them that they were just there to find bugs, and not tell them how to balance the game. But literally anyone who has ever played mechwarrior with any degree of competence knew that mech was going to be broken. And sure enough, when it came out out, it was the most ridiculously dominant mech ever… for months. And PGI exploited it, because you had to pay real world money to drive it at that point. And that’s just one example of the clusterfuck that was MWO’s development. Hell, at one point, when Star Citizen was first enjoying its kickstarter success, PGI even thought for a short while that they were gonna drop Mechwarrior and make a space game, with ripped off spaceship models and stuff (which never happened because they only raised like $10k).

They got a good chunk of my money out of nostalgia and because I kept thinking they were gonna make the game they promised, but they never did. I would not give them money again.

Now, MW5 is a single player game I guess? So they may not be able to exploit the P2W stuff as bad… But it demonstrated to me that they were not folks I wanted to support.

But hey, that’s just me.

The problem with Mechwarrior online, aside from the lag, is that it actively disincentivises piloting the mechs with a joystick. Mouse is more accurate (therefore essential for competitive multiplayer), yet a much less fun way to play the game. I never stuck around long enough after launch to see any of the monetization issues others are complaining about.

The graphics and piloting of the mechs always seemed fine to me, so I have high hopes that they can make a single player game work.

You bearded nerds… Why would you use a joystick in a point & shoot game like Mechwarrior in the first place? Because it’s a ‘sim’? Because the mech counts as a vehicle? It isn’t a freaking jet nor a helicopter! You also don’t use a joystick in a racing sim, right?
Because it’s ‘closer to reality’? Do you think in a fictional scifi future where mech exists pilots would use joysticks? No, they also would use a freaking mouse (or something superior, eye aiming?), ironically for the same reason the complaint against mouses exist: because they allow for easier, faster, more accurate aiming.

Some Enhanced Imaging system perhaps?

I do enjoy the sim aspects of MW a lot, so I would much rather use a joystick. Otherwise it’s just an FPS with robot skins and laser weapons.

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In the real world they use modified joysticks because in real life moving an object takes time. You can’t point at a magical spot in the air and tell your gun to “move over there” really. Also it’s in the lore of the setting as well. It’s the same reason you don’t operate a crane with a mouse: it has to physically move across all environments.

And BattleTech is pretty low-tech future anyway, they’re very much using switches and analog inputs.

Well, there’s also the neurohelmet, which seems to be the key interface for a 'Mech in the BT lore. The joysticks and stuff are for aiming the weapons, but movement is mostly neural, as far as I can tell. Whether a M+Kb or a joystick setup works best for this hodgepodge might well be a matter of taste.

The older the MechWarrior game, the more useful joysticks are, in my experience—in MWO, the twitchiness of the arm-aiming makes a mouse the best choice. In, say, MW3 or MW4, even the non-torso-twisting feels slower to me, and that maps better to a joystick.

Space Sims and Mech games are just more fun with joysticks. The feeling of flying or walking using the stick is part of the tactile feel of why I love the games in the first place. I’d rather not play them than play them with mouse and keyboard. I have to admit, I don’t really know where controllers fall yet. Some space sims have done a decent control scheme for space sims. And the Mechassault games did a good job with controllers, but they were quite different from traditional Mechwarrior games. So the controller is still up in the air.

In the MW 2 days, I had a Thrustmaster HOTAS setup that worked really well.

A bunch of the top pilots back in MW4 played with force feedback sidewinders. But a big thing was that you had very limited arm articulation back then. You could basically just flip the arms to the side.

That was the first one, right? Man I loved that setup. My friend and I loved playing together in the urban map. What was it called? And of course setting up a game was hit or miss. TCP/IP if I’m not mistaken?

which is why I really want MW to be optimized for joystick and worse with a mouse. You get a feeling of mass and inertia from proper calibration with joystick and little from mouse gameplay. I don’t want Titanfall, I want Mechwarrior.

Hey, Titanfall was absolutely excellent mech gameplay.

Well, if they optimize for joystick they’ll fail financially, because the vast majority of PC players don’t use joysticks any more, Unless joystick optimization is pretty much the same as controller optimization, and even then they’d be giving up the PC/Steam portion of their revenue stream. A joystick-only or joystick-primary PC game is DOA unless it’s a hard-core flight sim, and those…well, those aren’t going to make the money people want.

Yet if that was the main criteria developers went by, they all would be making Candy Crush or Farmville.

Mechwarrior certainly justifies passion for subject, just like the hardcore sims do, and that apparently is a large enough market to make a healthy living. If they could correctly support both joystick/mouse, great, but if they only do mouse, not nearly as interested.

Look, if they make it fun for mouse and keyboard players, they’ll never know that it’s even better for joystick players, since they don’t own one. I mean, they can hear about it on the internet, I suppose, but that shouldn’t make much difference.

So if the developer just makes it the most fun possible for each device, they’ll be fine. The core joystick-using core fans will praise it and say it’s so good, and that word of mouth should help, so when the average mouse users plays it and enjoys it, the game can be a hit.

Oh, sure, if they can make it great for all input devices, that’s the best solution. If you have to choose though, mouse and keyboard is probably where the focus is going to go, just out of practicality.

I know that a number of people have been using two joysticks to play space sims instead of joystick + throttle. Calling it HOSAS (hands on stick and… stick). Would this setup work well for a mech game too?

I’m not sure why having a second stick would be useful for a mech, there is less freedom of movement than in a spaceship. You will need rudder, though, either a twist rudder on the single joystick or pedals. I suppose there could be an argument for joystick + mouse, where mouse is the aiming of the arm guns.