Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5: Single player inside!

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.

I actually got to play that once. It was hard.

For the few that are interested, pre-orders start April, 30.

I’m definitely interested, but I don’t think I’m preorders interested.

Yeah, too many unknowns for a pre-order.

On steam? As far as I know preorders have been up for ages, but only directly through the dev and with all this extra Mechwarrior online content I don’t want.

Oh crap. Damn my ancient eyes. Preorders ENDING in 2 days. Thanks for the correction Tim.

Well, you might end up being right anyway. Their preorder setup is very strange, and is clearly designed to try and push Mechwarrior Online. That’s fine, but leads to them announcing things like “preorders ending in 2 days!” when that would usually mean the game is coming out in 3 days.

Unless they have spelt it out somewhere I haven’t seen, who knows what they are going to do after the direct-2-dev preorder term expires. I am hoping that means they start preorders on steam and other stores. It may also mean an announcement for Epic games exclusivity.

I seemed to have uninstalled MWO in some kind of alcohol fueled blackout. This in itself is not unusual. But I usually keep games in which I have a large investment of cash, on my HD. Now I haven’t played it in a long time. But I am irked by not having the ability to see my waste of money in front of me. And I still had a lot of unused mechbuks or whatever the were called.

This means that I may just reinstall MWO and go out in a blaze of glory. Unless of course I’m better now… No. Blaze of glory it is.

Still not pre-ordering MW5.