Shooting fireballs is easier on your video card and cpu vs. sending 40 individually rendered missiles.
40 is no problem, 1200 is another thing.
That’s what imposters are for.
Hmm I don’t remember this happening in any previous mechwarriors? Missiles just flew pretty much straight.
Here is some good autocannon action. Headshots seem to be pretty devastating. I watch this guy’s (Baradul) videos for anything mech related.
M5 looks pretty nice as far as the eye candy goes. I’m worried it’s a little too arcady but maybe that’s just because of the horde mode format. He brings up a great point about the heat buildup display being hard to read in the bottom left. Needs to be centered and up above the reticle would think.
It looks pretty solid. I’m actually not super interested, because I never played mechwarrior for the single player stuff. But the overall gameplay looks reasonable enough.
One thing that looks improved over MWO, is the sense of scale. MWO had this problem where the maps had buildings and stuff, but for some reason that I could never fully nail down, it didn’t have the same sense of “I’m a giant robot” that a game like Titanfall perfectly nailed. MW5 looks to have improved on that quite a bit. I think maybe a lot of it just comes from having better detailed stuff on the terrain (i.e. you can see something is a building, rather than just a big vaguely building looking box).
Did they ever add in all the full online war stuff that they had originally proposed in MWO? That was a big part of what was missing there, as we used to have much more in-depth stuff going back in MW4 in the online planetary leagues than what MWO had.
I could see this engine potentially working well in a multiplayer environment, if they took some lessons from Titanfall and turned all the non-mech stuff into the equivalent of the “grunts” in TF2… that way you’d be able to have some of the benefits of the combined arms stuff, without having to worry about the fact that virtually everything that isn’t a mech is trash.
In terms of MW5, the AI on the bots seems pretty lackluster… The guy fighting doesn’t seem to have to really do much in terms of using cover or anything, and the bots are kind of just wandering around in the open. This is what I’d tend to fear with any MW title, and why I always leaned toward online competitive play. Does anyone know what kind of difficulty that guy was playing on? Can you make the bots smarter so that they actually fight tactically?
Here’s some action on Difficulty 90. Video should start at 1h30m24s:
Yeah, the AI doesn’t seem to really have any kind of direction at all. Seems like that’s gonna make things somewhat limited, as it’s basically just a shooting sim rather than much of a combat sim.
Still looks pretty cool though.
EDIT: lol at 1:45 where he just starts headshotting everything.
He leaves the battle playing for about 6 minutes while mechs just stand mostly stationary in place shooting long range at each other. It looked pretty bad to me.
That’s the thing, he’s largely just standing still, and lining up headshots, and doesn’t seem to pay any price for it at all… and he’s just standing in the middle of an open field, with no cover.
It will be interesting whether PGI can actually make an effective AI for this game.
The Beef says the same thing I was thinking… that he wishes the game was PvP. Which is to say, that it’s MWO.
Is MWO still going at all? Does PGI have an intention to transfer it over to this engine, if so?
Yea that looks horrendous. I took it off pre-order because of that. I don’t want a brain-dead sim.
Yes, and no.
Possibly MW5 will get a PvP mode (certainly it could be modded).
Regarding the AI I am willing to bet it is gimped on purpose so that the missions are survivable, and that it can be dialed up to represent harder enemies. It’s kind of how MW games are.
Well looks like they got a lot of stuff right, but the ai is a total letdown. I mean, that’s not even what I think of as ai. How long has this been in development?
On a brighter side, the twitch bros in the two videos above are amazing.
Headshot! Headshot! Oh look, another headshot. Ok, I guess that was a headshot… Sigh, headshot.
Umm yeah, I’m trying to remember how headshots were balanced in previous MW action games.
It’s a combination of a few things.
First, the AI is really bad and not really good at protecting it’s mech… The AI in a necessarily turkey is going to be quite a heavy undertaking, as it would include the stuff you would have in most shooters, but with tons of additional complexity. A bunch of different weapons, potentially with C2 targeting networks… Plus things like low level piloting skills like shielding individual sections of a mech, plus targeting specific sections of the event, etc.
Then, beyond all that, is the fact that they still haven’t really addressed the fundamental issue of weapons convergence. This has always been an issue in mechwarrior titles, because it diverges from one of the fundamental mechanics in Battletech, but they still try to use other parts of Battletech.
Once you allow mechs to duct tape weapons into huge super cannons, then the armor model doesn’t really work anymore.
It lets you focus damage and just drill through a single section, bypassing most of a mech’s armor… Like what you see in the videos, deciding to simply leg a mech… And then you too the leg off almost instantly. Especially against stock mech designs that run stuff like half armor on legs.
The head is the other major problem area. In Battletech, the AC20 is a huge, bulky weapon with garbage range… but it has a very specific benefit, in that if you land a shot on a cockpit, you killed a mech. But if i can just run 4 medium lasers… It’s the same. For a trivial portion of the weight.
In Battletech, the reason that doesn’t work, is because those 4 lasers won’t all hit the same panel. You would have to be insanely lucky to have all 4 weapons ho
It, and also all hit the same panel, much less all hit the head.
Mechwarrior needs to incorporate some sort of weapons spread with simultaneously fired weapons if they want it to play correctly with the fundamental concept of balance in Battletech.
Generally, they tended to make the cockpit much smaller than it looked, so they were much harder to hit. In online play, network lag made it difficult to score headshots on moving mechs.
Also, in MW4, they fell back on a one-shot hit protection, so that no matter how much damage the cockpit took, you couldn’t die in one shot. It’s why most of us stripped the head armor, since it didn’t matter… you were gonna survive 2 shots.
I recall back in MW4, a pilot named Stalker playing for AK came up with a hilarious Uziel config with medium lasers and CSTRK SRMs.
He would use JJs to get over your mech, and then alpha the lasers and streaks into your head. This was extremely effective against the bushwhacker, which we ran a lot, which happened to have a large head hitbox when viewed from above.
The medium lasers would defeat the one shot protection, then the streaks would slam into the same location and kill you. It only worked in one battle, but it was a smart design.
It works fine. MW1, 2, 3, 4, LL, MWO and all expansions in between all pretty great games in their own right and somehow we’ve managed to avoid weird beard cone of fire or 6 different targeting reticles or whatever.
Headshots too frequent? Make the hit box way
small or remove the head or code in some other protection for the head. It’s solvable without sandbagging good shooters.
I will never understand the hilarious resistance people like you have to removing perfect precision from weapons…
I mean, hell, even in… Every modern shooter, where you are just shooting a single conventional gun, they have imprecision.
It’s not some kind of crazy idea. It’s… Basically every other game.
And in this case, it’s kind of required by the Battletech mechanics.
And sure, you can do without it… But this is what you get. The ability for any remotely competent pilot to just bore through a single armor panel.
Just maybe consider that just because I’ll have didn’t have it, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t improve the game? Sometimes, we make new things, and stuff gets better.
I mean, really dude, is being able to make a huge aloha sterile and dump it on a single panel… Of an AI controlled robot… The core source of fun for you? I can’t imagine that would be the case.
Would that actually make you have less fun? This is an honest question, as to me, it seems like it would probably make it more fun.
Modern shooters really don’t have any inaccuracy except that imposed by recoil mechanics (post first shot) or when firing without sights (necessarily our you would never need sights).
In any case no one wants the mechanics you are proposing. It has been discussed many a time for MWO and these ideas were shot down repeatedly with good reason by the competitive community and most competent pilots. You generally don’t want your skill shooter to devolve into an RNG-fest.
And yeah the games have always been fun. How strange that they achieved fun despite perfect accuracy… and even crazier, in MW4, a game you purport to have enjoyed, lasers were full damage instant hit-scan weapons. Game was somehow still fun!
Those battletech RNG mechanics are appropriate for Battletech where mech control is abstracted and other tactical factors are important. For Mechwarrior you want pilot skill to be quite meaningful since that is the whole point of the game.
Modern shooters tend to decrease precision from hipfire, recoil, and movement. You rarely have an opportunity to fire more than one bullet at a time in most of those games… In cases where you do, like using akimbo pistols… Then yeah, you have some degree of imprecision injected.
They didn’t always. But then they did.
Sure dude, I played them competitively with and against the best players. For years upon years. It was awesome.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t change. It can become deeper.
Absolutely, tons of fun!
But i already played that game. I don’t need them to just make that game over and over again.
When you fire real weapons, in the real world, you don’t have perfect precision. To me, having that kind of thing in a game which is inherently kind of simulator like, that doesn’t seem like it would be so bad.
It’s a significant component of how Battletech works. It’s an important aspect of how the weapons and armor model is designed.
Again, it’s not that it “can’t be fun” with a simpler model. Clearly it can be.
But, with the simpler model, you have what we’ve seen going back to at least mechwarrior 2… Which is that mech design tends to focus heavily on creation of very large alpha strikes and dumping that onto a single panel to drill into mechs.
This principle has dominated mech design in competitive play forever. In mw3 it was medium laser boats. In mw4 it was large laser boats. That was the most efficient way to drop the most damage onto a single panel. To the extent that you very rarely saw most of the weapons in the game, in competitive play. The balance was extremely simplistic compared to modern competitive shooters.
Now, in a single player game, it probably matters less, since lots of people won’t be making the most efficient mechs, and competing against a bunch of dumb bots in stock mechs means you won’t need to. But still, when you watch Beef play, you kind of see what you’d expect… it’s pretty trivial to just kill mechs, super fast, through either their leg or a single panel (or through huge heads, apparently)
But still, it seems like if damage from forms large groups of weapons together spread it a bit, then you wouldn’t see things like just headshotting mechs trivially… or legging then just as trivially. Or killing an atlas by only going through 20% of it’s armor.
But there’s a lot more to piloting skill than simply aiming precision.
I mean, honestly, aiming precision in mechwarrior had always been kind of a trivial compared to pure shooters. Your targets are moving super slowly, and are huge, compared to games like say call of duty or Titanfall.
If that’s the focus of what you are looking for… clicking with precision… There are better games to test those skills.
Mechwarrior always had something more going on, in tactical, coordinated armor combat. Even on the individual level, pilot skill was significant more involved than simply gunnery skills. It was sometimes called “the thinking man’s shooter”. You were doing things like managing your sensors, spreading damage across all your armor, you were managing your heat, etc. There was a lot of stuff going on beyond just shooting.
But, anyway, we’ve had this discussion before, haven’t we? And it’s moot, because there’s essentially no chance of PGI ever implementing such a system.
It just strikes me odd that you are so certain that fun depends on being able to fire 10 weapons at the same time and have them all hit the exact same location. It’s such a weird thing to place value on to me.
Which isn’t to say that I would advocate making all your weapons fire be random dice rolls. Clearly, that would awful. But still, it seems like you could implement some system that allowed some of the weapons balance and armor modeling from Battletech to be less negated than it traditionally has been in Mechwarrior.