That video did not look great. I think they have a lot of work to do.
Looking forward to this! Between that at Battlectech next year and the ongoing improvements to MWO my battletech needs are being met and exceeded.
PGI has done a pretty good job frankly. The hate is mostly undeserved. MWO is the best, most stable, most balanced, and most accessible Mechwarrior game to ever come out in a multiplayer context. Always room for improvement of course, but previous stabs at multiplayer have not even come close to what we enjoy today.
For the record, we achieved a dramatically deeper multiplayer experience back in MW4. In fairness, this was achieved not simply through the game itself, but through fan run league systems. Of course it was also done more than a decade ago, by amateurs, for free.
I mean, it’s fine for you to think that MWO is the greatest thing since sliced bread. You are entitled to your opinion. But your opinion is far from universally held. Just like my perception of their incompetence does not negate the fact that they have apparently produced a product that you enjoy.
I had high hopes for MWO, and fed them a good deal of money. Ultimately, they failed to meet my expectations, so I stopped feeding them. But that’s just me.
FWIW, watching the reveal and the surrounding coverage on Twitch, I got the feeling that they (PGI and HBS) are essentially cross branding MWO assets into a turn based game (Battletech) and a single player game (Merc5). The recent effort to do a catalogue sweep of scale in MWO made sense as they are putting those same models into a zoomed out perspective in Battletech. My feeling was that it is wise to really dial back expectations on both games and hope to be surprised.
The HBS guys are the actual battletech folks. Weissman and his crew (whatever remains of it), who actually made battletech, and all the previous mechwarrior games.
And in terms of the actual Mech assets, this is one area where PGI had some serious talent. I haven’t followed their more recent creations, but if they got the same guy (Alex, I think his name was) developing them, he had a talent for giant ass robots.
It was actually one of the things that kind of demonstated poor decision making on PGI’s part, in that they started making the models reflect the guns on them. This was, in itself, not necessarily a bad move… but the way in which it was implemented ended up being really piss poor, with many models just becoming really dumb looking. The Catapults come to mind, where you’d load missiles into their ears and it’d end up having a bunch of boxes stuck all over the outside of the ears instead of housing the missiles inside. Was kind of minor thing, but ended up detracting from the asthetics of the original mech designs.
If HBS has a hand in the new mechwarrior game, it could have potential, because they made the previous titles.
Probably in the minority here but I’d be happy to get an updated MechAssault for the modern systems. Loved the MP back on the original Xbox.
That would be awesome. I loved those games - held on to my original Xbox so I could play them now and then.
Exactly. And MWO would be a better platform for those deeper multiplayer experiences because it is a better game. MW4 mp was so broken in so many ways… it was mostly a joke unless you piled huge restrictions on it.
Everyone likes what they like, for sure, but I think most MWO haters are more… political rather than objective. You know like how according to them MWO is going to be dead in a few months, a claim repeated ad nauseum for years now, even though it is apparent that not only has MWO been successful, it’s been successful enough to fund development of Mechwarrior 5, and has the full support of Jordan Weisman.
Some people literally hate MWO just because it has 3rd person view… so whatever I guess.
They fixed that. Apparently there was some stuff they had to fix in how the models were made, when they did the rescale of all mechs and the remodel of the catapult in particular all those problems basically went away.
I think for most of the folks who hate it because of that, it was more due to the way PGI just totally spit in the eye of their hard core supporters when they did a total 180 on that… without seemingly any good reason at all. Again, it was just an example of boneheaded management. It alienated many supporters, and likely gained zero new users, because the 1st person view wasn’t the thing that made mechwarrior difficult for certain folks to pick up. Again, just a boneheaded move.
And to be clear, that’s where I think basically 100% of the problems with PGI lie. Many of their engineers (who actually no longer work there) were sharp, talented guys. But their management team created an absolutely horrific environment to work in. The reports of how Paul interacted with various groups, from testers to actual engineers on his team, are the stuff of nightmares.
Heh, well sure, but MW4 was also put out fifteen years ago. I mean, hell, we had folks playing with freaking 56k modems.
I think that’s ultimately what ended up being so disappointing about MWO. The original core of the game, which seemed to be inherited from another development team (I suspect some guys working directly for Weisman), had SO much potential. But it just never really evolved into the full game that we were promised back in 2011.
Hell, maybe it has at this point, but after like 5 years of waiting, I gave up on expecting the community warfare stuff to ever become what we expected. I thought we were gonna get something akin to what we saw in the old MW4 planetary leagues, and it just never happened. They just kind of threw together a starmap, and had some poorly conceived game mode that sat on top of it, and really wasn’t fun.
I always wanted to see the kind of stuff we had back in NBT or WOL, where you had functional economies rolling behind the scenes, affecting access to mech chassis and stuff… mercenary contracts… stuff like that.
Did they ever end up implementing the dropship stuff? They had mentioned it back when they allowed you to create a unit… I seem to recall us having to each hand over some chunk of in-game currency when we founded the unit, which was supposed to go towards the cost of a dropship? But then they never really fleshed that out. I’d be interested in whether or not any of that actually happened.
Looking at the steam stats, it looks like the overall population has dropped significantly, but seems to have at least stabilized at between 1000-1400 at any given time. Seems like that’s too small to really support a robust game though.
That’s good to know… that was another thing which was just insanely boneheaded at the time. We pointed out that certain models had screwed up scaling that made them very unbalanced (generally, that made them too weak, because their targets were too large), and they acknowledged this… but then said it would take a long time to fix, because they would have to re-do all the textures and stuff, since otherwise the stuff on the mechs (like ladders, hatches, etc.) would all be out of scale.
At the time, we were like, “WTF dude? That shit does not matter even one tiny little bit. Literally zero people are gonna care if the little ladder rung on the outside of a mech is a tiny bit too small for a real person to use.”
It was just such a weird thing to get hung up on, and delay balance changes which had tangible impacts on gameplay.
Anyway, whatever. It was fun to play a mechwarrior title again, but ultimately I didn’t get anywhere close to the amount of play out of it that I got out of MW4, and I kind of just inherently distrust the management team at PGI at this point, so I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting money in their pockets.
[quote=“Soapyfrog, post:28, topic:127356, full:true”]Some people literally hate MWO just because it has 3rd person view… so whatever I guess.
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I just didn’t enjoy how the balance progressed as they released new mechs. I was really happy with the game up until the point of the second big mech pack sale, where balance shifted heavily to campy jumpy heavies and light scouts suddenly became really uncompetitive (it might have changed again, whatever, they lost me at that point. I have no interest in piloting heavies or assaults).
I went to being a game I loved to being one I stopped caring about.
I do think the system design (if not the balance changes over time) where really solid, as was the sense of physical weight to the mechs, overall speed and map design. It was the overall meta structure of the game (F2P with A LOT of power creep, and single matches with -at the time- no community features or faction progression) that did a disservice to the really good moment to moment gameplay.
I would love to see a SP MWO (or a progression driven, non-micro-transaction-heavy MP version akin to something like Titanfall 2). However, the new trailer looks weird. Really slow movement speed, awful weapon feel compared to what were already on MWO, and (probable explaining the above) a full change of engine. It’s going to be a wait and see until word is that they have nailed down the feel once again.
Well now everything is properly scaled by volume; of course people complain about that too, so… really no pleasing people I guess.
So… MWO will fail in a few months then? ;)
Right now I think things are in a decent place. Brawl vs md-range poke vs long-range snipe each feels like it has it’s place. Big change coming in the new year though, they are removing all quirks, modules and pilot skills and replacing them with mech-specific customization trees. That’s going to throw the meta in chaos I think.
Ya, this was definitely a problem, and most definitely it was intentional.
It generally went through a cycle where new mechs would come out, be only available for real money, and be utterly dominant… and then eventually they’d be nerfed, available for in game currency, and then they’d just repeat the cycle with some other mech.
The clans were the biggest most insane example of this. When the clan mechs first came out, a few of the chassis (MadCat) were INSANE. I mean, in battletech, the MadCat was always an absolute beast… But in MWO when it first came out, it was totally amazeballs. Largely because, despite everyone telling Paul NOT to, he put in torso sections which allowed you to mount jumpjets. It was, without question, the most dominant chassis in the game for months.75 kph mech, with tons of armor, JJ’s, and a huge amount of weapons pod space.
And there were folks who would tell the people who didn’t buy the pack, “Hey, this isn’t pay to win… this is just pay to get the mechs early!” While stomping the have-nots with their shiney clan mechs.
On some level, the power creep is kind of part of Battletech. The different tech levels are exactly this… but the problem with MWO was that you could pay for access, and put the folks who didn’t pay at a massive disadvantage.
And I say this as someone who actually had those clan mechs. It’s not like I’m just blaming losing on not having them. I had them, and I can say with absolute authority that they constituted a huge advantage for a while, until later changes with variou IS mechs.
I have to assume that more recent mech packs didn’t have this kind of crazy pay to win vibe, because I just can’t see folks putting up with it… but then again, there were folks who pretended it wasn’t there, even when it clearly was, so who knows.
God damnit, this thread has made me start bitching about this god damn game again, after not playing it for months.
Whatever, folks like Soapy like the game, and if that’s enough to sustain them, then good on them. Pisses me off that I didn’t get the game I felt it could be, but I suspect that the battletech community would be impossible to please across the board.
The Kodiak is the only one that has really approached that, but the window now between real money availability and c-bill availability is much shorter (1 month instead of the 6 months the Timber Wolf had). edit: sorry it is longer than this if you buy a mechpack you get it 3 months early.
There is some debate about special variants (hero mechs and bonus variants included in the mechpacks) not so much for IS mechs but for clan omnis where the hero or bonus variant omnipods might be part of some optimal configuration. Mostly not a big deal though.
They have thankfully steered clear of real pay to win mechanics: paid boosters/consumables/extra lives/gold ammo which is usually what pay to win connotes.
Sorry for turning the Mechwarrior 5 thread into the MWO pros/cons thread!!
Is the capability difference anywhere close to what we saw with the madcat? Cause that was just absurd at the time. With the weapons balance at the time, it was just a perfect storm of cheese. I have to assume that with whatever is going on with the Kodiak, it can’t be that bad.
I honestly never really cared much about the Hero mechs, even though they had the potential for a pay to win thing… At least back then, none of the hero mechs were really superior to normal variants, although I guess the cataphract variant at one point had the ability to boat UAC’s, during the period where the UAC’s were way too strong prior to their nerfing.
The clans were a bigger issue to me, because they had mechs like the TWolf which was hands down the best mech in the game, and you couldn’t use it unless you paid money.
PGI really should just put everything up for in game cash, and maybe just make them really expensive during that period. If folks want to skip the grind, they can with real money, but there should never be a point where people who are willing to spend money have such a clear advantage over folks who are grinding.
But then again, I’m not their customer any more. But I know that that specific point drove other longtime mechwarrior fans away, and since those folks were people I played with for years, their not wanting to play eventually made me not want to play either.
It is not that bad; it is basically a faster direwolf with high weapon mounts. The truly abusive variant mounted 4 UAC/10 at cockpit height (somewhat nerfed now due to increased/fixed heat penalties when rapid firing the UAC/10 but stil super deadly), and of course the always popular 2x Gauss, 2xERPPC of the Direwolf but again at cockpit level. Still considered the apex predator in the game though the Atlas is tougher with its defensive quirks.
The Timber Wolf and Stormcrow were both a huge deal and really messed with the balance. And that was with clan weapons that were already substantially nerfed compared to table top.
Nowadays clan weapons have been successively nerfed to reasonableness though clan mechs in general are superior; clan xl, 2 space DHS, 7 space endo and ferro + generally better range, they simply have an edge that is only incompletely countered by inner sphere mech quirks. Buut at least it’s pretty close now.
So basically a bigger stalker, but presumably with jump jets?
Humanoid, no jumpjets.
I never understood why they just didn’t go with uneven team sizes to compensate for the lore imbalance. I always thought 2 crazy as hell Clan mechs versus 3 or 4 inferior IS would have made a much more interesting basic game structure. At least much more interesting than just trying to balance everything, which with all that complexity was a fool’s errand.
Oh, I know the mech is humanoid… I meant that it played similar to how the stalker played early on in the game. Capable of sniping with a large number of high impact projectiles, all mounted very high.
Although it seems weird that the kodiak doesn’t have JJ’s. I always thought of it as a jumping mech, but looking at the sarna page, it looks like they didn’t develop a jumping variant until 3095.