Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5: Single player inside!

As great as MW2 was, I think we deserve better.

Because they’ve basically boned MechWarrior Online.

Yeah, their development throughout the course of MWO was appalling. No reason to get into the details, but… yeah, it was bad.

I would strongly advise against giving them your money.

I’m going to wait till the game releases on steam to buy it, but screw you guys I am going to get HYPED!!

To celebrate I have started playing Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries again (my personal fav of the franchise) with a new HOTAS. Spectre is going to become champion of Solaris again for the tenth time.

Battlemechs only work with sidewinder joysticks.

Looks like it’s time to see how well Mechwarrior 3 works on Windows 10 this weekend…

This thing’s got VR and raytrace support yes? Interest level at massive level. Never played the online version, but did the hell out of 3 and 4. Fingers and toes crossed!

Smart.

It’s been designed with VR support in mind, I’m not sure they’ve actually said if/when VR will make it into the game…

As someone considering their MWO/ MW5 crossover pre-order and returning to MWO after a long absence, can you please elaborate a bit?

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.