Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5: Single player inside!

Games
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Oh, absolutely… but here’s the thing:
Piranha didn’t make that part.

That part was, by all indications, made by Weissman’s team. Piranha inherited that code, and then largely failed to improve upon it… in a lot of ways, they made it worse. Hell, I remember when they were at one point going to modify how the LBX worked, and they straight up admitted that they didn’t understand the codebase well enough to make the change. It was one of the most mindblowing things I’ve seen… because, jesus christ, even if you didn’t write code yourself, you should always be able to figure out how crap works. But nope.

Piranha did one thing very well… their dude who made new mechs, visually, was a great designer. I think his name was Alex? He did a great job of making mechs that looked cool.

But the overall game design, besides just “feeling like mechwarrior”, had so many problems. Not the least of which was how blatently pay to win the game became.

Or when during testing, the testers told their lead game designer, “Hey, you probably shouldn’t make a tiberwolf variant that has JJ’s, because it’s going to utterly dominate everything.” and Paul told them that they were just there to find bugs and not drive those kind of decisions. But literally anyone with even the most basic grasp of mechwarrior could predict how broken that variant would be… and sure enough, that’s exactly what it was when released.

“Hey, let’s take what’s already one of the strongest omnimechs in the battletech universe, and then give it the ability to add in a feature that exploits elements of the netcode!”

It was such an insanely broken mech when it came out that the fact it could make it into the release was nuts… but eventually, it became obvious why it was allowed. Because you could only drive it if you paid real world money. EVENTUALLY everyone could drive it… but for months, you could pay money, and drive a mech that was utterly dominant. Oh, and then its eventual nerfing just happened to coincide with it becoming available for in-game currency. Funny how that works.

Like I said… bitter.

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Not that this was difficult or anything, but indulge me when I say “CALLED IT”.

Really bummed about this, next they’ll be saying there’s no VR either.

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Maybe if they make you pay to play VR they will include it…

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Oh crap - I did not know that. Argggggghhhh!

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Hey, look; there’s a very real chance they’re taking that preorder money to pay for comp sci classes so we may wind up with something decent in the long run.

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Beta/demo is out, 5 instant action misisons where you can do a simple mission with a customized lance.

Haven’t been able to deep dive but it feels VERY mechwarrior so far, stompy, rompy and explodey; bodes well for the full release.

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How’s performance?

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Runs fine for me on max settings, my system is about 2 years old.

The GFX are really good but there is some kind of anti-aliasing blur thing going on that I want to fix. I’m not sure if its a LoD bug or something. It is a beta so I am expecting a little jank.

Also people have complained about the AI but it does not seems any worse than previous mechwarriors in that regard.

So far so good! I’m surprised there’s not more interest in this it really is the first proper mechwarrior game in over 15 years.

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Dude, the previous MechWarrior was made 19 years ago.

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Are you implying there’s been huge improvements in enemy AI in games in the last 19 years? For example?

I can’t think of any major enhancements in first person shooter AI after the original Half Life with the enemy soldiers that tried to flush you out with grenades, and the original Unreal Tournament which had the best bots that emulated human players. UT was in 1999.

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…but where? I looked on Steam, GOG, and EPIC and didn’t see any links.

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It’s out for backers only.

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Mate before sleep every night I am praying that this thing is not a disappointment. The only reason I am not posting here is that I am dreading the result. Mech 4: Mercs is in my top 5 computer games of all time, and I am even willing to get past my allergy to the Epic Games Store to buy this if it’s good.

Thanks for posting impressions!

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Yes? I mean, especially compared to MechWarrior 4’s largely non-existent AI of “move towards you and shoot”.

But, for example? Even back in 2005, a game like FEAR had AI which was orders of magnitude more advanced, where enemies would actually support each other and lay down covering fire and stuff.

Or more recently, a game like Halo reach. Or the far cry games.

Now, this isn’t to say that there weren’t advanced AI systems that could play games back in the late 90s. I seem to recall a very cool quake bot that was developed at Duke. But the actual AI of enemies that you encounter in games has definitely advanced in the last 20 years. They tend to have a better understanding of their environments, and they tend to communicate better with each other.

But all this is kind of beside the actual point, which was that MechWarrior 4 was nearly 20 years ago, and that game had virtually no AI at all.

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There was an amusing reddit post from years ago about this, I just digged it up:

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Someone hasn’t played Garden Warfare 2.

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Reports so far are positive! Fingers crossed, but seems we may have a bonafide Mechwarrior title with all the fixins’

Somebody complained about SteamVR getting in the way, and my eyeballs perked right up. I guess VR will be a thing with this one after release.

Can’t wait.

edit: can anybody in the beta confirm hotas controls? This is one I’d be glad to dust off rudder pedals, where I don’t usually bother with DCS.

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The mechs feel great to control and the weapon effects and feedback is pretty great. Rolling around in an annihilator with quad ultra AC/5s is … stimulating. The terrain and destructibility of tree and buildings is pretty great and the maps actually feel like wide open spaces rather than constrained arenas. The gameplay feels very very mechwarrior which is great.

I think the new hud could use some improvements, e.g. moving the minimap back down to the bottom center would be a huge improvement; I think they pushed all the hud out to the corners so you can see better but then its not a very effective hud where you actually want stuff more central.

I like the mechlab stuff so far where which is very MW4 style, i.e. more constrained than MW3 but also quick to use and plenty of customization options nevertheless.

Modding support is going to be in from the get go so I really look forward to what modders can do with this game.

One note on the AI. Mechwarrior missions are long affairs where you fight successive groups of mechs and vehicles. If you want that kind of extended battle with plenty of action you cant really have a bunch of expert AI pilots. it remains to be seen if the AI can be “dialed up” to provide a reasonably challenging duelling opponent e.g. in a solaris setting or in missions where you explicitly going up against an elite lance or something.

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The one thing that troubled me from one of the gameplay videos they did awhile back is that the cooldowns on weapons seemed really short. Short cooldowns makes the game seem more like a standard shooter, but maybe it was the specific weapons they were packing?

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May even have been sped up for maximum trailer pewpew. Have you ever seen a DCS trailer?

Speaking of that, how do you tomcat without rudder pedals @Anklebiter? Or taxi?