Since it’s been continually profitable for them AND it’s the best multiplayer mechwarrior experience yet to appear (yes I think its better than MW:LL) I suppose they are doing ok!!
that they are banning other iterations of Battletech really pisses me off. Maybe I should get back into Megameknet before it too goes…
Nothing has been banned as far as I know unless you have inside information you are not sharing. You can still download and play MW:LL. Megamek is still a going concern. You can play MW4, 3, 2… earlier this year I happily replayed MW3 and expansions. Best Mechwarrior single player campaign ever.
I played MWO with a group and we were all getting burned out. Somebody announced there was an awesome Mechwarrior mod that had not only mechs but other vehicle types. Literally two days later it announced Piranha applied legal pressure for the development of LL to stop. My mistake re MW4, it seems Microsoft and not PGI have scuttled that ship. Cheers to you and embarrassment to me for not fact checking properly.
I had a great time with MWO but also a frustrating time. Its all detailed in the MWO thread on these boards. I’ll wait for 15 years to pass and play Battletech in 3D before giving PGI more money, that’s where I’m standing. The game itself was a strong platform to be developed upon, the company just pissed me off too much.
I am not even sure this happened, although people have said it did without providing any evidence. The actual guy behind LL maintained and has always maintained that he did not want to continue developing LL if there was a released official product with ongoing support. Supposedly he and PGI were in talks but they didn’t see eye to eye or something? In any case, whether there was “legal pressure” or not is something that has not gone beyond the speculation of third parties.
It would not be unusual if it did happen, but nobody has actually come forward and said “yes, and here are the C&D to prove it”. Nevertheless… you can STILL download MW:LL run a server and play it, which would seem to indicate a C&D was not issued and the project was not “Foxed”. People generally don’t though; it is not an easy game to run or to play. As good as MW:LL was in some ways, I’d rather play MW4 or MW3 multiplayer than that most of the time.
Good news about not giving PGI more money, you can viably play MWO for free. And it seems there are good times ahead in the universe of MWO with CW finally dropping next week (check out the trailer for leopard class dropship action)
Edit: I take it back, PGI apparently pulled a fast one and dropped the CW beta today! So it is out and playable as we speak.
Currently the MWO community warfare thing is pretty broken. They rushed it out to drop it on the same day as Heavy Gear’s new alpha pretty obviously. The lobbies on the planets don’t show other players that join, so you can sit for 30 minutes in what looks like a dead empty lobby. When it gets all 12 people, it then flips on and shows everyone. Of course, since it looks perpetually empty getting that to happen is exceedingly rare.
Heavy Gear, by contrast, is reminiscent of Call of Duty 4, in that you can host your own server, and looking for a game currently is essentially browsing a server list. It’s not doing any of the modern matchmaking stuff at this point, although that may come in the future - however you’ll always have the ability to run your own server, stick mods on it, change the rules, etc.
CW is definitely in a beta state and needs some love. However if you have a bit of patience those invasion battles are an absolute blast. All the ones I’ve been in (dropping solo) have been near constant combat for the 30 minute duration or close to. A secondary effect is that most of the competitive players tend to go straight to CW meaning the normal solo queue is a little more relaxed than usual.
I think need to give clanners less tonnage for their drop deck though; say 200 instead of 240.
Yeah, something has to balance those clans. I’d almost say give them an 8 man team instead of 12, because of clan stars and shit. Given how they destroyed the board game and such.
I’d talk about Heavy Gear but NDA. I’ll say this much, it’s a totally different beast from MWO. More like Call of Mech Duty once they get the crouch and prone and cover shooting stuff in there that we’ve talked about. They’re definitely more of a VOTOMS style mech and not a colossal metal monster. Plus, they have dodging and stuff. Much more maneuverable.
I checked out the Heavy Gear website and some screenshots yesterday. It looked pretty slick (though maybe a bit too shiny/plastic-looking with some textures IMO), and those screens brought back some happy memories of Heavy Gear 2.
I’ve never heard of VOTOMs, but I think I’ll be happy so long as the new HG hews somewhat close to HG2. I never minded that the Heavy Gear jaegers were a bit smaller and faster than Battletech mechs because they still felt like big machines you were piloting instead of a giant agile ninja character that could immediately reverse and side strafe. (Or maybe that’s just the rose-tinted glasses talking).
Well, it’s still early access. It doesn’t even have more stompy or explosion sounds and you have to hand edit a .cfg file if you want to change key bindings!
It’s quite fun as-is, but it’s missing an overall structure.
Yeah I finally got around to buying it. I think I agree with your assessment. I’m having a blast just messing around with it, but I’m curious to see how they plan on expanding the campaign. I hope they do add more to it.
I bought a cheap Xbox 360 a few months ago and remembered Chromehounds sounded cool. Is it still worth playing now that the multiplayer is dead, or should I just not bother?
Corhek, don’t bother. The multiplayer was the meat of Chromehounds. Unfortunately that’s how you played most of the content, including A.I. opponents. It was a real gem, but they shut off the servers so the whole game is useless now, all that’s left is basically a tutorial. Would pay top dollar for a Chromehounds 2!
I took Brigador out for a spin. It looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous.
The thing that was tripping me up were the controls; they just felt totally wrong. I first tried with a game controller. It had seriously bad deadzones, the twinstick-style shooter aiming seemed to make no sense since it just gave directional firing but to actually hit anything you need to also need to be able to adjust the aiming height. So I was pretty much not hitting anything. It didn’t help that the tutorial campaign messages are written for keyboard + mouse.
Ok, the controller support isn’t any good. So I switched to keyboard + mouse. But it too didn’t feel good. Direct movement with WASD on an isometric display? Insane and clumsy. And then there were odd things like toggling ramming mode on a tank would switch it to use classic tank controls instead of direct movement, which was very disorienting.
Turns out that the game was originally designed purely for tank controls but they added the directional movement later on. And for whatever reason the horrible directional movement is now the default. Switch to “relative” controls in the settings, and suddenly everything just clicks into place.
The other thing I was feeling a bit unhappy about was that the gameplay was a bit sluggish. Again, it appears to be something they changed in the new edition when adding controller support. Since the new movement and aiming models were so clumsy, they had to slow down the game to make it playable. So be sure to switch the game speed from 80% to 100% in the settings.
I’ll have to try the tank controls, thanks for the tip. The charge move seems to be broken when holding the S key.
The aiming is a bit frustrating. I have the reticle at the enemy’s feet and some rounds sail right by. Maybe I’ll get used to it.
I was put off at first by the low rent presentation, but the combat itself is starting to grow on me. It helps to pretend like I’m playing a game from the 90s.
Yeah, I don’t think they explain this part about aiming at all. There is no targeting reticle; the red/blue lines are only showing the first 80% of the projectile’s path. If the lines actually intersect something, they’ll hit that. But the point where the line tapers off is not where it’ll impact the ground. That’ll actually be a lot further away.
