46 replies to this topic

[Davers]

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 10 March 2013 - 06:08 PM, said:

and theyve said we cant fight in storyline battles on storyline worlds so yeah wtf is the point of CW again?

Hopefully the battles will feel as though it has meaning. Otherwise it will be about as much fun as looking at your Map Statistics.

CW needs to be fun and engaging. If it ends up being a 'tacked on' feature then they will lose a lot of their player base. It sure needs to be more engaging than WoT Clan wars!

[grifflyman]

Is the going to be a NEW timeline though? I thought MW:OL was going to be a new, fresh start. so who knows what happens?

[Davers]

grifflyman, on 10 March 2013 - 06:40 PM, said:

Is the going to be a NEW timeline though? I thought MW:OL was going to be a new, fresh start. so who knows what happens?

Sorry, no. The original vision doesn't even have the players deciding where they will be fighting. All attacks are being set by PGI (though they said it might become player controlled at some point.)

[Thunder Lips Express]

grifflyman, on 08 March 2013 - 03:38 PM, said:

I'm a bit confused as why the beta is following a 1:1 timeline still....

Or is it?

Why would one of the biggest story elements of the game be released during beta? I would rather see the clans come in the far future and let the factions battle it out for a year like it was originally intended.

Rushing through the most major event in the battle tech universe while the game is still in beta just sounds like a mistake.

Would it really hurt the game to "pause" the 1:1 timeline while the game remains in beta?

As I stated, I'm not sure the game is still following the 1:1 timeline, but I hope it's not...

as much as i would love for clans to be introduced asap i agree with you, the quality of the game comes first. i'm in this for the long haul as are most of us. if people leave because the clans will be delayed let them, if clans are that important to them they will come back when the clans invade. in the mean time let the developers continue to release inner sphere mechs, flush out bugs, add maps, game types all in the meantime having clan mechs being worked on in the background to be released in a large bunch on invasion day. that is if they aren't already doing that

[Zyllos]

The way I see it, the story line planets might be immovable and unchangeable but what about the worlds around the edges?

CW, hopefully, will allow us to build our own story of the Clans and their excursions into taking the fringe worlds. And hopefully done in such a way that allows the community to build up unique events in time, which seemed unimportant to the actual invasion, but is important to the worlds that are fought over.

[Davers]

One of my biggest problems with the Devs sticking to canon means that at least 2 factions won't have any official reason for fighting the Clans: Marik and Liao never get involved in the fighting. Does that mean we will never face Clan mechs, ever? If so, that seems like a big waste of time excluding 33% of the community from 'the big show'.

[Jimskiavic]

Worth remembering that there's the 'year of peace' from November this year to October next year, with effectively no Clan vs IS fighting. And when you think about it, the timeline actually looks pretty helpful from a development point of view.

A concept for how the Clans could be introduced (which I'd originally read posited by someone else on the Clan forums a while back):

• March - October 2013/3050: 'news of the Clans spreads through the IS, as does intel about their Mechs, tactics, background, etc'. i.e. concept art and gameplay details slowly revealed (could be written in a very fun, RP-like way from an IS perspective). But for us lowly MechWarriors, this is all distant news, and none of us are on the front-lines (i.e. we don't get any IS vs Clan battles).
  
• Sometime* from November 2013/3050: the Clans launch as playable. Battles are restricted to Clan vs Clan, and IS vs IS (conveniently allowing more time to work out balancing issues). There could be the occasional special event weekend where there's some 'minor raids between IS and Clan forces', allowing some IS vs Clan battles to help with balance testing (and if it doesn't match how Clan vs IS battles end up looking like, well it's just because 'it was all those rubbish non-Bloodnamed warriors doing the fighting').
  
• November 2014/3051: the invasion resumes, and Clan vs IS battles become an option (with everyone having had plenty of time to build up their XP and CW).

* This would obviously depend on development progress of course, and it might make sense to have CW in place for a few months first so as to give people some 'sunk' investment in being IS, so that there isn't a mass Exodus (pun intended) to the Clans (not that I'm suggesting you would have to make a 'permanent' choice between Clan and IS - I would suggest rather that you effectively have two 'sub-accounts' that operate independently, and you can choose which one to play with at any given time).