71 replies to this topic

[Training Instructor]

I love the battletech universe, and I started playing the tabletop game in 8th grade. I've never really gotten the impression that anyone at PGI bothered to study up much on the lore, or read any of the books. Maybe some intern there is a bigtime battletech/MW geek, but it's pretty clear his/her input isn't taken into consideration.

One interesting thing about another game I'm looking at Everquest Next, is that on their forums they don't allow users to make new threads, but rather the developers create what they call roundtable discussions, which are fancy names for Threads with polls. These threads feature a group of devs giving their thoughts on an idea for a feature, and then the poll usually gives the users 4-5 options of what they prefer the most, and then the users get to discuss it. This is a game from a big development house that doesn't have to consult the fans about game features, but they're choosing to do it so that they can make a better overall game.

I think if PGI would have done something more like that, they could have steered their limited engineering/coder resources much more efficiently, and we might actually have CW now, rather than sometime in the far far distant future.

[Aluminumfoiled]

Mycrus, on 14 November 2013 - 09:39 PM, said:

The soup expands consciousness.

The soup is vital to space travel.

The soup must flow.

If you can destroy the soup, you can control the soup.

[Robin Wolf]

Karl Streiger, on 14 November 2013 - 07:18 AM, said:

Soup is the elexir of life

“He who controls the soup controls the universe.”

[stjobe]

Sybreed, on 14 November 2013 - 10:17 PM, said:

there's even some for Lone Wolves!

Hey, if you played those in your youth but don't have them any more, they're available (all above the board and legal) for online play here: http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

Edited by stjobe, 14 November 2013 - 11:49 PM.

[Rushin Roulette]

Robin Wolf, on 14 November 2013 - 11:44 PM, said:

“He who controls the soup controls the universe.”

I must not LRM.
LRMs are the soup-killers.
LRMs are the little-cockpitshots that bring total obliteration.
I will face my LRMs.
I will permit them to pass over me and through me.
And when they have gone past I will turn the inner eye to see their path.
Where the LRMs have gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

[Wolfways]

PGI's latest staff meeting..

[Tolkien]

Van Hovern, on 14 November 2013 - 11:17 AM, said:

in fact im a little bit shocked about the fact that pgi STILL hasn't been able to put in a simple thing like a lobby. remember bt:3025? you had a ****** galaxy map, but you were fighting about planets, for your house. can't remember if u got any benefit from that, but i had a LOT more fun fighting about stuff, even if it was a colour on a digital map! and there was a lobby system, you met players again and you formed units naturally, just by dropping again and again with the same players. its just not the same when you just read their names in the chat in-game. you are focused on other stuff. how much easier it would be to give advice to new players and keep them in game. i'm sorry, but it can't be that hard to implement those features. and you don't have to be a genius to know that those things are friggin' important. so... why is pgi that ... excuse my... tremendously stupid? i WANT this game to succeed but sometimes i cant help but feel pgi does not.

The benefit you got from holding extra worlds in MPBT3025 was a boost to your house economy in the form of your salary.

You received Cbills both for doing matches and once per day as a salary. The salary was a nice boost if you had been away for a few days. It would never buy you a mech but it did help (maybe 10% of total earnings for a player who played a few matches every day). To prevent players from just creating an account and leaving it idle they also had pilot levels right from day 1 and different mechs required a different level to purchase.

[Tyrnea Smurf]

a plot you say...

Yes we have many plots.

Over there we have the plots where are buried those who questioned about the developments pace.

Yonder there we have buried those who brayed about the ghost heat.

Sundered about are the plots where are buried those who cried aloud on the change made on seismic matters.

And other plots where are buried those who insist our spiders are not broken.

Who lay beside those we buried who insist they are - are we not clever!

...........

Humm whats this, not burial plots but a plot of fiction? A story plot you say?

Why yes I can prove that charge as well, for we have had great plots on fiction.

We had a plot on matters concerning a first view player playing a third view player, it was quite popular.

In fact so well done was that plot it was taken for true - haha the fools!

We have plotted and planned a grand thing, some thing concerning a whole community and its warfare.

it may well become a true plot where we shall bury a great many others -

But for now we lie content of it -

A work of fiction...

[Johnny Z]

mekabuser, on 14 November 2013 - 06:13 AM, said:

CW is coming.
WE know this.
The problem is, so far there is no hint at all from pgi as to the plotline involved in CW.

I find it a bit odd that there isnt more of a tie in of BT lore into the game.
Without a doubt , our community has tons of people who want to role play, write up short fiction, any number of things , anything to flesh out the universe we are fighting in.

Well said, this will add to the depth of the game, something that is lacking so far.
If one looks at star citizen, they are actively looking to meld lore into the universe. This is a top down approach with fan input celebrated and encouraged.

we used to have little tweets from comstar but that has all but dried up along with pilot trees, command modules etc.

I worry about the absence of this material because imo, if things lke this were being worked on behind the scenes in a productive manner, its only logical the devs would want to share some of their triumphs as wip , a sneak peek into the awesome they have planned.

Silence to me indicates the possibility there might not be awesome. There might be nothing.

Make no mistake. I LOL when i see the " i havent been around in 6 months and the game is worse crowd"
That is FALSE.
in fact, the game does improve, slowly steadily. Graphically, stability, balance, lighting, ragdoll, screenshake, map imrovements<are there competing map teams?> I love it.

but im worried about CW.
CW will make or break this game.
I would say there are a great many people who LOVE the combat, love it, but they are waiting for that persistent universe. A well thought out CW could make this one of the best games ever.
Poorly implemented CW and you will have an exodus to star citizen once it drops.

even I, an assault MW junkie am just starting to grow bored with just match after match.
I want my battles to mean something.

Well said, plot will add to the depth of the game, something that is lacking so far. I am looking forward to the rivalry faction fighting will bring to MechWarrior online.

[Sabazial]

Wow, those adventure books, i never thought i'd hear about those again. I rememer one i loved where you were a ninja fighting against poison that was slowly killing you while trying to assassinate some king, The Usurper it was called, good times.

And hi Daisu, hope you are keeping well my friend

[Sybreed]

stjobe, on 14 November 2013 - 11:48 PM, said:

Hey, if you played those in your youth but don't have them any more, they're available (all above the board and legal) for online play here: http://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

thx! I did play those in my youth, I think I had 5-6 lone wolves book, but their covers were completely different than what I saw on google images, weird.

Edit: Oh there are several series... I think I played a specific one but the site you linked is so slow it's taking forever to see the book covers

[Silentium]

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

It is by the soup of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

[Aim64C]

Honestly, I don't expect much.

Who in their right mind releases an "online" game where there is no in-game function to friend and/or report another player?

All good "Online" games make it almost impossible to avoid running with a temporary team. The pillar of their game is to support community and team interaction within the game. You -want- people to be replacing their instant messaging client with your game, linking it to their facebook, etc.

What draws people is the player community and the atmosphere of the game's lore. You should sort of feel like you're hanging out in the Ready Room, the Mech Bay, or the Bridge - discussing life -and- the game's world/lore. The lines should blur a little as to where you actually are.

MWO fails on both of these fronts.

The lack of in-game community support is... well... impossible to ignore. We could even forgive a lack of in-client VOIP (or support for a third-party add-on that at least allowed easy formation of teams and porting them onto a VOIP server) if there were a sort of lobby... or... something.

But there is, quite literally, zero continuity between matches aside from some rudimentary RPG-like elements that are mostly linear in nature. It's just death-match following death-match.

This can all be seen as Mafia Wars as a stand-alone application and practically no Facebook interlinking (Where's the "get mech-bays for recruiting a friend" deal? It wouldn't hurt to take a page out of Zynga's book, you know... people play the **** out of that **** and it's a re-hash of the same damned game... those games aren't even all that good and people leave their kids' weddings early to go harvest their crops and other stuff).

Except... unlike Mafia Wars, Farmville, Ayakashi, etc - you have to manage to do more than click the "launch" button and purchase gear. So there's pressure to perform - which means there's frustration.

Games like those I mentioned are a pain because you don't know if you have the time to devote to 'being good' in them. You generally want to play them and do awesome things... but you just don't have the time. Unfortunately, when it comes to MWO - it's a game I have time to devote to playing here and there... but I honestly don't know if I want to.

It's a tale of completely inverted development priorities. There's no lore... the community has to try and support itself and the game (rather than the game support the community)... Weapon mechanics and balance were not clearly thought through (or whoever spent time on thinking about them, clearly, should probably not hold such a position from here on out).

There are pretty stompy robots that make explosions, loud noise, and bright flashes. They've even managed to bring back some of the "Unseen."

It's honestly like they have no clue what makes a game marketable and enjoyable.

It is telling that most of the people I end up playing against have, obviously, purchased the Phoenix packages. While that sounds great, at first... it is not a sign of a healthy community. There should be more free players than there are (indications of new players coming in)

What this means is that the game is illustrating itself as a niche market with very devoted, yet small numbers of players.

Anymore - I believe MWO was not an attempt to create a new battletech-themed simulator/shooter. The original goal - perhaps honest at the time - has been replaced with an attempt to extract money from a passionate group of gamers who have matured over the years and can/will pay $80 every few months in some form or another to pay for a piece of something they loved in their childhood.

No one with any business sense worth respecting would "launch" a game in this state.

"Okay, Aim, what should this game look like?"

Path of Exile started out with clear goals for the scope and intent of their game. They thought through where they needed to be at different stages of development and left themselves room to work with. I would wager they have had a smaller budget than this game - and have accomplished far more in far less time.

While the developmental challenges are different between the two games - the sharp contrast between the states of the games as they were approved for Open statuses and release statuses is striking. If I were someone with any authority within the budgeting structure related to this game - I would be demanding an audit of expenses, employee work hours, copies of meeting minutes and developmental memos.

Game development is expensive - but that is largely because 'real' games have cut-scenes totaling and exceeding the running time of feature length movies complete with voice actors and stunt-men used for animation purposes. Some of the most costly portions of game development are notably absent from this game - yet quite a few of us are paying fairly hefty sums into this game (or have in the past - when we still had faith).

Perhaps some of the coming updates will reverse the trend and prove my negativity unfounded...

But I don't hold up much hope. UI 2.0 has been "just around the bend" for over a year.

It honestly wouldn't surprise me if, within the next two months, we simply get an official announcement that funding has been pulled from the project and all further work will cease. As it stands - the game is little more than an open community mod project from "back in the day." Living Legends was considerably better, in all honesty.

So these guys could very well have made a killing off of this game and just close up shop and leave, citing poor market prospects with little sustainability.

The pace of development has bee agonizingly slow. I took a four month break from Path of Exile and had to practically re-learn substantial portions of the game, that is how rapid the development of the open beta was.

MWO? ... LRMs still suck - unless you are in danger of swallowing your tongue out of sheer stupidity (but the gauss rifles usually get you before the missiles do). Because of Ghost Heat, ballistic weapons have taken over and various incarnations of them are the build to nerf (Whack-A-Build). SRMs still have substantial hit detection issues. I still can't friend a player I have fun running with in the game and drop for a few matches with him. There's no support for guilds (or squadrons, or whatever the hell we decide to term them). The modules are the same...

The only thing I had to re-learn was that boating autocannons is now a good formula for competitiveness - though a lot of my other direct-fire builds are only changed by the fact that ballistic fire is reigning supreme, now (which makes lights a little more challenging to play - hit detection seems to work just fine for autocannons).

The bottom line is that the main reason I decided to 'come back' after a few months of not playing was because, a few months ago, I decided to spend $80 and the goods have now been delivered.

I didn't come back for the launch. All I needed to read were the patch notes - and with no mention of community warfare, community [something], or support for some kind of faction/lore meta... there wasn't much of a reason to other than to try and grind up C-bills and GXP to make Phoenix assimilation go more smoothly... so that I could play sequential robot deathmatch in a different looking metal can.

It all boils down to they made a persistent community based game with no continuity, limited replay value, and no community.

I did not know PGI had Sebelius on their payroll.

[Xendojo]

Loving the Dune references.



............there was a plot? when?

[Zolaz]

CW is a lie. Just keep giving PGI your money.

[DaZur]

In fairness all, I believe a good portion of our concerns over "depth of game-play" is sour grapes...

It's really easy to build up and have expectations of grandiose battle scenarios and plot twists and turns. The reality is CW is never going to be more than a maybe a number of linked scenarios and singular battles over contested planets and assets.

Much of the driven "story line" we all pine for has already been written... It's kind'a our job to broaden our imaginations and "believe" our battle drops are but a microcosm of our participation in a greater plot (Kind'a like the previous mentioned adventure books)...

May no mistake... I'm one of a relative handful of members who would love to see a little RPG / Role playing sprinkled into MW:O to give depth and meaning to out drops. That said... I've been around PC gaming far too long to let my self-created expectations leave me sour because I was unrealistic with them.

In short... CW is going to be what you make it out to be. A lot will depend on how much "make-believe" you guys have left in ya...

Thankfully for me, I'm 46 going on 6... so I'm still having fun.

Edited by DaZur, 16 November 2013 - 08:00 AM.

[Stardancer01]

Hisashi No Oni, on 14 November 2013 - 11:27 AM, said:

Look at the game date that will tell you what they are planning. Ill give you a better hint Succession war era just prior to Clan invasion.

It seems that the nostalgia of previous MechWarrior game cut sequences is what is carrying the MWO franchise. It is about time we got a few live action, video or audio snippets. I love the ‘no guts no galaxy’ arena commentator snippets, about mechs getting wasted in the death match arena. (Note arena death match free for all area match wanted).

I know that World Of Tanks tries it best to avoid backstory. WOT can’t because of the amount of people it could offend. MWO isn’t limited by offensive lore and needs to bridge the gap between WOT and Star trek/wars online.

Clan War should be put off for another year. Giving a whole year for inner sphere succession wars. (Note arena death match free for all area match, needs to be setup for clan trials) A lot of stuff setup and debugged for the inner sphere wars will slide directly into Clan War.

[CrashieJ]

Lefty Lucy, on 14 November 2013 - 07:12 AM, said:

There used to be a can of soup on the ground that you had to protect. The can of soup grew up into an oil rig.

SOUP DRILLS

DaZur, on 14 November 2013 - 11:57 AM, said:

"Technically" the story is still in revision...

It's like those story books we had in grade school where you could drive the story line by skipping chapters to elicit different endings.

dat childhood

[Silentium]

gavilatius, on 16 November 2013 - 11:54 AM, said:

SOUP DRILLS



dat childhood

Now I kind of have to do this....



It's obligatory at this point.

[Congzilla]

All of the lore and all of the plot has existed for about 20 years so i really have no idea what you are talking about.