24 replies to this topic

[MechLord71]

I have been playing a bit of MWO here and there. At times, it has ignited my nostalgia for previous MW games and the amazing fiction universe that took us through the Succession Wars and through the Clan Era (I ignore the Dark Age stuff personally).

Anyway, I realized something pretty quick. For me, MWO is a poor shadow or parody of real Mechwarrior. It gives just enough of the look of mechwarrior but lacks the feel, variety of being a mechwarrior and a member of a lance (or star) fighting for your nation's/clan's goals. The books did this very well and the single player MW games did this very well too in my opinion.

I think I will always be pulled to MWO, but what I have found is that I am personally being pulled not by PGI's average at best game and more by my memories of the past. I have sadly seen little that makes me think PGI will turn around and deliver on the awesome IP they are benefiting from. If they did not have the IP and had to start from scratch like other IPs, I am fairly confident this game would already be dead.

It is sad, but that sums this game up for me. I think I am going to go read some Battletech fiction. Best of luck all.

[Vandul]

For me, its missing the human element. It reminds me of Eve. Your really a disembodied person in a piece of machinery. At least in Eve you can customize your look a little. The stars of the genre, the mechs, are really impersonal too. Sure you can fit them out, and paint them to some degree, but they feel cold, sterile.

The skill system is neutral too. Everyone has the same perks, same chassis bonuses. A more detailed development tree would go a long way for me.

Being able to walk around the mechlab, or to interact or customize the cockpit a bit more would be good. But in the end, there is nothing to set you apart from the 23 other players other than an .xml spreadsheet and some paint applied in a set pattern.

That being said, there is no other Mechwarrior game in existence or on the horizon, so warning red, weapons free.

[Vassago Rain]

It's an IP held hostage.

[Dymlos2003]

This thread just reads: "I want a single player campaign"

[Tom Sawyer]

Its a click in combat sim, rinse and repeat. Yes you can IMAGINE you are a member of a great house, or the clans fighting for your beliefs or honor or fluffy kittens. But all you really get are some more creds, some exp to spend on perks, and perhaps a new mech if you grind long enough or spend some cash for.

[Koniving]

I think this thread reads:
"I want the tactical, thinking person's shooter that we were promised where objectives actually matter more than killing everything we see and smaller mechs are viable, not this twitch shooter fest of pinpoint damage where it's go heavy and jump or go home."

[Solahma]

exterior customization would be very neat. Odds and ends like visual armor, different weapon visual styles for the same weapons, adding roll bars, etc. Anything to give the mechs you run into more personality. The colors and camo is okay, but it would be nice to have a little more.

Having a Pilot Customization section for your "character" would be a very VERY nice addition. Something personal and that could be used in any future developments that might involve a use for your pilot avatar. Give a player an in-game FACE to their name.

IMO it was the single player experience and story that made the previous titles Mech Warrior.

MWO is just the arcade multiplayer part of the game, it is lacking any form of story or immersion into the Battletech world other than the actual combat.

Hopefully we get some content to fill in the gap, but I'm not counting on anything. Hence why i'm trying to start a scenario league (just waiting for a Spectator Mode of some sort

Paul did mention that he had long-term visions of a single player campaign, but those are only dreams at the moment. Would be very welcome though.

[CeeKay Boques]

Are PGI Mech heads? Are they battletech heads?


I think they're just game dev guys. I think they LIKE MechWarrior... but I'm not sure they're passionate. They have 50 people on their team, I'm thinking the artists are the only 'Mech heads.

Concur?

[Malleus011]

PGI needs to do a lot of things to make this title live up to its predecessors.

Giving your Mechwarriors character would be a good start. Names, custom skill trees, individual history logs - all these would be a good start. Being able to put decals on our 'mechs would be great. (Why don't I have a Steiner insignia *on* my Catapult?) Being able to have your Mechwarrior's name, or call sign, or a kill score, or nose art ... all this would help with that little bit of customization.

Beyond that, we need Community Warfare to lend the title a sense of purpose. Right now we're nothing but a team deathmatch game that uses stompy robots instead of special forces operators. It could be and should be so much more than that. My bringing an Artillery Strike should deploy a Mobile Long Tom somewhere on the map that can be hunted and destroyed. Customizing a 'mech should be end-game content. I should have a tech who yells at me when I come back missing an arm and without enough salvage. I should have a CO who assigns missions and combat fronts for my various Mechwarriors. My stumpy robot victories should matter.

I know Russ and team have this idea that they have a 'vision' of Mechwarrior they want to bring to life, but what they need to do *first* is bring to life a Mechwarrior game that lives up to the previous titles. Prove to us that they can handle the IP, and earn the right to bring their own vision. Right now I read their 'vision' and wonder if these guys ever played Battletech, or read the novels, or played Mercenaries.

Nostalgia and pretty 'mech designs brought me into this game. The only thing keeping me here is the long wait for Community Warfare, and trying to get my entertainment dollar's worth out of the Phoenix 'mechs. (2.5 AAA titles ... yeah, nearly done with that by now). Sadly, MWO doesn't deliver a Battletech experience as designed. Their strange take on Clans won't fix the problem.

The closest I've been to Battletech has been playing Stock Mech Mondays, and that's not the game PGI has made, that's the game the players have cobbled together out of what they've got available. Will PGI give us more freedom to make the game better? Will Community Warfare actually let the Great Houses fight campaigns, or will we just have Team Deathmatch vs. Clans on ten different maps?

Time will tell. But there isn't much more time. After the Clans, MWO has no single great release to hype. Only incremental new content to put out. What's left to draw and retain players, if not a campaign of some kind? Character? Story? Absorbing gameplay?

Anything?

[SgtMagor]

I think the point about a single player game, is making me feel a little disconnected from MWO, and things like a black market so I can buy custom mechs without having to worry about mastering them aka mechs with only 1 or 2 variants along the timeline. other than that I like the game and the mech art is the best its ever been in a MechWarrior game.

[Marmon Rzohr]

We will have to see what becomes of community warfare. It could really be awesome. Especially since this is the MW game that has by far the most potential and is much more interesting and exciting then any of the previous ones.

[WildmouseX]

Is it Mechwarrior? hell to the F'n no - Mechwarrior is the RPG expansion to Battletech - Battletech was just the miniature war game.. This is Battletech in it's most raw form.

as far as a twitch FPS using mechs go, it's on par with many others... While I started out in the BAttletech/mechwarrior PnP games, I have gone through all the IP's computer games starting with this one .

[Ryokens leap]

For myself MWO is missing the underlying sense of fear and imminent doom that enemy dropships could appear in orbit at any moment. Remember the intro to MW3, "it's the 31st century and once again mankind is at war". MWO is meta builds, Frankenmech paint jobs and players rushing to post their pug stomp screen shots on the forums. I really want Clan hardware, but at this stage I would have preferred IS tech with Community Warfare. I barely drop with the group I joined and lately prefer to drop against the Russians at 5 am MST.

[Kill Dozer]

This is a sore point for many MW veterans and has been repeatedly brought up, however, these concerns fall on deaf ears for the most part.

"Mechwarrior" has decades of immersive back story, board games, dozens of books, video games, cast figures etc. that really make you feel like you are taking part in a larger world.

"Mechwarrior Online" was, and is, marketed as a game similar to the team based Mechwarrior combat sims of the past.

However, it is designed primarily as a single player ("PUG?) "robot arcade shooter" and most of the immersion has been discarded in favor of "monetizing" for the F2P arcade model. A quick example of this is having to "check out of the shopping cart" when leaving the Mechlab, immersion fail is best fail. The metacritic review for MWO is littered with reviews laying all this out in more detail than I will bother to go into here.

Other than some similarities like Mech names etc. it is decidedly NOT a team based (if "team" means more than a group of random players on a side) Mechwarrior sim.

I'll probably get censored for saying the above but it's an honest answer to your question.

[CeeKay Boques]

Great point on the check out. Details, do everything.

Kill Dozer, on 29 May 2014 - 11:46 AM, said:

This is a sore point for many MW veterans and has been repeatedly brought up, however, these concerns fall on deaf ears for the most part.

"Mechwarrior" has decades of immersive back story, board games, dozens of books, video games, cast figures etc. that really make you feel like you are taking part in a larger world.

"Mechwarrior Online" was, and is, marketed as a game similar to the team based Mechwarrior combat sims of the past.

However, it is designed primarily as a single player ("PUG?) "robot arcade shooter" and most of the immersion has been discarded in favor of "monetizing" for the F2P arcade model. A quick example of this is having to "check out of the shopping cart" when leaving the Mechlab, immersion fail is best fail. .

Yes. They don't care enough about the world. They are trying very hard to put all their monetization and game options in good looking Mech things. But you can tell... the don't get it. From "All systems... Online" to "Check out" at the end... I feel like I'm buying mechs from a game dev, not playing Mechwarrior. I fear that it will never be done enough.

When they first started with the daily quotes and stories... I thought maybe... maybe they were more Mechwarrior than me! Wonder what changed... I feel like it all went down hill after the players tried to form some sort of brute squad...

[-Natural Selection-]

This game take a step further away from MP gaming the longer time passes.

Puts cap on group size, but allows to join their own que.
Increases team size but maintains same group size, thus watering down the % of grouped players.
Tries to restrict the number of groups per match to one per team.
Adds private matches but makes you P2P for it with no rewards.

This game inch by inch caters to nothing but solo players. Nothing that could not be dev'd into a single player vs AI and achieve the same kind of match.

As this may be harsh and kind of off topic, the proud "86%" in my opinion is 99% the fail of this game.

[Sprouticus]

I think you guys are looking at the old mech games with seriously rose colored glasses

MW4/MW4 Merc was a decent single player but the balance issues were horrific in multi player. Mektek and NBT fixed some of those, but the majority were still there at the end of life.

MW3 had the worst multi player code I have ever seen. It was also very easy to abuse the mech customization system.

MW2 is lauded by old timers as the best of the bunch, but you still had horrible netcode (not for the time, but compared to MWO), ball of death PPC's, mixmaxing to the extreme, jumpjet skating, etc.

No, as much problem as MWO has with balance, etc it is far better than any previous Mechwarrior title.


As for CW, I would not mind if they left CW to the community and focused on making the game itself better (UI, mechs, maps, etc). Give the community a way to integrate their own community warfare into the game seamlessly (API of some kind) and we would take it from there.

NBT and other leagues lasted for YEARS after Microsoft ditched the game.

It will never happen of course, just my 2 cents.

[CeeKay Boques]

Sprouticus, on 29 May 2014 - 12:20 PM, said:

I think you guys are looking at the old mech games with seriously rose colored glasses

MW4/MW4 Merc was a decent single player but the balance issues were horrific in multi player. Mektek and NBT fixed some of those, but the majority were still there at the end of life.

MW3 had the worst multi player code I have ever seen. It was also very easy to abuse the mech customization system.

MW2 is lauded by old timers as the best of the bunch, but you still had horrible netcode (not for the time, but compared to MWO), ball of death PPC's, mixmaxing to the extreme, jumpjet skating, etc.

No, as much problem as MWO has with balance, etc it is far better than any previous Mechwarrior title.

This is very true, and Mechwarrior Online does hold up very well when compared to 10 and 20 year old games, despite not having the immersion nor features of those games. It has other, modern stuff.

When looking at modern games... its doing ok.

Quote

As for CW, I would not mind if they left CW to the community and focused on making the game itself better (UI, mechs, maps, etc). Give the community a way to integrate their own community warfare into the game seamlessly (API of some kind) and we would take it from there.

NBT and other leagues lasted for YEARS after Microsoft ditched the game.

It will never happen of course, just my 2 cents.

Absolutely. They need to s#$# or get off the pot. I think they are trying to do both, making a planetary and mech sim. I think in the name of... money? They want to hold all the things.

They really, really need to choose one or other... they don't have the focus or manpower for both, in my honest, uneducated opinion.

[Keeshu]

Yeah this thread is similar to single player experiences in past Mechwarrior games. Community Warfare has a chance to change that and emulate a more dynamic experience similar to the previous mechwarrior missions but with things changed up a bit. I don't really know how many more extra turrets/vehicles we will be able to use to defend with (not even sure if we can use some to attack). We'll see what that brings eventually as we don't know how little/major CW will be.

After hearing about Single player in MWO, I got really happy. However, I'm assuming they mean co-op. Don't get me wrong, I love single player games every now and then, but usually single player games don't have the kind of replay value that multiplayer games do generally.
Would be nice to see some specific commands like previous mechwarrior games. I'm not much for leading, but I do like following. Awaiting orders sir! o7


I'm not much for PvP, but I like it when devs balance PvP first before going onto PvE content because it's easier to build PvE enemies based around the player's capabilities, than to balance players based off enemies and other player's abilities.



For now I'm enjoying the game for what it is, and right now it's the best Multiplayer Mechwarrior experience I've had/seen. Though the bar was pretty low to begin with when it comes to older mechwarrior games imo, not that it needed to be low since MWO is mindblowingly awesome. I jump on MWO whenever I get a chance to right now. The second Co-op is in, you'll see me stuck to that mode.

I shall wait to see what happens for the future.

[Wolfways]

I rarely play anymore, but i only play at all because MWO is (loosely) based on Battletech.