158 replies to this topic

[Lugh]

Novakaine, on 20 July 2015 - 12:00 PM, said:

Of course if PGI would quit jacking around and added these.
The game could change overnight.

AND Elementals

[Vxheous]

Anjian, on 20 July 2015 - 02:13 AM, said:

Having even 1 million active players, this is kind of small to the mega MMOs out there like World of Tanks, DoTA2 and League of Legends. These games beef in the tens of millions. And they are still a fraction of the online game market out there.

You are comparing 1995-2004 online gaming numbers to current 2015 online gaming numbers. 1 million active players back in 2000 would be considered a huge population.

[Duncan Jr Fischer]

Why are mech games are not popular indeed...
Maybe because they are usually badly executed, meddle in some dubious types of monetization and are developed in a half-ass mode? MWLL is the only mech game in the latest years that developers really worked on hard, but it was actually nearly a fan-based non-profit work, and that places some hard limits on the final quality, which nevertheless was pretty good..

MWO is probably the best we have of mech "sims" around, but it's oh so far from being good.. and even from being a sim =D
Promised to be good once, and it would be much, much more popular, be it at least new player friendly, BT friendly and community feedback friendly. But it's notorious for being the opposite.

[Cementi]

Trouble is mech games are too complicated for the average CoD and TF2 type players to comprehend. Varying loadouts, mechanics, weight classes and on top of that having to deal with the fact that your gun can point a direction different than your legs is simply too much for most of them to handle.

I had a few good friends that I have gamed with in mmo's try this game. Everyone of them, including the guy who used to play competitive TF2 (he got free mice and keyboards and stuff not sure if he actually made money) said that not only was the learning curve to steep but the he simply could not grasp the fact that not only could his torso face a different direction than his legs but his arms could point a different direction than his torso weapons and he just got frustrated even when toggling arm lock on and off.

Not trying to be a jerk about it but quite simply some people want a more simple game.

[ShinobiHunter]

Lugh, on 20 July 2015 - 07:36 AM, said:

Because ASDW walking and Mouselook is so hard?!?!

In any other popular FPS, you always walk the direction you are looking. This is a whole different ball game. With any of my friends, this has been the hold up.

[ShinobiHunter]

Lightfoot, on 20 July 2015 - 09:33 AM, said:

Joystick fixes that. MWO has good joystick support now and MechWarrior is a joystick game like a flight sim is. I am using a Thrustmaster 16000m I picked up for $40. The return spring was a little strong so I opened the bottom and zip-tied two of the coils together, once I did that it was better than my old Sidewinder 2 and comes with good software. Anyway it is an option and a natural way to pilot a mech.

Unfortunately, most gamers aren't going to go out and buy a joystick, just to use on an obscure robot game. If they're not interested in the game, it's very unlikely they will buy equipment solely for that.

[N0MAD]

MWO could and should of been popular, i mean look at the number of Founders that signed up (over 70k) but it was PGI developing, i think that says it all.

ShinobiHunter, on 20 July 2015 - 02:58 PM, said:

In any other popular FPS, you always walk the direction you are looking. This is a whole different ball game. With any of my friends, this has been the hold up.

Wot may disagree with you and what is the WoT population?

[JP Josh]

mogs01gt, on 19 July 2015 - 06:11 PM, said:

Mech games = simulator, sims arent popular
FPS = popular due to ease of play


I dont think I could name a complication FPS other than RainBow 6, that game wasnt very popular because it had a high skill cap.

interstellar marines is shaping up nicely...... we are getting fps and mechs in that to and as a added bonus land sharks are on the horizon.

[Alan Davion]

MeiSooHaityu, on 20 July 2015 - 03:19 AM, said:

The gaming industry is too afraid to take risks because costs are too high now (development, marketing, etc...). They want a sure thing to make money. Remember, the share holders want to see steady or rapid growth. No hiccups in profit are tolerated or some people executives might be shown the door.

It's all about profit for the big publishers, not fun.

I think the industry views mech games as a First Person Shooter and little else. Because of that, only games trying to appeal to the CoD formula are deemed a safe enough venture for a publisher to put money into.

Games like MechWarrior are great, but they aren't CoD or Battlefield, so there is too much risk that the public will like it. The fact that even MWO exists sometimes boggles my mind. Then again, it has used alternative techniques to get to market (like Star Citizen and Elite) because the industry views these non-CoD like shooters as too risky for a traditional game development model.

TL;DR
Basically, the more successful the game industry gets, the more greedy it gets. It is a game of one-ups-manship that means better graphics and physics that have driven up development costs immensely. To cover those costs, they want to only develop what makes money because a loss is too costly. CoD is successful so it needs to be a CoD killer. Games like MechWarrior are too outside of what is proven, so it will never get greenlit.

It's amazing ANYTHING new or fresh ever gets made. Thank god for indie developers (when they finish a title anyway :/).

Bolded for reference.

This really is the core of the problem with the games industry these days. How huge was the budget for Destiny, and how much of that was poured purely into advertisement? And in the end, Destiny turned into just another CoD-esque game, or so I've heard.

I've never been able to play the GD-thing due to all the bleeding errors I get from their servers.

Which is why I'm more excited over games like Star Citizen and Heavy Gear Assault. All the money they make from sales goes straight into the development of their game. What's Star Citizen up to now anyway? Well over 80 million? And that's not even counting the money they make from the Centurion/Imperator subscribers.

I grew up with MW2/Mercs and Heavy Gear/HG2, and I was like... 10 years old at the time, and I had to really think about how best to manage my mech... Even more so during the Merc Commander campaign, finances, pilots, more mechs. Hell, my brother at the time was 6 and even he played those games, and did fairly well with them.

The problems games face today are two-pronged. Greedy publishers, and brainless kids who just want everything yesterday.

Frankly, I don't think one can't be fixed without fixing the other.

Someone mentioned FarmVille. That's a good example of what I'm talking about, you don't really have to think almost at all, and you can veg out with it for hours at a time.

Now, going back to CoD, I only really played CoD:MW2 and after that I was bored with the whole bloody franchise... Which is a good thing because after that they just kept dressing the game up in different outfits, while leaving the core game more or less unchanged. The same can be said of Battlefield, but they did a better overall job with that franchise... At least until Hardline, which I heard was an absolute train wreck on PC.

I remember the MW5 reboot trailer, and the way that looked, it really harkened back to good old MW2 Mercs. The mechs were big, and capable of untold destruction, but it would have required people to really dig into the lore and think. Which, if I had been the pilot of that Warhammer, when I saw that Atlas stomp out of the smoke, I probably would have shite my pants and done my best to beat a hasty freaking retreat. The Warhammer did a good job holding its own, but was ultimately outmatched as it should have been.

I'm hoping that Star Citizen, when it comes out, will give the games industry the big honking middle finger/back-hand slap to the face it needs in order to wake up and start making some fresh, new games. Otherwise we'll just keep being spoon-fed the same shite we've been getting for the last... What... 5-10 years?

Wow, that turned into quite the little spiel, didn't it?

[Kristov Kerensky]

Vxheous Kerensky, on 20 July 2015 - 12:15 PM, said:

You are comparing 1995-2004 online gaming numbers to current 2015 online gaming numbers. 1 million active players back in 2000 would be considered a huge population.

This is wrong, there were never 1 million MW players on the Zone, the MOST popular game on the Zone was Asheron's Call, with 15,000 players, per MicroSoft. The 1 million players was taken from another quote, which was the number of people who USED the Zone total, which is why MS shut the thing down, it was a money pit and that's all.

Mecha titles of any sort have never been popular in the US, PC or console, doesn't matter, they just aren't, and the reasons why have been touched on multiple times in this thread. BattleTech related titles don't do well anywhere, they never have, Japan being no exception as the Japanese prefer the more organic and sexy mecha types from Gundam, Macross and the like, the Mechs of BattleTech are too ugly, too boxy, and not sexy at all.

WE obviously love the genre, some of us having been playing it since the 80s with TT and every single PC and console game ever created for the BTech genre, but we have to remember, it's a VERY small niche market, always has been, always will be.

MW2 titles, never hit 10k players in any of the leagues, MW3 and MW4 barely hit 10k players in their leagues. Quake games were topping hundreds of thousands at the same time. More people bought, and this isn't a joke, Deer Hunter than bought all the MW titles combined.

I was amazed when PGI announced MWO, I never thought I'd see another MW title in my lifetime outside of the mods like MW:LL. It wasn't ever a popular game, and only MW2 ever really made a serious profit for it's publisher. Be happy we have MWO, we need to do whatever we can to make it succeed, because if it fails, we won't see another MW title.

[Y E O N N E]

Alan Davion, on 20 July 2015 - 04:27 PM, said:

Bolded for reference.

This really is the core of the problem with the games industry these days. How huge was the budget for Destiny, and how much of that was poured purely into advertisement? And in the end, Destiny turned into just another CoD-esque game, or so I've heard.

I've never been able to play the GD-thing due to all the bleeding errors I get from their servers.

Which is why I'm more excited over games like Star Citizen and Heavy Gear Assault. All the money they make from sales goes straight into the development of their game. What's Star Citizen up to now anyway? Well over 80 million? And that's not even counting the money they make from the Centurion/Imperator subscribers.

~snip~

I'm hoping that Star Citizen, when it comes out, will give the games industry the big honking middle finger/back-hand slap to the face it needs in order to wake up and start making some fresh, new games. Otherwise we'll just keep being spoon-fed the same shite we've been getting for the last... What... 5-10 years?

Wow, that turned into quite the little spiel, didn't it?

Earnest Garbage, man, Earnest Garbage.

I'm also worried about Star Citizen. They kept adding stretch goals when they didn't even have a clear outline of what the game was going to be like. And, what I've played of it so far, has not impressed me in the slightest. It feels like more Earnest Garbage, just scaled up because the budget dedicated to development is also scaled up.

[Impyrium]

MWO is also situated right in the worst area possible for a game like this, really.

It's no where near complex enough to be considered a proper 'mech sim. But it's also not simple enough to be easily accessible by any gamer or player, made worse by the lack of introduction or tutorial.

Problem is MWO completely missed the point of being best of both worlds, because it's really the worst of both. Those of us that want a very indepth, complex and immersive 'mech sim are left wanting. Yet players that come in wanting something super simple and easy to get into are immediately drop kicked by the game.

Regardless of what the game should be, the fact is it's not very good at either and hence those of us that do stick around are those of us that have learned to accept it for what it is, but that's the last thing you want players to have to do to enjoy a game.

[N0MAD]

Kristov Kerensky, on 20 July 2015 - 04:42 PM, said:

This is wrong, there were never 1 million MW players on the Zone, the MOST popular game on the Zone was Asheron's Call, with 15,000 players, per MicroSoft. The 1 million players was taken from another quote, which was the number of people who USED the Zone total, which is why MS shut the thing down, it was a money pit and that's all.

Mecha titles of any sort have never been popular in the US, PC or console, doesn't matter, they just aren't, and the reasons why have been touched on multiple times in this thread. BattleTech related titles don't do well anywhere, they never have, Japan being no exception as the Japanese prefer the more organic and sexy mecha types from Gundam, Macross and the like, the Mechs of BattleTech are too ugly, too boxy, and not sexy at all.

WE obviously love the genre, some of us having been playing it since the 80s with TT and every single PC and console game ever created for the BTech genre, but we have to remember, it's a VERY small niche market, always has been, always will be.

MW2 titles, never hit 10k players in any of the leagues, MW3 and MW4 barely hit 10k players in their leagues. Quake games were topping hundreds of thousands at the same time. More people bought, and this isn't a joke, Deer Hunter than bought all the MW titles combined.

I was amazed when PGI announced MWO, I never thought I'd see another MW title in my lifetime outside of the mods like MW:LL. It wasn't ever a popular game, and only MW2 ever really made a serious profit for it's publisher. Be happy we have MWO, we need to do whatever we can to make it succeed, because if it fails, we won't see another MW title.

Kris would rather see no version of MW than this current one,, IMO its detrimental to the IP, its hurting the IP.

[Alan Davion]

Yeonne Greene, on 20 July 2015 - 04:44 PM, said:

Earnest Garbage, man, Earnest Garbage.

I'm also worried about Star Citizen. They kept adding stretch goals when they didn't even have a clear outline of what the game was going to be like. And, what I've played of it so far, has not impressed me in the slightest. It feels like more Earnest Garbage, just scaled up because the budget dedicated to development is also scaled up.

They actually stopped adding stretch goals somewhere in the 3rd or 4th quarter of last year, and there hasn't been another once since.

And what you've played of it so far is like, a game within the larger overall game. Chris Roberts just spent the last... 2, maybe 3 months over in London directing the performance capture for the single player portion of the game, Squadron 42, so the game is progressing, by leaps and bounds sometimes.

The delays to the FPS portion, Star Marine though, and indications that even they aren't infallible, but they are at least honest about it and are even working on the weekends to try and get these problems fixed.

I have high hopes for CIG, which is more than I can say about most dev studios these days.

[Kristov Kerensky]

Yeonne Greene, on 20 July 2015 - 04:44 PM, said:

Earnest Garbage, man, Earnest Garbage.

I'm also worried about Star Citizen. They kept adding stretch goals when they didn't even have a clear outline of what the game was going to be like. And, what I've played of it so far, has not impressed me in the slightest. It feels like more Earnest Garbage, just scaled up because the budget dedicated to development is also scaled up.

SC has me worried, multiple SRM members bought into it and every single time I ask, they always tell me, do NOT drop a dime on SC. Reading their latest monthly letter really worried me, they are FINALLY getting up to 16 players in multiplayer! Seriously, wtbf, the engine supports that natively and they are just NOW getting it to work? And that's ALL they can get it to support? It's supposed to be an MMO, massive space combats and all that, sorry, 16 players is NOT massive, and it's sure as hell not an MMO.

That and the FPS news, wow..ok..I WAS impressed with the devs working on SC at first, but now I'm starting to wonder about them.

Whenever you think PGI's devs are slow and whatever, remember this : SC has been in dev almost as long, has a lot more money and a lot more talent and is still nothing but a space ship demo that is just now getting capable of putting 16 players together at once.

[Eider]

lack of boobs.. honestly throw some babes infront of mechs and guns and people would be all over it.

[Alan Davion]

Kristov Kerensky, on 20 July 2015 - 04:59 PM, said:

Whenever you think PGI's devs are slow and whatever, remember this : SC has been in dev almost as long, has a lot more money and a lot more talent and is still nothing but a space ship demo that is just now getting capable of putting 16 players together at once.

Remember that they're also going to have a metric crap-ton more immersion than MWO could ever /dream/ to have.

Multiple landing zones on the same planet, let alone multiple planets in the same bloody system. Then the fact that they'll have something like 100 unique star systems, where as MWO hasn't even gotten one bit of lore for even one star system, let alone managed to make the individual planets worth something in CW.

I actually think SC hasn't been in development as long as MWO has, maybe a year or so less, they started back in 2012 if I remember, where MWO started in 2011 didn't they?

But again, SC is simply going to have a lot more than MWO will ever have once it reaches a full launch status.

[CtrlAltWheee]

I don't buy the "it's too complex." WoW is stupidly complex. Dozens of skills, items, crafting, etc.

MWO's issue isn't one thing. It's a few things together that drive people away to lower hanging fruit.

Bad NPE (totally agree. Probably the worst offender)
Super steep pricing model
Siphoning the fun out of things
Taking things that should be fun like modules and making them so expensive that they aren't fun
-See also hours spent searching for modules. equipping, de-equipping, re-equipping.
Taking things that should be fun like customizing your hangar and not having customizable hangars
Taking things that should be fun like changing camo and having an inexplicable 75 vs 750 mc pricing
Taking things that should be fun like buying your favorite variant of each chassis and instead you need to buy the variants you don't like if you want 2x basics

High time to kill is one of the unique and great things about mechwarrior. It keeps getting shorter.
When you buy mechs they suck until you kit them out in endo and with DHS and we hope new players figured that out
The entry-level mechs, light mechs, pretty much require an additional expenditure of a few million c-bills on an xl engine to be good. We hope new players understand this and it makes their new purchase underwhelming if it's using a std engine cruising at 97kph.

This being said, MWO is my favorite game and no other IP could get me to spend the $1000 I have here. I love it in spite of some bad design decisions.

Wish they'd take all the art and gameplay and try MWO 2.0. I'd play it.

[Y E O N N E]

Alan Davion, on 20 July 2015 - 05:07 PM, said:

Remember that they're also going to have a metric crap-ton more immersion than MWO could ever /dream/ to have.

Multiple landing zones on the same planet, let alone multiple planets in the same bloody system. Then the fact that they'll have something like 100 unique star systems, where as MWO hasn't even gotten one bit of lore for even one star system, let alone managed to make the individual planets worth something in CW.

I actually think SC hasn't been in development as long as MWO has, maybe a year or so less, they started back in 2012 if I remember, where MWO started in 2011 didn't they?

But again, SC is simply going to have a lot more than MWO will ever have once it reaches a full launch status.

What they have to show backers after 4 years of development is nothing special. Four years is a long time to be in development, even by AAA standards. Not even Halo 2 was in development for that long, and that game was scrapped about half-way through and restarted from the ground up. By this point, they ought to have at least one section of the game complete, given the modularity. They don't. Oh, sure, they are calling Arena Commander finished, but it's not, not at all.

Alan Davion, on 20 July 2015 - 04:52 PM, said:

They actually stopped adding stretch goals somewhere in the 3rd or 4th quarter of last year, and there hasn't been another once since.

And what you've played of it so far is like, a game within the larger overall game. Chris Roberts just spent the last... 2, maybe 3 months over in London directing the performance capture for the single player portion of the game, Squadron 42, so the game is progressing, by leaps and bounds sometimes.

The delays to the FPS portion, Star Marine though, and indications that even they aren't infallible, but they are at least honest about it and are even working on the weekends to try and get these problems fixed.

I have high hopes for CIG, which is more than I can say about most dev studios these days.

I know they stopped, but they stopped too late. They ought to have stopped way before that. They've essentially promised three games in one, but they can't even get the arena shooter to be any good. The controls are incredibly chunky, the weapons are uninspired and a complete snore, the ships are detailed but aesthetically unpleasing, and then of course there are the bugs. While I realize things can and probably will improve, I sincerely doubt the controls will get much better and I know the ships are not changing (but hey, they can always add more ships!).

If you ask me, the only space sim worth keeping an eye on right now is Enemy Starfighter. It's not anywhere near as ambitious as Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, or No Man's Sky, but its focus on what it is has allowed the developer to shine it to an incredible level.

Kristov Kerensky, on 20 July 2015 - 04:59 PM, said:

SC has me worried, multiple SRM members bought into it and every single time I ask, they always tell me, do NOT drop a dime on SC. Reading their latest monthly letter really worried me, they are FINALLY getting up to 16 players in multiplayer! Seriously, wtbf, the engine supports that natively and they are just NOW getting it to work? And that's ALL they can get it to support? It's supposed to be an MMO, massive space combats and all that, sorry, 16 players is NOT massive, and it's sure as hell not an MMO.

That and the FPS news, wow..ok..I WAS impressed with the devs working on SC at first, but now I'm starting to wonder about them.

Whenever you think PGI's devs are slow and whatever, remember this : SC has been in dev almost as long, has a lot more money and a lot more talent and is still nothing but a space ship demo that is just now getting capable of putting 16 players together at once.

Since I grew up on Wing Commander, I was incredibly excited for Roberts and Star Citizen. The concept he pitched for the game was also very appealing. However, the development is moving at such a snail's pace and even the stuff we have access to is mediocre. All Star Citizen has going for it at the moment is high-poly, incredibly detailed ships. But, as mentioned above, I think the ships are ugly as a package, so that buys them nothing in terms of good-will.

[Leiska]

SaltBeef, on 19 July 2015 - 07:25 PM, said:

I am Serious add an infantry section too this game, cha ching! Toad, infantry, pirates, mercs, special forces infiltration teams, just a different game mode attatch it to the game. Vehicles, storylines from lore and Wolf Ceremonial uniforms MmmmmmmmmhhhhMmmmnmmmmmh!

Is there something special about Clan Wolf uniforms?