Posted 04 October 2015 - 07:51 AM
Nice tongue in cheek comments about our mechs movement abilities and lack thereof, but it does strike a bit of a bitter nerve on some of us grognards aware of how manuverable Battlemechs are supposed to be. You would think there would at least be features like crouch and mantling ability, since this game is based on cry engine and likely both of those are functions that the client can accomplish for a "normal sized" character in the game space. It would follow that they could have likewise scaled it up completely for their giant sized characters in same game world, coming up with animations of mantling, just like there is usually a "drooping" or powered down animation for each mech.
An atlas for example trying to climb a structure as tall as it, or shorter could simply do a collision check in the game, if it finds a wall there after the game engine recieved a "mantle" command it could trigger a climbing animation where one arm comes up, the whole mech sticks to the "structure" and the elevation is then changed as the raised arm and the lower arm which is assumed to have "grabbed the wall" both raise the mech up, accompanied with an awkward mantling animation. Such would be available to humanoid shaped mechs which concievably could "mantle" giving a REASON and diversity to mech build design. Meanwhile things like a raven, sans arms to mantle would be denied such, though one could see it have some mantling ability, perhaps by allowing it to raise it's leg forward very high, to grab an edge half it's height and slowly "step up", the way a real chicken sometimes does get up onto something higher, rather than spastically flapping and rolling up onto the higher level.
Regrettably, all this is unlikely. Unless they have been laying the ground work of this all along in their pursuit of realistic collisions, knockdowns and crouching, it's unlikely there are any good animations for all the dozens of mechs in game for these things. A general "class" of animation, allowing the more humanoid mechs to climb or mantle or crouch in one way, while other classes of animation for things like ravens, maruauders or king crabs might do the trick but as we all can see, it's much the case of mech pack after mech pack rather than these things that we still might want to see but that PGI sees as bells and whistles that are too much trouble to be trifled with.