67 replies to this topic

[FRAGTAST1C]

I heard from the recent AMA that the controls are going to be very similar to MWO but it's be a lot slower. But what about the weapon variety, the damage numbers, armour rating, engines and their impact on the mechs, etc.,?

[JediPanther]

nothing because pgi does the exact opposite that any normal game developer would do. Way back in time developers would do things like:

Demo: a quick level or two usually the first two to get people interested in the game;mgs on ps1 being one of the best.
Shareware:like a demo but usually a lot more content sometimes even an entire series of levels or a chapter given for free with no drm or install restrictions;want more well you need to buy rest of the game.
Game magazine ad: images and text about the game,sell price,systems it releases on.
tv ad: sometimes show video of the game in action or have a high profile person talking to get you to get the game.

Pgi's method is simply buy it and like it while being eternally grateful that pgi in their AAA gaming godly hood bestowed upon you the chance of buying mw5 saving mw and bt from the depths of forgotten game franchises. Now buy their dlc while you still can you undeserving mortal before they rescind their position at the time to offer you dlc.

[FRAGTAST1C]

Well, in the AMA, they did talk about marketing and that a budget was kept aside just for it and will be used 20-30 days before the release of the game. Plus the Beta being pushed back and released as a demo is ok in my book. But there needs to be a bit more sound bytes being created for the game. I mean, there isn't even a dedicated forum for the new game.

[JediPanther]

Other than the sub forum here for "battletech" in general they have just that mw5 pilot sign up web page. Like always just twitter russ. I don't know of any video game,movie or tv show that did well with just a mere 30 days of advertising. Pgi gona pgi onward expecting a blizkreig of 30 days adverts is going to suddenly get all those who arn't aware of mw/bt/mw5 to suddenly pony up the cash for it.

I'm far more interested with cyber punk and that doesn't come out for months. That's how you advertise and market a game right there;e3 videos,demos on youtube, pre-order on multiple digital distribution sites, and interviews on gaming sites. While pgi has put me forever off pre-ordering it hasn't gotten rid of my ability to keep track of a game I have an interest in.

[Vanguard836]

JediPanther, on 13 October 2019 - 07:48 PM, said:

nothing because pgi does the exact opposite that any normal game developer would do. Way back in time developers would do things like:

Demo: a quick level or two usually the first two to get people interested in the game;mgs on ps1 being one of the best.
Shareware:like a demo but usually a lot more content sometimes even an entire series of levels or a chapter given for free with no drm or install restrictions;want more well you need to buy rest of the game.
Game magazine ad: images and text about the game,sell price,systems it releases on.
tv ad: sometimes show video of the game in action or have a high profile person talking to get you to get the game.

Pgi's method is simply buy it and like it while being eternally grateful that pgi in their AAA gaming godly hood bestowed upon you the chance of buying mw5 saving mw and bt from the depths of forgotten game franchises. Now buy their dlc while you still can you undeserving mortal before they rescind their position at the time to offer you dlc.

How many other big releases in the last years have done what you say PGI hasn't done ?

[R79TCom1 Night Lanner]

I do find it odd that they required people to pre-pay just to get the demo a few weeks ahead of full release. I mean, everything else they gave away with the pre-order turned out to be free handouts. I remember a time where you could walk into a video game store and pick up a hardcopy of a game demo free.

[Vanguard836]

R79TCom1 Night Lanner, on 13 October 2019 - 08:45 PM, said:

I do find it odd that they required people to pre-pay just to get the demo a few weeks ahead of full release. I mean, everything else they gave away with the pre-order turned out to be free handouts. I remember a time where you could walk into a video game store and pick up a hardcopy of a game demo free.

That was a long time ago indeed

[FRAGTAST1C]

Vanguard836, on 13 October 2019 - 08:38 PM, said:

How many other big releases in the last years have done what you say PGI hasn't done ?

Well, the thing is, we aren't considering MW5 to be a big release. But we are wondering why there isn't anything beyond a few AMAs so far. The AMAs are there to answer questions but most of the questions were completely unrelated to what actually the topic of the day was. I'm not interested in finding out how many refunds PGI had to do, for e.g.,

After a long series of AMAs, we were told that MW5 has very similar controls to MWO but it plays a lot slower. So, it's up anyone's imagination as to what that exactly means. MW5 will have repair costs and we can't simply walk up to an enemy, torso twist and expose an arm that has its armour stripped off in the mech lab. If MW5 is a lot slower, what exactly does that mean in terms of gameplay difference between it and MWO?

Also, the timeline isn't something I'm familiar with enough to know what the weapons tech will be. So, I'd love to know what type of weapons there are. I'm not sure how long the main campaign will be either. I hear that co-op in main campaign means that the player joining a friend's campaign will have access to the friend's mechs and loadout but instant action is different.

On another note, there are land and aerial vehicles in MW5. All the mechs were taken from MWO. So, will there a pipeline to add MW5 vehicles into MWO?

[Hanky Spam]

FRAGTAST1C, on 13 October 2019 - 09:52 PM, said:

On another note, there are land and aerial vehicles in MW5. All the mechs were taken from MWO. So, will there a pipeline to add MW5 vehicles into MWO?

I highly doubt it. The current MWO maps are not made for something like this.

[Koniving]

FRAGTAST1C, on 13 October 2019 - 07:37 PM, said:

I heard from the recent AMA that the controls are going to be very similar to MWO but it's be a lot slower. But what about the weapon variety, the damage numbers, armour rating, engines and their impact on the mechs, etc.,?

Slower, in the sense that mechs will be closer to canonical speeds (which will appear slower than it really is as MWO's mechs are quite oversized. For example according to the Blood of Kerensky trilogy, the Wolfhound Phelen Kell uses, Grinner, is 9.5 meters after the Clan upgrades (which I'm going to casually mention is taller than the Hunchback...). This is implied to be a little taller than before.

Meanwhile in MWO it's almost 13 meters tall.
Kai Allard's Yen Lo Wang, while still using his father's configuration and a modified Victor's right arm with the 40mm Pontiac 100 and most interestingly a paintjob of mottled brown, with blue for the arms and head, with stripes of white and black vertical around the faceplate and a pattering of spots...is powered up for a test run among a hangar full of Davion mechs ranging from 9 to 12 meters tall. Given that Centurions are always depicted as much taller than Hunchbacks (which are arguably between 8.5 and 9.5 meters tall, while the 2-series of Shadowhawks are 9.63 meters tall, it stands to reason the Centurion is on the high end of that range at 12 meters).
Kai Allard's Yen Lo Wang pre-Clan-upgrades.


Because of the scale used by MWO/MW5, canonical speeds will appear to be brisk walking at best for many mechs.
Where at their canonical sizes, some of these mechs would have been jogging (like the Madcat, at 11+ meters as originally conceptualized as a scaled model in 1993 and retconned to 12.6 meters in 1994/95 in Mechwarrior 2's instruction book, at 12.6 meters its 86 kph comes out to be a pretty brisk jog, complete with brief fractions of a second of no contact with the ground for either foot in MW3's intro) and especially small mechs would appear to be running.

--------

Size complaints aside and back to what's known about MW5...

You're slow because you can't pump in a huge engine. Unless they provide the means, you're unable to change out the engine except in terms of repairs or replacement with something of identical size. (Can't put a corvette engine in a volkswagon beatle).

Unless anything has changed, it's either 3015 to December 3049, or 3025+ to 3049.

Weapon brand names in August/September was mentioned as something they wanted to try to get in but didn't actually do. Considering HOW GOD DAMN LATE it is in development and with the crunch of a second missed deadline...it just ain't happening.
Currently it's just "upgrades."
So medium laser + and medium laser +++
Aw, does the bad guy have a large laser? Well my AC/5+++ does 12 damage I guess...god this company really knows how to **** **** up.

Sigh... An upgrade system means there is the ground work is there for modders to make actual brands

In a screenshot of an Awesome, it had both a head laser and what appeared to be a SRM-2 mounted either to the head or left torso... on what otherwise appeared to be an Awesome 8Q or 9M with an SRM on the left hand as it was still sporting 3 PPCs. So despite claims of no real customization, there's evidently hardpoints and and fiddle-sticking in the mechbay. I literally just noticed it has a gut-laser too.

Green lasers also either have really impressive range, or its just being fired for the sake of being fired.
(Also funny note: BT's medium lasers are typically Ruby for IS and Scarlet for Clan, while it's known that some large lasers fire an Emerald-colored beam. In fact the "large lasers" of Mechwarrior 3050 were green. In the mechwarrior series it also hasn't been entirely consistent [yellow for ML in MW1], but MW2 set a red-green-blue that's also used by MWO).

Despite visuals of infantry around tanks and men running from mechs in multiple trailers, it was also said during AMAs that they do not have infantry opponents.. Although there is the possibility that Russ misinterpreted that to mean that to be asking about infantry Swarm attacks which they definitely do not have, or that Russ doesn't consider them opponents as they probably can't hurt you.

According to the video series "War Stories" which is about issues developers have with development, PGI's scenario generator was a player slaughtering machine that they have mostly overcome by setting guidelines. They also have adjusted it so that the AI was segregated so as to not have a global alert to your presence once detected, as otherwise the entire force on the map would come down on you. However it isn't elaborated on whether or not they are just tied to detection ranges or if there would be a timer before they communicated your presence to others.

The same video also describes how the AI originally had no regard to the destruction it caused. While it was an issue, they "kinda liked that," so they have made it much less likely to happen but sometimes when the quickest way is through something, they will take it.

The "Annihilator is the tallest mech" they have in the game, also from the video.

We know that tech, and as such variants, become available in potential enemy and purchase population lists depending on their canonical year availability. It doesn't elaborate on how well the game is taught on what is available where.

A screenshot in a clip where Russ is playing revealed that your Technician has a "level of expertise" and that fellow Mechwarriors are paid salaries. "Salary" implies they get paid, whether or not they are on a mission, but this isn't definitive.

Firestarter and Javelin are depicted in screenshots doing what appears to be "running." A Griffin, depicted below with a left-shoulder missile launcher rather than a right shoulder launcher, appears to also be taking large strides in an animation that appears to be unique from those in MWO.

But I don't want to get my hopes up, MWO's animations have been increasingly abysmal over time, and higher quality animation over there might actually just piss me off more as there's no reason why those improvements couldn't be done here.

With the way you're saying there's no information, have you not seen the three hours of MW5-Mercs gameplay footage out there? We've seen base rushes, scout missions, rescue missions, multi-player co-op and what happens when a secondary player bails out (he's instantly replaced with the AI pilot he was taking control of). Character banter between what's either your crew or the locals and "yourself."

Mech repairs being done.
Being able to see parts of your mech's skeleton from damage / repairs.


Combat capable enemy dropships are apparently a thing.

Also Atlas has glowing eyes back.

PGI didn't develop the land vehicles, they're part of a model exchange with HBS Battletech; they produced the vehicles, PGI shared the mechs.
Its possible the helicopters are also HBS models that weren't used in HBS BT, but nothing definitive. I know my attempts to add helicopters into it (using a flying APC as a placeholder model) shows it is possible to have aircraft in HBS Battletech, but the AI has no idea how to properly utilize it.

MW5 has IK for mech movement.
However Russ has said something about not being sure about knockdowns in MW5 implying..it hasn't happened yet. (Most likely as they would have to make standing animations for all the mechs not around before October 2012).

Roughneck is in MW5. It's been speculated the Corsair is also possibly in the game.

LRMs do not appear to be one object of linked missiles as they do in MWO since the "flight path rewrite" of 2014. They appear to be individual entities. SRMs are often depicted as firing one missile at time in earlier footage although LRMs appear to be launched like rapid Clan salvos judging by screenshots and what footage I've seen. (multiple at a time rather than one at a time, but still in sequence rather than all at once).

For your Tech questions.. (Note everything following this point prior to the mention of the Demolisher, is just BT lore in regards to the tech and most likely all of it will be ignored or barely recognized in MW5's implementation).

Standard lasers, ACs, missiles, standard engine, single heatsinks, no structure/armor mods until 3029.
From there, Davions get their hands on a memory core and parts of it are sold off by merchants to other factions (at the behest of the Gray Death Mercs, and implied that 'finding' it was somehow arranged by Wolf's Dragoons [whom are Clan spies with instructions to prepare the IS for the Clan invasion]). As such, from 3029 onward, new technologies will start appearing.

Gauss Rifles and pulse lasers would appear in Draconian space, with their first appearance being strapped on new Kali-Yama made Hunchback 4G "remakes" (as the original Hunchback series was gradually becoming extinct with fewer than 300 left in the universe), this slightly taller, upgrade-capable but not so equipped [DHS, XL] Hunchback 4G sported a taller skeleton, smaller ammo drum [as this Hunchback is tall enough to fit the ammo inside], different AC/20 and medium/small lasers but in this case was refit to carry a Prototype Gauss Rifle, where they were firing from beyond visual range [visual range is 60 hexes or 1,800 meters] and landing some hits. The mechs themselves, however, occasionally fell on their *** firing these Gauss Rifles. TRO-3039 and War of 3039.

Improved autocannons will start appearing in Davion space. Conflicts between the two will ensure that Ultra AC/5 technology starts getting into Kurita hands, but not LBX. (They also make numerous other advancements especially in medicine but irrelevant to the game).
Marik, whom had the biggest tech advantage over the other factions short of Comstar but an inability to replace much of it (but a lack of need to do so as they stayed out of much of the fighting) will very quickly be able to reproduce their machines and very quickly begin creating new variants en mass. Liao gets major strides in subterfuge technologies including Guardian ECM and BAP. In the psychotic and paranoid hands of Romano Liao, it quickly finds use.

There's many more advancements, of course. But many of them aren't relevant to MW5 as it lacks brand names or specifics. For example the transition from the Komiyaba Type VII Hunchbacks to the Crucis Type V Hunchbacks will definitely get no detail at all and if it does, it'd be just a text mention. (All of Hesperus II's aftermarket refit kits are for the Komiyaba Hunchback, so Kali-Yama's Crucis Hunchback is deliberately made incompatible with those refit kits so that they can sell copies of those popular refits factory direct and dominate the market. Unlike the original Hunchback line, the new "remake" Hunchback 4 series and by extension of fact their Hunchback 5 series from which the 4 series remake is based, can't handle heavy-caliber ACs, including the Gauss Rifle..which in turn leads to the development of the Hollander. Kali-Yama's Big Bore AC/20 on the 4G is only 120mm, where the Komiyaba Type VII Hunchback 4G carried a 180mm Tomodzuru Mount Type 20 autocannon... a caliber of such immense power that the only thing in the IS more powerful per shot is the Chemjet 185mm mounted in a pair on the Demolisher tank).

Oh speaking of Demolisher tank, it's in MW5, along with the SRM-carrier.

R79TCom1 Night Lanner, on 13 October 2019 - 08:45 PM, said:

I do find it odd that they required people to pre-pay just to get the demo a few weeks ahead of full release. I mean, everything else they gave away with the pre-order turned out to be free handouts. I remember a time where you could walk into a video game store and pick up a hardcopy of a game demo free.

The early release is actually supposed to be the complete game, although the intention much like when EA did this with most of its Battlefield games is to make sure that the game can handle traffic and find last minute bugs for a day one patch to fix them. In essence, we're used to test the game and likely report bugs and issues and it's sold to us as a privilege for buying early.

Edited by Koniving, 14 October 2019 - 01:39 AM.

[FRAGTAST1C]

So, we can just speculate at this point. That's the unfortunate part of delays without exposure of the product.

[Koniving]

Jordan Weisman's words at the end are ominous, like it's a bit of advice to PGI that I wish was better heeded.
"Always respect the audience, respect the investment they make. If you're lucky enough to have created something that people really, really care about... you can't just do what you want with it, because it's not yours exclusively anymore. There's a lot of people that care about it. Nothing starts big, everything starts small, and you gotta be patient with it. You gotta treat your people well, treat your fans well, and..." (I can't make out the end of the sentence).

FRAGTAST1C, on 14 October 2019 - 01:50 AM, said:

So, we can just speculate at this point. That's the unfortunate part of delays without exposure of the product.

There's over three hours of gameplay demonstrated on youtube, from combat to dicking around with menus and trailers beyond that. Both single player and co-op in campaign.

If you look at Final Fantasy 7 remake analysis videos, we know a huge amount about the game from less than 40 minutes of footage including trailers.
You could...perhaps...watch the gameplay footage?
Sure there's bound to be changes between then and now.
But it is actual gameplay. For example from any time an LRM is used to attack a helicopter, we know that helicopters try to dodge missiles, even pulling some pretty sick maneuvers as they don't want to die. I mean they've been releasing footage for over a year...

Edited by Koniving, 14 October 2019 - 02:06 AM.

[Koniving]

(I do grant that the most recent gameplay videos are from 9 months ago, but they started releasing footage in 2018 and kept going until shortly after the preorder started in 2019, since then they've transitioned to screenshots)
This demonstration is probably the most comprehensive of what they've shown us.

It has been noted by one of the Devs that the buildings were set to 0 in terms of resistance to destruction as not all structures were ready for it and to keep 'difficult to destroy' buildings from potentially ruining the flow of the footage in the trailers and by extension the mechcon presentation. Supposedly buildings have multiple stages of destruction before "destroyed" with damage depending on how exactly the section of structure was attacked.

It's also noteworthy that compared to many of the other combat gameplay vids shared, Tanks took more than a 'touch', in fact often several shots to die. That's quite an improvement, as a pair of Scorpion tanks can give a Shadowhawk quite a fight in tabletop so to see them as one-shot-and-dead in much of the footage was quite concerning originally.

In that footage, the LRMs are fired all at once.
Though in many cases such as this Shadowhawk footage released at the same time the LRM is stream fired.

Here you'll see what I mean about the tanks, something tells me their settings are tweaked to zilch to make play-testing and demonstrating gameplay easier.

Edited by Koniving, 14 October 2019 - 02:28 AM.

[FRAGTAST1C]

Koniving, on 14 October 2019 - 02:04 AM, said:

There's over three hours of gameplay demonstrated on youtube, from combat to dicking around with menus and trailers beyond that. Both single player and co-op in campaign.

I've watched those videos. I still don't know the answers to my questions. But if I watch, let's say, the 40 min video of the devs playing Doom : Eternal, I know exactly what the answers will be before I even ask the questions a few days later. But yeah, you're right. PGI has released a few videos but I don't think it answers nothing more than the very basic aspects of the game and players from MWO are like, "Ok, but it still is unclear what exactly the tech we're going to play with" and so on while changes keep getting added in, most recently the mech lab where you could swap a heavy missile weapon with a medium or small missile weapon.

Mind you, I'm still new to the Battletech universe but I don't think I can be called a complete newbie to this genre. So, the basic answers don't really answer my questions.

[Koniving]

For some reasons the specifics of the first post didn't register with me as for some reason I thought it was "what do we know really?"

For the specific questions...we don't have those details. Pgi isn't much for reinventing the wheel so it's probably similar to mwo. It is roughly 1.5 to 2 seconds between shk ac/5 shots. This bugs the living **** out of me (Armstrong j11 is an 80mm ac. The 150mm ac/20 Crusher super heavy specifically needs 10 shots to make 20 damage. Ac/5 ranges up to 130mm in shell diameter requiring 3 shots to make 5 damage... Atlas's 180mm ac/20 Defiance Mech Hunter...still shoots 5 shells per "round" of ammo to make 20 damage... What shadowhawk has in mw5 is a Heavy Rifle in my opinion. 6 damage to armor 9(9 to structure), 8 tons same range as ac/5. But pgi calls it an ac/5.

Meanwhile mechs with 90mm ac/5s are depicted as dumping out dozens of shells and many projectiles on what is clearly not MGs. Naturally that's why I am working on my mod...as honestly I don't really care for what I seen of pgi's numbers.

[Snakesh1t]

Koniving, on 14 October 2019 - 02:20 AM, said:

In that footage, the LRMs are fired all at once.
Though in many cases such as this Shadowhawk footage released at the same time the LRM is stream fired.

Here you'll see what I mean about the tanks, something tells me their settings are tweaked to zilch to make play-testing and demonstrating gameplay easier.

The first one was from the MechCon Demo, while the second was sometime before Summer 2018, so they definitely changed the LRM launch pattern in 8+ months.

[Jackal Noble]

3 hours of gameplay?
Your lore rant had some interesting themes, but seriously you are off your rocker man.

The fact of the matter is that the game for all intents and purposes in recent time is smoke and mirrors.
Not sure what is more sad;
Your long winded monologue,
My forlorn hope that PGI would make something beyond a scratch on the surface,
Or that this is likely going to be a bait and switch.

[Jackal Noble]

Oh oh and I guarantee that the buildings will behave like they are made of glass rather than actually representing a directive destructive force with strength. That’s annoying.

It speaks volumes that they got hung up on AI design. It’s like game design one-oh-f@&$ing-one and they haven’t figured it out in 8 years.

[Prototelis]

FWIW, the buildings are apparently going to slow you down in the final product. They have them on paper-mode in the demos to show them off.

[jss78]

Yeah, they mentioned how much the falling buildings slow you down will be tuned.

In general it's kind of remarkable how little we've seen of the game thus far, with release only 1½ months away. Maybe it makes sense for them to focus their marketing effort in the last few weeks (as Russ states their intent in the last AMA), game marketing's not my field.

A poster above asks about the tech level -- basically the game goes from succession war tech level (so just SL/ML/LL, SRM/LRM, AC2/5/10/20, MG and Flamer; STD engines, no endo/ferro etc.), but then continues through the gradual re-emergence of lostech, so you'll be getting additional technologies down the line through ~3015-3050. But the game stops (or at least stops tracking canonical history) just before clan invasion, so that tech will not feature.

We know we'll have lots of combined arms assets (vehicles and VTOL's), but no infantry (although Russ said they really wanted to add infantry, so maybe that's something we'll see in a DLC).

Since it's a single-player campaign game, the REAL test is the replayability and story-telling aspect. And we know nothing about the game in that respect, and PGI has little track record with that stuff, so it's a big unknown how they'll deliver there. We know PGI has great art assets and that they can make a game where battlemechs shoot each other in a fairly impressive manner, but that's not enough here.

It's frustrating to sit here with MWO development grinding to a halt, which is clearly due to MW5:M development. But at the same time, I think it's necessary to understand we can't be the the core audience of MW5:M -- there are just way too few of us.

Edited by jss78, 17 October 2019 - 01:34 AM.