0
I've been on and off hype for a Mechwarrior 5 for most of the century, when it got the tagline Mercanaries I was pumped. A return I felt to what made the series' greatest installment, including a bunch of lines that we still recite today - and I still faithfully regard the Draconis Combine as 'scumbags' for killing my CO.
Let's start of by celebrating the massive thrust for the SP Mechwarrior games into the new century, yeah? Just *look* at the leap this game brought:
It's a 7 minute video montage of the evolution of the series, from the 2D to now. BTW, if I could mod-in Betty from MW2M to MW5M I'd be delighted.
MW5M is definitely, I feel, worth the asking price, to anyone still on the fence. I'd gush more but I haven't taken time to absorb it fully. The game is pretty, and graphically it seems to be very performance efficient. The career system is there, the mechanics of it appear to work fine after a few hours. And at the end of the day it's fun to go blow something up, you could do it all day. T
hat said, you'll hear it from everyone that there's room for improvement - I'm no different. Many of the bugs, glitches, imperfections, etc. are fairly superfluous though: like why I have a marine hanging out in a dark corner of the mechbay admiring a rack of LRMs, or loading a mission where my mouse cursor isn't initiated right so I have to reload or fight the mission with my mech unable to fire a primary weapon, instead having to left-click to drag the torso around, that was funny.
But some of these are design choices that I felt, taint the first few hours of the game and TBH that's largely why I'm here sharing my first impressions.
For example, the 'story' of the first few missions is kinda flat, and there is a cutscene without spoiling too much where two+ mechs are talking to each other and the pilots are 'emoting' with their mechs. It just felt weird. More importantly though the missions are a little confusing, there was a deliberate design choice to for example give you a Javelin with no missiles (odd, tbh) and the early missions themselves are very 'on the rail' go here, go there, through winding pathways - but the waypoints to get there are somewhat confusing, if you decide to jump-jet your way there you're just in for a bad time, because the maps are set up poorly in the first mission or two, your Javelin just gets stuck on some spiky rocks and at one point I had to exit the game because my Javelin had gotten stuck in a pocket of rocks where it was 'always falling' and couldn't cool its jump jets. In this same mission, at the start, your HUD starts to spaz out without explanation, and users could be forgiven for thinking its a bug, its not until you deal with this for a few minutes that your character finally says something to the effect of 'hmm I think something is wrong with my HUD' so players are left guessing if its a bug or feature.
The other big bugbear you'll hear a lot is the mobs. You just see swarms and swarms and swarms of tanks, helicopters, and sometimes light mechs just showing up out of nowhere, nobody warns you a leopard just dropped off a couple Spider mechs, you turn around and there are 5 tanks where there weren't any a second ago. Look, it's just an immersion killer, plain and simple. It's very arcade, and it feels out of place in this type of single player experience. Yes, I could damn near expect there to be a never-ending trickle of attack helicopters, but where is the enemy mobilizing all these tanks from, with such velocity? I don't get it, and frankly it is not fun. The first few missions have you defend bases against 1 or 2 done and dusted waves of light enemies (in the aforementioned windy icepath level with poorly designed 'shortcuts' for jump jets for players otherwise in a mission-inspired sense of urgency to get to the objective to defend it). In subsequent contracts the enemies never stop and there just is not nearly enough of a cooldown between waves: you quickly find yourself just taking missions with a Locust, run here, karate-kick that enemy antenna, and run away. It's counter-intuitive. As players we didn't buy the game to play like that, gonna be honest fam. We bought it because, well, you advertised it like you were piloting a boot into a sidewalk full of ants:
(By the way: False Advertising on the LRM-S, in the demo they're quite accurate, in reality I sometimes see all but 1 of my missiles hit my locked target. Whatever!)
When I tried to play the way the Demo essentially suggested I play, but in the Centurion, I got cored several times trying to complete a basic assassination contract: go for the target, splat, tanks get you, take care of the tanks, splat, more and more and more tanks just keep showing up, splat, or eventually the target just roasts you with an AC/20 anyway. It's not that the unit types are imbalanced (they don't appear to be) it's that there is no reward for the player for eliminating mobs by way of any real sense of reprieve. Furthermore: that assassination mission clearly told me in the description the base was 'lightly defended' because of bla bla bla the bulk of the OpFor is off-site - until they suddenly aren't, and you're left facing down 2 lances of randomly spawned mechs and dozens of tanks and helicopters. I mean, that's a HELL of a response time, especially when in the Battletech Universe employers seem to need to contract out mercs days or weeks in advance to provide them backup or conduct counterstrikes, but all these people have tank battalions for days. This is the weakest part of the experience thus far.
I'm a bit concerned this is a problem so early in my playthrough. I understand the contracts are for the most part meant to be procedural and recycled (ugh) but I'm worried that's it, and there won't be any memorable missions to play in this. Think about it: Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries was almost 30 years ago and I haven't played it in 20 years, but I still remember specific missions, blowing up specific floors of an office building, hiding in a canyon powered-down until a base patrol went past me, defending an iceberg in space from dreaded ice pirates, fighting a full lance of heavies inside of a derelict, etc. but this game is going to end I fear being a blur of 'I ran my mech into hundreds of similar looking buildings to collect C-Bills' with a limited number of memorable moments. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I got from the mob spawns, that the point of this game was to spend more time in the Leopard getting ready for a mission, than playing the mission. My last 'raid' because of necessary Locust-tactics, ended up being a 90 second deployment, more or less.
I think these are manageable issues though, and PGI can tweak the spawn timers on mobs, patch the bugs, FIX THE LRMS, whatever (why else would you launch on a Tuesday lol) and this will be an all around solid game, because it is, it just has a handful of improvements to undertake before it achieves true greatness.
Ultimately a lot of the issues I've come across discourage me from immersing in the game, and I've already found myself closing the game a few times just because I wasn't getting enjoyment from it. Like even in Battletech I could play all day what is a turn-based calendar simulator. I don't have that kind of hook here. More to explore on this later, but I think the golden hour - the first you play, either at the start of your career or the start of your play session - needs a lot of work.
Edited by overheal, 11 December 2019 - 10:40 AM.
