Sir Wulfrick, on 12 December 2019 - 04:44 PM, said:
So after abandoning MWO a couple of years ago I decided to give PGI another chance and dove head first in to MW5 Mercs. Hmm.
There's certainly potential here. Moving to the UT4 engine is a very welcome thing. Performance is far superior to the abomination that was the DX-9 locked crye engine. As was true in MWO the mech art, texture work, battle damage is superb - the best I've seen in any Mechwarrior game. I also really like the music. It's somewhat generic but really fits the genre. Nice.
Now lets get on to some things that maybe need looking at again from a design perspective.
1. Enemy spawning. Enemy mechs literally materialising 100-200m in front or behind my team is nothing short of idiotic and lazy design. If we can't go as far as having enemy mechs being dropped in then at the very least have them spawn as a group at some defined point on the map, rather than deliberately spawning them on top of my team. Engagement ranges are always short, to the point where long range weapons are nearly pointless. This also severely limits tactical options: approaching an objective from the rear or from the side is utterly pointless because whatever defenders are present will simply spawn on top of your team.
Technically, they try to spawn when you're within 900 meters on the huge handcrafted maps.
But it's set that if you're looking at the spawn points, they won't spawn until the instant you look away.
You can get a better long-range experience by "looking away" from where you are going periodically. I think they expected you to be paranoid and checking corners. It is, admittedly, poorly designed as with handcrafted maps they could easily have crafted roads out of immediate sight when approaching the area that the vehicles could spawn on, as well as put in a clause that if the pilot is able to see the spawn for too long or gets too close to the point, to instead summon a vehicle dropship.
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2. Magical healing. Legging an enemy mech appears to cripple it for about 5-10 seconds after which the destroyed leg magically repairs itself and the enemy mech is away again at full speed. Can I have that please for my team? No? Well it's a stupid and unrealistic game mechanic then.
You have this for your team too. Speed is reduced a bit, but after a few seconds you can move again. I used this to defeat a Griffin with a Javelin. In a way it is unrealistic, but the same is true with MWO's version... but imagine how much it'd suck if you got legged and just fell over.
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3. War zone missions. After the contracted 17 kills hanging around to take on further waves simply isn't economically viable, not even in armour repair costs. The payout for destroying further enemy units needs to be at least 5x what it currently is.
Haven't got an opinion here, haven't lingered on one yet.
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4. Walking around my dropship is nice - it's really immersive to be able to visually see the state of repairs of my mechs. That being said, my ops officer and mech tech are obviously the strong & silent types because following the tutorial neither of them has said a single word to me.
I confess, if they went around and did more I'd believe Fahad actually did amazing work because at the moment he says how busy he is going to be with my Centurion and then...never moves.
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5. The vehicle mega-swarms. Obviously vehicle support for mech forces is more "realistic" than only facing enemy mechs, but it's pretty obvious that the only purpose for the vehicle mega-swarms that once again magically materialise within a few hundred metres of my team is to buff repair costs and limit progression speed.
When they get too plentiful, for some reason walking through them is far more effective than shooting them. 35 ton mech versus an 80 ton tank that's smaller than a 20 ton mech...stomp stomp. Totally makes sense.
My wife tells me I'm a bully for doing this to the cute little tanks.
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6. The quality of voice acting varies between 'dead rotting tree' and 'merely horribly wooden.'
My favorite line is the woman calmly telling me that they're being murdered by raiders, and how urgent it is that I help because there are women and children there.
....and the entire place is devoid of any human life and nobody cared that I leveled the place after the HP bar went away.
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I am having fun playing through the various missions, of which the mission variety is nice, but the game has some head scratchingly insane design decisions, the worst of which is the utterly inane enemy spawn mechanic. Overall opinion so far: just like MWO - amateur game mechanic design decisions and wasted potential. Minimum viable product here we are again
I agree for the most part, some of the issues are from lack of putting in polish, animations, etc. related to people (startup of the TUTORIAL's Centurion... activate by pressing the air followed by tapping the dashboard far away from the buttons, mech turns on... The TUTORIAL mech didn't get polish, are you serious? Also in the 2018 Mech Con trailer, the King Crab that kills father Mason opens its claw to do the kill. In the released game the claws don't function.)
The spawn mechanic is a lack of foresight. It works perfectly if you're "paranoid" and frequently looking around. But if you're just moving to the goal marker, you're staring at the spawn points and so you're on top or past them when you look away for the millisecond it takes for the game to decide you're not looking, time to spawn finally.
Edited by Koniving, 12 December 2019 - 06:30 PM.