Hawk_eye, on 02 January 2020 - 12:31 PM, said:
I find it quite frustrating that those things were in the first, original Mechwarrior (anyone remember those tidbits of news about the "Galahad Tournaments", then the outbreak of the 4th Succession war, the war of '39 and so on?) but are absent in this iteration, friggin 30 year later.
The original was largely filled out by FASA and the original game had the goal of converting as many people as possible into customers for its expanded universe.
This game is developed by a company whose head may have many of the source books but the picture of them in storage in his garage also shows they have never been opened, whose goal was once to recreate the feeling of a mechwarrior game and then recover from bankruptcy with the license they had acquired (2010/2011), and then to create a second means of income as "a single game can't sustain a company" which started with the attempt at
Transverse in 2014but its funding project went under before it got off the ground, and that's when MW5 came back as
MW5 Mercs in 2015.)
Basically...
MW1 had the goal of converting people into long term customers of the novels, the board game, any future games, etc.
MW5Mercs has the goal of "this isn't exactly the mech game we once wanted to make, but we need the revenue."
It was stated once, "We decided to start with Mercenaries because they are more open ended. The mercenaries titles have always been light on the story elements" to allow you the freedom of just being a mercenary managing your resources. Basically, easier on the developer's budget as they would need very little in the way of voice actors, story, etc. (in fact in a recent interview in which the mod tools are waiting on Epic to put through an end user agreement which Epic in fact did the next day but the tools still aren't released, Russ said that "the story (and the voice acting) came only in the last year" and he admits 'There's an especially large gap between the story missions.' that is about 6 ranks long that he regrets but there simply wasn't enough time due to other issues they were having [insufficient staff, insufficient know-how to solve some blaring issues {one of which, the spawning, still wasn't solved even at launch but by that time they were obligated to release}, and a few other things that led to PGI signing the epic exclusive deal in order to fix].) "With Mercenaries, if successful we'll have the foundation to make Mechwarrior 5." (Russ 2015/2016, paraphrased. I don't know if PGI has plans to make regular MW5 still, but they do have plans for at least two expansions with the first in approximately 6 months.).
(Edit: Fixed a spelling error that completely changes a sentence's meaning).
Edited by Koniving, 03 January 2020 - 09:48 AM.
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