Is MWO a classic hit? I can't say so in a general sense. It is a niche classic .. and is good at what it does well.
MWO IS multiplayer online MechWarrior. For the fans of first person mech shooter games where you have to plan and build your loadout and then fight with it, MWO delivers on that aspect and unfortunately perhaps on very little else.
MWO has gone through MANY technical, gameplay and mechanical enhancements since closed beta. Most of which aren't that visible. Host state rewind, hit registration, reduced or eliminated issues with lag aiming, weapon balance iterations to try to make a range of builds both fun and effective etc. It wasn't and isn't an easy process and there is probably no way the game with the wide range of mechs and weapons can ever really be balanced.
This is even more true when trying to create a balanced multiplayer experience with both clan and IS mechs in the same game. In the lore clan tech >> IS tech. In Battletech clans vs IS were usually balanced by giving the IS more tonnage. These types of options don't really exist in MWO where clan and IS mechs can drop in the same matches (which is necessary to avoid massive queue times for one side or another). So "balance" becomes an exercise in which clan and IS tech converge with different numbers but roughly the same effectiveness. Greater damage but longer burn times and more heat ... etc.
When MWO came out of closed beta, many of the beta testers felt it needed more work. The 8v8 game was fun but prone to stomps. Organized 8 mans could drop against 8 randoms leading to some very short matches. It was still a GREAT MechWarrior game after so long without but it was nothing more than 8v8 quick play.
It was massively fun to play, but folks posted to the beta boards that the game provided very little motivation to play besides the fun of just dropping into matches. Players suggested that the game needed features to keep folks playing - with a variety of motivations.
- organizations - clans and merc companies for the social aspect
- factional warfare or something like it so that dropping into a match might mean something - perhaps with some sort of bonus or reward related to factional membership without penalizing those who didn't want to join a faction
- leaderboards and pvp competitions - 1v1, 2v2, 4v4, 8v8 - some folks are really motivated by PVP of different scales
- better matchmaking (they never did get this one right .. though the developer who worked on it was excellent before they left for Amazon).
The game needed reasons to want to play the next match beyond just playing the next match because it was fun. PGI was very slow to implement these. Russ even promised the player base that factional warfare would be in "90 days after the end of beta". That comment among others caused a lot of angst on the forums and a general and very negative collection of feelings against PGI due to a general inability to communicate clearly and well with their player base. It was really unfortunate and could have been handled much better. PGI eventually almost abandoned the forums and appeared to consider the player base almost as an enemy rather than an ally in the development of the game.
In the end, it took years for PGI to implement some version of most of these features (and sometimes a few years more to iterate on them) and in many cases there were design issues (some related to the overall game constraints) with each feature that made them less effective than they ideally could be at satisfying the needs of the community in terms of giving them more reasons to just keep playing the game.
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That said, MWO is still an amazing mech game. The graphics, driving stompy mechs from Locust to Atlas and almost everything in between is just plain fun. Jumping in my Jenner JR7-D and managing to get behind a few assaults and cause them some problems is both fun and satisfying, even on the rare occasion when a wingman comes along to spoil the fun. Punching holes in things with my quad AC5 Jagermech. Burning holes in things with my Jester. Even tactical support LRMing in my MAD with Artemis and TAG, it can be very effective at suppressing several mechs at 700m just by hitting them with missiles ... so many folks duck for cover when LRMed
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I think I've played 2 or 3 games in the last two years, usually around Christmas, since MWO started I've played about 4500 matches, have 102 mechs and still have 5,242 hours of banked premium time from occasional purchases and events (LOL!)
. I bought into MWO as a Legendary Founder and participated in the closed beta. As far as I am concerned, I received my money's worth and more out of the game. I hope that PGI can keep the lights on and the servers running for years to come. I'd love to see a revised engine drop based on MW5 and a proper implementation of some of the features that the game needed and continues to need but I won't hold my breath.
Anyway, MWO is a niche classic game for fans of MechWarrior and BattleTech. Could it have been better? Maybe, there is no way to know. The game and its developer have always had significant financial and design constraints.
Cryengine was unsuited to multiplayer online play and required a lot of work. The whole IGP/PGI debacle and the complete failure of other games that were published by IGP. The licensing issues with Microsoft. (PGI didn't even start work on some features they claimed were in development until after receiving a renewal of the license from Microsoft - another lack of clear communication issue - I think PGI might have been afraid folks would leave or not spend money if there were questions about the license renewal and they might have been correct - we'll never know).
In the end, in my opinion, MWO is a good game that could have been a great game.