13 replies to this topic

[Stokes52]

(Since 'General' Disscussion is gone, I figure the best place for this to go is here)


Game forums are filled with complainers. This is a fact. That isn't always a bad thing, though. The forums are the place for players to voice their concerns and show what it is they don't like - often in the hopes that it will be changed for the better. Unfortunately, this means that developers don't often get to see the community's praise and appreciation for their hard work., because, well, they're too busy enjoying the game to make a post about it.


This brings us to Mechwarrior: Online. This game is pretty fun. It also has a lot of bugs and balancing issues. It's also still in beta, thankfully. Nonetheless, there are a whole lot of small details that PGI has included in theis game that probably rarely get noticed, but which contribute to an overall better game.

The following is a list of some of my favorite very small details and polishes that add a whole new layer of enjoyment to this game for me.

Welcome to the forums.

1. Lasers are made of light, so they don't make noise.

What? Of course they do, you say! Actually, if you pay close attention, the laser beams themselves do not emit noise in MWO. The capacitors make noise when a mech fires, and you can hear the loud crunchy-melty noise when a laser hits the dirt or another mech, but the laser itself is silent, just like it would be in real life. 1+ for realism and immersion.


2. Lasers melt paint off of battle mechs and make their armor turn glowy white.

In past Mechwarrior games, it always irked me that my mech's paint job always looked sparkly clean, even after a pitched battle. In MWO, when a laser hits another mech, it superheats their armor, causing it to glow reddish white. When the heat dissapates it reveals the cold, unpainted metal below. That camo pattern you so meticulously put together? Melted off! The effect is detailed enough that you could theoretically attempt to laser melt your initials into someone elses mech if you really wanted too, which Zorro fans think is pretty cool.

If my 6 LL Stalker was a movie star, he'd be Antonio Banderas

3. I can open and close my mech's protective missile doors.

There's a little known feature on some mechs that when you press the [ / ] key, it toggles your mech's missile bay doors from closed to open. (Note that this only works on mechs that have missile bay doors of course, like the Catapult, Stalker, and Centurion.) Opening the bay doors allows your missiles to launch a little bit faster, but also makes that weapon's hardpoint 10% more susceptible to damage. The effect isn't too big, but just the fact that PGI allows me to do something as mundane as open up a little flap on my mech makes me feel like I'm a real mech pilot who knows how to press all the buttons and do all sorts of cool things with all those pretty switches and dials in my mech's cockpit

"This button controls the ice cream dispenser"

4. Cockpits look cool, AND I can freelook inside them!

Speaking of buttons, this is the first Mechwarrior game that I can remember that has cool looking cockpits. Remember how bad they looked in Mechwarrior 4? Now my Mech's cockpits have all sorts of random buttons, computer screens, and useless wires strung about, and while none of this directly contributes to my ability to blow up your stompy robot in my stompy robot, it's still pretty cool.

Ugly. Where are all the useless buttons?!

5. Internal cockpit HUD items actually serve a function.

While not all of the cockpit's display show useful information yet, it looks like PGI intends to make them all useful at some point. Already, some of the cockpit displays show useful information that you cant obtain through the normal HUD display. For example, one display shows the location and status of heatsinks. Another display shows how much ammo is left in each section of the mech, which can actually help you decide whether an ammo storing part of your mech is safe to expose to enemy fire or not. Most people will probably never look at these displays, but it's a nice touch.

This monitor actually works. It tells how you much ammo is left in a particular section. Also my graphics suck. Sorry.

6. Arm lock toggle.

This is actually a pretty big gameplay change, but its also so simple. Allowing the arms to move independently of the rest of the mech makes weapon placement so much more interesting and important. I'm glad PGI decided to allow this.

It's not this, but at least its a step in the right direction.

7. Toggle cockpit light!

This is arguably one of the most useless features of MWO, but that's precisely why I love it. Any time a developer adds a purely cosmetic feature like this, it shows how much they love the game they are making. If you press the period key [ . ], your mech's internal cockpit light brightens and dims. I have no idea why this feature is in the game, but it is, and it's awesome. (Okay, fine, maybe the flamer is more useless, but the cockpit light is still cool!)

Light on - Light off

Most of the features above aren't very groundbreaking, but they show thought, detail, and creativity and while most of the time we don't even notice them, they each contribute to the overall feel of the game. These are just my favorites, but there are plenty of other little details that make this game that much better, even though they are hardly noticed. Sometimes, it's the small things that matter most.


For PGI: continue to work on the small things. Some of us notice and appreciate it. Give the guy who thought of the cockpit light a bonus. It's absolutely useless, but I love it and I think the guy who designed and implemented it deserves a promotion.

For the rest of us: Remember to be thankful for the little things, in gaming and in life. In a world where game developers are all about big sparkly new features, sometimes the little details get overlooked. Also, if there's something that you think is cool that I missed. Share it with us! We'd like to hear about it.

Edited by Stokes52, 08 May 2013 - 07:11 PM.

[Keifomofutu]

This game has a pretty awesome art and modelling department. They really just need a few more bugfix guys to really take off.

[aniviron]

The cockpit light is far from useless. Notice how with the light on that screen has a bright white cast to it? Well, if you have a mech with screens on your field of view, when you turn they become BLINDING DEATH RAYS and they make it impossible to see. I will direct you to my thread on the issue. Please note that those screenshots were taken with the lights on minimum; you can imagine how bad it is on full blast. I also find it helpful on River Night, as both nightvision and therms are borderline useless, and if you turn off the cockpit lights the HDR adjusts so that you can actually kinda almost see things.

[Skunk Wolf]

Lasers powerful enough to damage things are silent?

News to me, the one at the local university is louder than a .38.

They make a bang.

Not a Pew.

These lasers would be INCREDIBLY loud and there would be INSANE atmospherics because of the super heated metals and gasses.
Boiling metal is incredibly unpleasantly loud.

I weld.

Edited by Skunk Wolf, 09 May 2013 - 03:14 AM.

[Neolisk]

Stokes52, on 08 May 2013 - 06:24 PM, said:

4. Cockpits look cool, AND I can freelook inside them!

Yep, now PGI spends 10x more time to create a mech design, and other things get delayed (10x is random number here - use your own if you want - does not change the idea).

Stokes52, on 08 May 2013 - 06:24 PM, said:

5. Internal cockpit HUD items actually serve a function.

Internal cockpit is often buggy and does not show the right ammo for example.
At least that's how I remember it before the last patch.

To sum up, priority of things is important. In my understanding, for a game in beta a team needs to focus on gameplay and not fluff. Especially if your fluff care multiplies the cost 100x. At the same I know they need to make some money on that, so how would they accomodate cockpit items without a cockpit view?

And yet things like HUD issues, crashes, broken textures etc should have been fixed at closed beta stage.

[Darwins Dog]

Neolisk, on 09 May 2013 - 06:34 AM, said:

Yep, now PGI spends 10x more time to create a mech design, and other things get delayed (10x is random number here - use your own if you want - does not change the idea).


Internal cockpit is often buggy and does not show the right ammo for example.
At least that's how I remember it before the last patch.

To sum up, priority of things is important. In my understanding, for a game in beta a team needs to focus on gameplay and not fluff. Especially if your fluff care multiplies the cost 100x. At the same I know they need to make some money on that, so how would they accomodate cockpit items without a cockpit view?

And yet things like HUD issues, crashes, broken textures etc should have been fixed at closed beta stage.

And so we trot out the mantra of different groups working on different things in the vain hope that it will be heard. Cosmetic things are handled by the art people. HUD and gameplay are handled by the programming people. Making cosmetic things does not in any way delay gameplay fixes. The HUD bugs persist because they have complex causes that are difficult to reproduce. That's why they had to make a headless version of the game in order to simulate more matches at once.

[Neolisk]

Darwins Dog, on 09 May 2013 - 06:45 AM, said:

HUD and gameplay are handled by the programming people.

Hire more programmers then.

[Darwins Dog]

Neolisk, on 09 May 2013 - 06:48 AM, said:

Hire more programmers then.

Well I'm not in charge of hiring at PGI, but you can apply here if you want the job.

I really like the little touches in the game. Things like the sparks that fall in the mechbay, and the way a mech looks when it goes down. Very nicely done.

I especially like the little things around the matches. That goes double for tourmaline desert; the wreckage actually has identifiable parts, not just random junk.

[Neolisk]

Darwins Dog, on 09 May 2013 - 06:59 AM, said:

Well I'm not in charge of hiring at PGI, but you can apply here if you want the job.

Seems like they only have Facilities Coordinator position available at the moment. Besides, my specialization is not gaming, unfortunately, although I used to be involved with some game dev 9 years ago (for personal enjoyment). Nothing was really finished back then, so let's not count that as real expertise. Anything that involves workflow optimization, business process automation and demands high performance - that's what I am good at, but most companies don't pay much attention to it.

I agree that MWO has been shown more love than some other F2P games.

[DaZur]

Sigh... The internet = The only place everyone can be an expert on everything.

​Agree that the pedantic nuances are lurvly and do in fact add to the ambiance that draws one into the game world!

[Stokes52]

It seems to me that a large portion of AAA title game developers today often forget the little things that make games great. I feel like a lot of the classics from the early 2000s and sometimes even late 90s were true labor of love games where developers would put all sorts of little unnecessary details in their games for the simple love of their art.

That mindset of focusing on the little things is sometimes lost on the "big budget" games and production companies of today. That's why I so appreciate the "details" in any big name game of today. It shows a care for the art form, and I appreciate that.

[Skunk Wolf]

I should have elaborated about that laser. It's used for studying the state of matter when hit with a pretty big hit of energy. Essentially, blowing holes as fast as possible in stuff. So it's got one big quick pulse, hence the bang.

Now having said that, the ones on these mechs are an order of magnitude more powerful than that one, and have a firing duration.

Better to leave them as a slashing weapon. Imagine if the ER LL was just a one microsecond blast, you think people are whining about PPC jumpers. o_0

Although replacing them with a rumbling of thunder during firing would be kind of neat.

I have no media skills, someone should put that in a youtube video as a comparison.

At least for the PPC's.

Edited by Skunk Wolf, 11 May 2013 - 05:23 AM.

[Stokes52]

Actually, real lasers dont make noise, as far as I can tell, in response to the naysayers.

Of course you have the extremely loud noise of the target being vaporized, and possibly the hum of the weapon itself, but the LASER BEAM itself is silent.

Here's the sound of a car being melted by a laser:


Also, the laser beams in MWO, and many of the Laser beams in real life are not singe bursts of energy, but sustained beams that burn over a short duration:


Basically, PGI got their lasers right, in my opinion. If they were "real", of course, they would be invisible to the eye, but here I think we can safely invoke the "Rule of Cool." Colorful lasers are just cooler. (Not to mention better for gameplay)
http://tvtropes.org/...Main/RuleOfCool

[Skunk Wolf]

Not so much invisible to the eye, as using an efficient long wavelength.

That noise is about as loud as .38 but it's really freaking hard to tell. Until it his something substantial to boil away, yeah. The LASER itself isn't making the noise, the target getting boiled and everything in-between is. Notice that the test was in the desert, be interesting in the fog.

My personal favorite was the theory to lase matter using a nuclear warhead as part of STAR WARS in the '80's.

That's to make nukes more effective in vacuum. No shockwave there folks.

Yeah, shaped energy charge nuclear weapon, reality is stranger than fiction.

The USSR just applied a mirror or ablative finish to the MIRV's.

But we got CD players out of it!