No replies to this topic

[Lordrobotron]

Over the thanksgiving holiday I went home to Ohio where my friend had a LAN party. Since MWO doesn't yet have a way to create hosted games where we can battle each other we played my friend's favorite game Battlefield 3 and Counterstrike. Afterward I tried to show him and a few others MWO, here's what I found.

Even though my friends could be described as core/hardcore gamers several aspects of MWO really baffled them and several of them dismissed the game entirely after some frustrating rounds.

First, everyone was confused on the Mechlab. Utterly and completely. The way Trial mechs, versus owned and the readied mech system is laid out wasn't intuitive even to these essentially long time PC gamers.

Secondly, and it may sound trivial, but the grouping and readying system is wonky. It became a joke among them that you had to click 'Not Ready' to become 'Ready'. So at the start of each match, I'd ask "Everyone ready?" They'd reply, "Yup, I'm Not Ready".

In matches, no one had a clue how to change their weapon groups, everyone overheated constantly as their weapons were defaulted to basically alpha strikes. I'd run around the room each time trying to explain how to set the groups.

Everyone kept asking, why can't I see the outside of their mech. I know 3rd person view is controversial but its instinctively desirable for new players.

In all maps there are terrain features that your mech will get hung up on and will walk in place. Rocks, ledges, hills that all look like you should be able to step on or over but can't. With someone new it adds frustration when learning the game.

LRMs. Everyone hated all the LRMs. This by far was the biggest killer of everyone there. So when each one tried using LRMs I noticed that often they wouldn't hold missile lock the entire flight and would miss. Also they'd fire the LRMs shorter than 200m range all the time and do no damage.


Everyone wanted at one point or another to change their keys or options while in game, bummer you can't.

Targeting was something I had to constantly remind everyone to do.

Everyone's game crashed at different points throughout the evening, which is par for the Beta.

Everyone thought the game's graphics looked cool but soon after all but one of my friends was back playing Planetside 2, BF3 or something else.

To draw in new players. I think there needs to be a much more through series of tutorial missions along with some serious cleaning up of the UI.