That's pretty good-looking art for a facebook game.
That's pretty good-looking art for a facebook game.
OMG yay!!Originally Posted by LMN8R
fantastic! Really like what I hear, talk of tactics and lances, etc. The only thing I've really missed in these games, other than urban combat like they mention, is the ability to make a tactical withdrawal if your mech has been savaged beyond efffectiveness, but can still move. It happened all the time in the books, and given how precious a ressource they are, it would be nice if the pace was tactical enough to permit the player to decide that he won't win with just one arm and a machine gun, and make it worth his while to split.
Anyway, happiness!!!
I think the LoL model would work well, a ramping time penalty vs. a long-cooldown "Save" power.
H.
History of the game to this point. They were going to go for a non-F2P single-player game, but there wasn't any interest from publishers.
Interesting stuff. They could almost just make World of Tanks with Mechs and i'd be fairly happy. Though I think they have more planned than that. I look forward to giving it a try.
Though a part of me still yearns for some good ole turn-based mech goodness. I should get off my duff and finish doing it myself.
Something I missed on my first reading: the planet-conquest metagame portion is taking place in 3049, which is the year the Clan invasion started. The FAQ talks about the Inner Sphere Houses being the contenders for the metagame. Speculation is silly at this point, but I predict that either a. there'll be a Clan force, too, maybe limited somehow or b. there'll be a co-op component (like they said they wanted to add) against Clan mechs.
Multiplayer-only? Goddammit.
*sigh* Another MMO.
Well, I'm sure a bunch of people will like it, and so maybe it's for the best as perhaps that will lead to enough revenue and interest to make MW5 afterall. Ah, well. $50 saved.
Ambitious vision for the whole day-by-day clan-era game model, but at the moment we don't know if it's a well-founded, half-realized design or just some guy going "Wouldn't it be cool if..."
I assume they won't try to do anything very emergent with the metagame; they can just dictate the course of events themselves and let players participate within that wider narrative. That being the case they can just structure the battles so that the Inner Sphere players don't have a crappy play experience fighting the clan, perhaps giving them delay/defend objectives where they're only supposed to achieve so much.
Well... World of Tanks was pretty fun for a while, and I mainly left because of non-inevitable matchmaking/grind/wallet-warrior issues. All of those are likely to be pitfalls here, but one can hope.
Good lord, so much fail in that blog post. "We're deciding to do the same thing that Kesmai tried -- and failed -- to do over ten years ago, and it's going to be free! Our only experience is a couple of garbage game properties -- Transformers 2 and Duke Nukem Forever -- and boy, that makes us the best folks around to reboot the Mechwarrior franchise. As a freep MMO! Golly!"
Goddamn.
Free to play. *sigh*
I hate micro-transactions. I really don't want to see things like "Buy a Medium laser for 2000 Mech points (which takes a week to earn), or 2 for only $.99!"
I don't play F2P games, but I think one of the models is to charge players who want to avoid built-in downtime or rest periods. That's a good match for this game since it's running in "real-time," and playing 30 sorties a day might not fit in the universe without paying for logistics expenses or whatever.
That's my guess. I'm only making one prediction because it's cheating to make three!
Yeah, this. Also ditto on their previous efforts not speaking particularly strongly for them, heh.
If it can be as fun as WoT can be when the matchup works though, I can see it having a home on my PC for a while. I might even send a couple of bucks their way for some XP weekend or a custom mech. Fingers crossed.
Shut up, MPBT:3025 was amazing. :(
Yeah, but it never left beta, right? (I'm talking about the followup to the original MP Battletech that Kesmai did on the first Mechwarrior engine)
Right now they're claiming that this won't be an issue, and that advantages won't be for sale.
“Anything that would affect or give you a tactical advantage, you can’t purchase with real cash. You have to earn that by playing the game.” - Creative Director Bryan Ekman
A couple of things.
1) This isn't an MMO. It's entirely comprised of small matches between teams of 4-person squads.
2) The complaints against the free-to-play model are so old-hat. Especially those worried about buying weapons. Developers learned years ago that if you make your game that way, "pay-to-win", it'll drive away the 95% of people who never pay anything, leaving the 5% with no incentive to buy anything.
Tribes Ascend and Firefall are absolutely amazing, without charging for weapons or anything like that. MechWarrior will hopefully be the same.
While I'd personally love a more Mercenaries model that lets me choose missions and such, I'd love to try this out. Mech games are likely one of the few sub genres doing worse than space games.
If they can make a truly cosmetic FTP model work that's awesome and really does away with a lot of the usual worries, but is there really a precedent for that? People talk about the importance of skin sales in LoL, but LoL also has the character unlocks for sale which are certainly a good idea for any serious player.
It seems to me that a free to play game can't get by just selling horse armor to people who hate money. And a lot of people are fine with that, saying, well, pay 20-40 bucks as if you were buying a real game and you're set from there on out.
Which is fine in theory, but the fact that I can earn spacebucks by playing a free game means that I think of purchases as being A: wallet warriorism and B: paying for shortcuts instead of paying in gameplay, almost as if I forgot the free game part. I ordinarily have the usual good-will and desire to give money to developers but something about F2P crosses my wires and I feel like a putz putting down 9.99.
Haven't Riot Games said that the vast majority of their revenue comes from cosmetic stuff? Yeah, the character unlocks are premium stuff, but they're not exclusive characters -they're all characters that are unlocked for everyone on a rotating basis, and can't they be unlocked permanently through play too?
Regardless, the distinction is that the other characters aren't inherently better. They're different. That's where the F2P model shines - letting people pay for differentiated content instead of superior content.
Also, Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of this - paying for cosmetic stuff and differentiated stuff, not better stuff.
It depends on the unlocks, mechwarrior could easily have unlockable skins for its mechs. But it could also unlock variants mechs as well. As long as they weren't overpowered, this wouldn't be a problem -- it's easy to screw this up, World of Tanks did fairly well until they introduced the Lowe.
I've actually warmed up to allowing minor bonuses\extras to those who want to pay for them. If done right, they aren't that big a deal, and developers do need to make money on their game. (The Matilda tank for WoT is a good example, its a good tank, but it's not a game changer and it fits a niche that makes it different from standard tanks at its tier) It's a tightrope walk that can be dangerous, if developers start to design ineffeciencies in their game to try to get people to spend money. WoT for example, with it's tedious grind at higher tiers to get even basic unlocks on a tank to get it playable.
In LoL, you really don't need to spend money on Champs, they only come out once every few weeks, and nowadays they are much better at not making hte new guy an overpowered, buggy mess, and they offer them up into the free rotation immediately afterward. Something similiar could be done with mechwarrior online, depending on the model they choose to go with. You could be stuck with only certain free mechs and armaments, but if you own the mech (which you could buy with either in-game or external monies) you get to modify it with things bought with in-game earned currency.
People these days really put the MMO label to everything...
Is Quake a MMO? Is League of Legends? Battlefield?
It's a f2p multiplayer action game, like Quake Live, but not a MMO.
The bulk of unlocks in LoL are horizontal unlocks for the impatient: You pay for permanent access to heroes, but you can do this if you just wait a bit, too. You can buy XP boosters, but you cap at level 30 and most players seem to be there, so that's a vertical unlock for the impatient. If you look at it like this, it's particularly funny because there's a spacebucks booster you buy with real money. It lets you gain the non-cash credits quicker: It's patience for the impatient!
They sell options, not power.
How about we wait till they're released before holding them up as an example of the right way to do things?
Its either this or nothing.
I'll take it.
Given that it was a dead license, and given that it's not going to cost a dime to try, why the hell not? I would much prefer a good single player campaign (or series of campaigns as DLC), but if they want to "MMO" it, I'll give it a shot. I suspect that the MMO will likely mean less impressive graphics, however, and could have implications for the destructibility of terrain (such as buildings), etc.
That said, at this point, I'm willing to give anything Mechwarrior/Battletech a shot, if only for the nostalgia value.
That might be a great way to reach out to non-multiplayer fans.(or series of campaigns as DLC)
For those who already have Crysis Warhead I'd give any MWLL servers that are still active a shot. I had an amazing time playing when it ran on Crysis 1's engine. One could quibble about the game modes and the balance effects of giving everyone an Elemental as an escape pod, but mostly it was wonderful.
It's not an MMO though, it's a f2p 4v4 game. Yes, the fact that it's f2p may mean that it will have lower system requirements, which would be a shame, but I could see them easily having a co-op 'horde mode' like component or campaign of sorts.
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