Friday 18 November 2011

Mechwarrior Online, what we know so far

  • It's scheduled to release summer 2012
  • It's F2P with cashshop, etc.
  • The plan is to avoid Pay2win and make it Pay4Options (we'll see... but I have hope).
  • MWO is being made using the Crytek engine.
  • It is not an MMO and you do not play within a persistent world.
  • It will be instanced battles you take part in like the old MMO games, but with a bit more of a scenario/battleground twist.

  • It does have a persistent campaign system that your battles will influence.
  • There is a focus on "information war" and making lighter mechs very important.
  • Old Mechwarrior games had very open terrain, MWO will move away from this into much denser and tactically important terrain. Bye bye circle strafing.
  • Gameplay will be sticking as close as possible to the tabletop game and will be a shooter-simulator again.
  • It is primarily being designed to play from within the cockpit, though how to add external views without it being a dodgy advantage are being considered.
  • The cockpits will have working and useful instrumentation, scanners, etc that provider information beyond the neural UI link thingy.
  • The game is being set in the year 3049. In Battletech terms this is just before the Clan invasion and means the game will (initially at least) be focused on the Inner Sphere. However going forward the Clans and other major events will feature in a big way.



  • Players will be able to level their pilot and gain skills of some form (I suspect like the specialisations in Mech Commander).
  • Players will be able to form Mercenary Corps (guilds).
  • This is a PvP game but they are looking into adding some form of PvE too.
  • Piranha (the developers) are aiming for bi-weekly content patches. Yes you heard that right... New content every 2 weeks... I'll be amazed if that actually happens, but it's a positive thing for them to be aiming for.

There's a fair bit of other info out there too, but those are the key points for now.

3 comments:

  1. If I would not be so sceptical, I really love Classic BT. Someone shoot the guy who asked for some form of PvE, they already said it's no MMO (which is actually not a bad thing, quite contrary) and therefore they can forget about the usual MMO thinking of PvP/PvE separation.

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  2. The problem with dense terrain is that this slows down lighter mechs.. at least when gameplay is like the tabletop or previous MW games. It will make them easier to be killed. Imho circle strafing isn't as bad as leg-shooting ;) So no need to totally suppress this style of play.

    Tbh.. I hope that there will be no external view at all. Maybe for short terms because of recon stuff, but not as a general view. I hope that this game leans more on the simulator than on the action-shooter side..

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  3. Longasc - I don't mind them adding PvE, as long as it is kept well away from the PvP ;) And I agree about the not being an MMO bit, I would be very worried if it was. The standard quirks of MMOs would ruin a battletech game.

    Karic - Yeah that's a good point. They'll need to find some kind of way to balance it all out for the lights.

    I think they will add an external view because of all the people complaining about motion sickness from cockpit views. If they do I just hope they make it more beneficial to play from within the cockpit, which I will be doing anyway simply because it feels much cooler.

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Half man half pixel. Music obsessive, likes a drink, occasional bastard.