With all the DLC's being out and modders having had enough time to update their stuff I decided to give Roguetech one last shot. I played for about a week and had two nice lances with my first assault mechs finally coming online, including a 100t Annihilator with 3 artillery pieces that would wreck light mechs from across the map (it kinda had to since it could only move about 2 squares and engine upgrades are expensive). However, I reached a point where I just couldn't deal with the poor performance anymore, same as with my other attempts to play this game (both vanilla and various iterations of Roguetech).
Simply put, it's the worst performing game I've ever played in my life and I've played hundreds going all the way back to the late 80s. I can forgive a long boot up time, but it then takes a minute to load any given savegame on top of that, even early in the campaign. It sits at 10-12 gigs of ram, which is about half the game, and still takes upwards of a minute to load each and every mission on an SSD. Every single click, whether it's cycling through targets, cycling through your own mechs, navigating the menu on your ship, or simply clicking OKAY on a message, is followed by a short delay. Every time you want to speed up your movement animations by pressing SPACEBAR, which you want to do ANY time something moves in this game, you get heavy stuttering. Each time a hovercraft or VTOL calculates its turn it takes about 45 seconds and should you decide to speed up the movement after it fired, it takes twice as long for some reason, as if it started its movement calculations all over again. Great fun on missions with 4+ of the mentioned vehicles. Every time a mech dies due to missile spam there's a 2-3 second pause where the game seemingly tries to figure out what exactly happened just now. And then there's the occasional memory leak where the game simply shits itself and becomes unresponsive on a mission start, dumping all its 10 gigs into nirvana and showing the .exe as 5% of my 16 gigs, yet task manager shows me that I'm at 95% overall memory usage. Naturally this is followed by killing the task and 3 minutes of loading screens to get back to where you were. I'm not even gonna go into talking about overall low fps while still looking like dogshit, because that's honestly the least of Battletech's problems.
Whoever programmed this pile of shit shouldn't be working in the industry at this level. I can't comprehend how you can ship something like this and still look at yourself in the mirror - and then proceed to do absolutely nothing about it and release some half-ass cashgrab DLC's the following year. It's doubly disappointing because the base game, while bland, provided plenty of modding opportunities to make something great. However, this isn't Bethesda level incompetence, this is so much worse, because mods can't fix fundamental problems with the engine itself.
Time for me to go back to Mech Commander, again.
