MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries by Piranha Games - now on Steam and GOG

[Syme]

A couple of missions in and I can't really recommend this. The enemy spawning system is absolutely atrocious. It's wave after wave of tank and helicopter fodder that mindlessly drives at you, interrupted by the occasional Mechs spawning behind you at fucking medium weapon range. Your sensors are useless because they're locked at around 450m on the minimap. This, coupled with the fact that enemies can spawn inside your sensor range, means that enemies just pop up from out of nowhere without any warning. No "Mech power up detected", just BOOM have an AC5 to your ass and then watch me run in circles until I die. Rinse and repeat.

Your teammates seem to be blessed with the same moronic AI as your enemies, so they mindlessly rush in and get shot to pieces while running in circles, causing a drain on your cash and several months of waiting for them to be healed up again. For me, the only approach to keep repair costs down to a reasonable level is to get to high ground and spam LRMs at max range, and then move in to complete the objective while hoping that shit doesn't spawn directly behind me... again. It may seem like using cunning tactics and shit, except that I don't want to play a fucking LRM boat.

Overall I would recommend waiting for a year until this hits Steam, not only because fuck Epic, but also to give modders time to fix this nonsense. If you need your singleplayer Mechwarrior fix, go play the old ones, you'll have a better time.

 

[DeepOcean]

Those mainstream reviewers are completely useless, how not a single one of those clowns mentioned enemies spawning inside sensor range? That alone is enough to disqualify this game as even playable.

 

[Syme]

Just as an example, this is how close enemies can spawn in completely open terrain. Mind you that they will do so behind you as well:

 

[Van-d-all]

Just as an example, this is how close enemies can spawn in completely open terrain. Mind you that they will do so behind you as well:

Also that wonderful generated map that cuts half of it's space with useless mountains around it's borders shows how tiny they are in comparison to mechs.

 

[Syme]

Scratch that, THIS is how close they can spawn.

"Enemy Mech forces spotted in the area. Watc-". YEAH NO SHIT KAREN!

One more screenshot. This is the range of your minimap. I went and pressed every single button on my keyboard, nothing increases it. Active/passive sensors doesn't seem to be a thing in this game. You're stuck with around 480m when you, and your enemies, are running with weapons twice that range from the start. While you can lock on to enemies up to around 900m, there will be cases where you'll be getting shot with ballistics from beyond your minimap and wondering where it came from. This is especially annoying because sensor locks often break when line of sight is broken and there is often a lot of terrain or props between you and that light tank trying to find a path to properly suicide himself in front of you.

 

[warpig]

How can they fuck up such basic things :/ A game that potentially could be very cool fucked up by stuff like that, and these generic missions. All of this stuff was already figured out in the previous MW games, just fucking lol.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

amateurishly retarded and retardedly amateurish.
there's no torso and legs bearings on hud, on central and/or upper zone where they would be useful, they're to be extrapolated from the minimap two kilometers away from the action.
there's no effective weapons groups range on hud, next to the crosshair where they would be useful, they're to be read from the weapons groups two kilometers away from the action.
no radial threats on hud, only generic tokens on minimap.

this just from the tutorial.
it seems like NOBODY ever played this, and also nobody ever played mechwarrior online which is their property. "dudes, let's do a mech game, but let's make it by blindly code without ever having touched a mech game ever! dis gon be gud".
i'm willing to bet there also isn't a bar representation for armor levels (present only in mw4, mysteriously absent from subsequent games) and i wouldn't be surprised if it lacked the alpha/single/sequential firing mode selector too.

but wait, there's the part on foot! 20-30 seconds to switch from contracts tab to repairs tab. TAB!


i was prepared for a bad game, but not THIS bad.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

How can they fuck up such basic things :/ A game that potentially could be very cool fucked up by stuff like that, and these generic missions. All of this stuff was already figured out in the previous MW games, just fucking lol.

I don't think they were entirely unaware of the previous games. The charitable version is that budgetary constraints were so tight they simply had to release an unfinished product, and that's why they launched as an E-pig store exclusive. The real release is years away, but the diehard fans will buy it anyway. People at Piranha know they will - they run MWO, a game that's kept alive by the same subset of gamers that fund Star Citizen. No joke, there's a big overlap between biggest SC whales and MW playerbase. So they get these people to fork over some cash and in the meantime they'll try and fix the game. Since this is Piranha, the results will be underwhelming anyway.

The uncharitable version is that Piranha is staffed by barely competent retards, that they probably lost key people that could wrangle the autistic mess that is CryEngine into something editable - or just couldn't handle it anymore, and that they lost big boy bucks having to switch to Unreal and start over from scratch. Unable to attract investors, chronically underfunded and understaffed, the project was cobbled together in last months leading up to to release by a skeleton crew that was half absolute burn out cases and half unpaid interns. The rest of the team was busy trying to keep the MWO trashfire burning to pay their wages. Once the Epic money ran out, they dumped it on Epic Store because they knew the fans will buy it no matter what, and it will never get better, because this is Piranha. I don't have the time or autism to trawl through linked.in and social networks just to try and confirm this version though, so it might as well be a pure fantasy. Or not. Pick your poison.

 

[warpig]

No joke, there's a big overlap betwen biggest SC whales and MW playerbase.

I'm not surprised. Both are appealing to similar tastes (more typical in older gamers who have money) + you also have to be dumb to become their paypig.

 

[randir14]

amateurishly retarded and retardedly amateurish.
there's no torso and legs bearings on hud, on central and/or upper zone where they would be useful, they're to be extrapolated from the minimap two kilometers away from the action.

There's a white line below your crosshair that shows a general idea of where your torso is facing in relation to your legs. It moves from the center to the left or right.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

are you really surely sure? because i just gave the game a second chance and no trace of it. do you mean that small, thin, tiny sliver of a white something which goes absolutely lost on all the white of the snow? i just noticed it in the screenshots because i wanted to see it, i honestly didn't see it at all in my games. still, even if it's there, it takes a special kind of retard to put an already barely visible white hud element on top of all the white you're planning to paint everything around with.
but i have a small correction: the stuff on foot can be skipped (most of the times) by pressing tab. i even mentioned it couldn't be done, somehow it didn't work the first time, i usually press each and every button at least once to check if it does anything.

 

[Grotesque]

I played this game for 15 hours and I like it.

There are aspects that can be improved but the game is immersive and it has attention to detail.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

The only way I've been able to reliably see leg orientation has been looking at the mini map. I think they intended you to use 3rd person all the time.

I don't mind the generic missions but the spawns are too close, you get tanks showing up right underfoot from nowhere.

You can toggle sequential (chain) fire but only for weapon group 1, if there is a way to do it for any other group I can't get it to work.

Mods will save it. I hope.

 

[Grotesque]

The only way I've been able to reliably see leg orientation has been looking at the mini map. I think they intended you to use 3rd person all the time.

I don't mind the generic missions but the spawns are too close, you get tanks showing up right underfoot from nowhere.

You can toggle sequential (chain) fire but only for weapon group 1, if there is a way to do it for any other group I can't get it to work.

Mods will save it. I hope.

this is legs/torso orientation.
the white line. it's very intuitive.
and frankly you don't need it since you have keys to align torso with legs and vice versa

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

The only way I've been able to reliably see leg orientation has been looking at the mini map. I think they intended you to use 3rd person all the time.

I don't mind the generic missions but the spawns are too close, you get tanks showing up right underfoot from nowhere.

You can toggle sequential (chain) fire but only for weapon group 1, if there is a way to do it for any other group I can't get it to work.

Mods will save it. I hope.

spawns are retarded, you're constantly surrounded, every time, always, with almost no way to protect yourself because most of the buildings crumble as soon as you look at them the wrong way.

chain fire is "per group", which means a group is either chain fire or it's not. you can find it in the weapon grouping box. yes, this is retarded too.

 

[randir14]

A developer in their Discord said they're working on a patch to fix the spawns and hopefully will have it ready next week

 

[Ravness]

Do you guys think the problems with this game can be fixed with patches or ...dlc. I'm going to wait until steam but yeah its a bit worrying, might as well stick with battletech

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

no.
the whole mission structure should be rebuilt from the ground up, no amount of sewing can fix it.

 

[Grotesque]

but wait, there's the part on foot! 20-30 seconds to switch from contracts tab to repairs tab. TAB!

it seems you are one of those retarded bitter cunts that doesn't know what he's talking about. what the fuck you mean by it takes 20 seconds to switch from contracts to repairs? are you seriously that stupid when in fact the switch it takes literally a press of a mouse button?

do you mean that small, thin, tiny sliver of a white something which goes absolutely lost on all the white of the snow?

as anyone that is not blind, that "tiny sliver of a white something" is still visible even on snow background.
you are a cretin set to shit on this game or you are that blind after a life of masturbation in front of the camera to make a living.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

So does it have modding support or not?

 

[Alpharius]

I've found that spawning out of thin air is not so bad at assaination, demolishion and raiding missions. The enemies still spawn out of thin air but they usualy spawn around objective when you're 1 kilometer away from it. So it possible to use long range weapons at least and usually none spawn right at your back. I usually order my bots to hold position about 1200 meters out then trigger the spawning and retreat back to the bots, so the enemies are coming form one direction mostly.

Defence contracts are also not that bad as enemies spawn about 1 kilometer away out of line of sight when you are right on top of the objective, which sort of makes sense for a defence contract. Warzone contracts are the worst.

Also even managed to find a story mission that i've not been able to complete with my current mechs, and it has only a 180 tonnage limit. Jagermech + centurion + lights dont cut it, will need something heavier for the main mech.

 

[JDR13]

The uncharitable version is that Piranha Bytes is staffed by barely competent retards, that they probably lost key people that could wrangle the autistic mess that is CryEngine into something editable - or just couldn't handle it anymore, and that they lost big boy bucks having to switch to Unreal and start over from scratch.

When did Piranha Bytes get involved? :D

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

When did Piranha Bytes get involved? :D

based low iq poster

Edit: Namedropped Piranha Bytes without even noticing it. Turns out I'm also a based low iq poster. What a shame

 

[JDR13]

When did Piranha Bytes get involved? :D

based low iq poster

Not the same developer.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

Not the same developer.

Big oops. Didn't even notice that I namedropped PB lmao.