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

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Or find a download for the short-lived Mektek freeware release of MW4 that has them built-in.

 

[Infinitron]

Delayed to 2019:

 

[Cyberarmy]

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I'll take a delay over lowered quality.


But odds are it was just that initial planned release schedule was hopelessly optimistic in face of gross incompetence.

 

[Mech]

Maybe they realized their plan to riddle the game with microtransactions like the online game was a bad idea and now they have to completely redesign it.

 

[Grotesque]

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries’ Mechs Are The Best-Looking Mechs To Date Thanks To NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing
By Andrew Burnes on August 20, 2018 | MechWarrior 5 MercenariesGeForce RTX GPUsFeatured StoriesNVIDIA RTXRay TracingTuringNVIDIA GameWorks
MechWarrior is a much-loved part of the extensive BattleTech universe, which recently returned to the limelight with a turn-based PC title. In 2019, Piranha Games will launch


Specifically, Piranha will be introducing NVIDIA RTX Ambient Occlusion shadowing, NVIDIA RTX Reflections, and NVIDIA RTX Shadows, which they’re demonstrating in an exclusive demo set in the MechWarrior bay of the dropship that’ll take players to and from planet surfaces.



In the MechBay, ray-traced translucent reflections are seen on glass, on the walls and floors, and on the factory-fresh mechs, too.



Ray-traced ambient occlusion and shadows, meanwhile, add to realism and immersion throughout the bay through the addition of realistic contact shadowing, and detailed, complex shadows cast from characters and mechs.



There’ll be much more to come from MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries and its ray tracing integrations, so stay tuned to GeForce.com as we get closer to its release in 2019.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

A more appropriate wording to use would be "expensive looking." Even with Piranha's in many ways laudable visual redesign of the 'mechs, they still aren't anywhere near the best-looking 'mechs ever made, games or otherwise. In games for instance, even with PS2 tech behind them Anubis and Jehuty leave the entire selection completely in the dust.

 

[Black]

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries’ Mechs Are The Best-Looking Mechs To Date Thanks To NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing
By Andrew Burnes on August 20, 2018 | MechWarrior 5 MercenariesGeForce RTX GPUsFeatured StoriesNVIDIA RTXRay TracingTuringNVIDIA GameWorks
MechWarrior is a much-loved part of the extensive BattleTech universe, which recently returned to the limelight with a turn-based PC title. In 2019, Piranha Games will launch


Specifically, Piranha will be introducing NVIDIA RTX Ambient Occlusion shadowing, NVIDIA RTX Reflections, and NVIDIA RTX Shadows, which they’re demonstrating in an exclusive demo set in the MechWarrior bay of the dropship that’ll take players to and from planet surfaces.



In the MechBay, ray-traced translucent reflections are seen on glass, on the walls and floors, and on the factory-fresh mechs, too.



Ray-traced ambient occlusion and shadows, meanwhile, add to realism and immersion throughout the bay through the addition of realistic contact shadowing, and detailed, complex shadows cast from characters and mechs.



There’ll be much more to come from MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries and its ray tracing integrations, so stay tuned to GeForce.com as we get closer to its release in 2019.

That reads like an ad.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I'll take the skill of a good art director over the raytracing-powered laziness of a technical artist anytime. Thank you.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It's actually kind of a pity they don't keep using the words "ray traced/tracing occlusions" even more to produce a hilarious effect.

That reads like an add.

It is an ad.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

I'll take the skill of a good art director over the raytracing-powered laziness of a technical artist anytime. Thank you.

Agreed, though I will say IMO FlyingDebris gives them pretty decent stuff to work from. I mean, a lot of people apparently don't much care for a number of his redesigns in MWO, but if I had to pick something MWO actually did REASONABLY well I would say "mech designs" overall. Now if PGI could just get shit like walk cycles and hitbox geometry to a decent place...

(An exception to my like of the redesigns: MWO's Raven doesn't look bad but it doesn't really look like a proper Raven. MWLL gets the Raven right, though.)

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/mechwarrior-5-mercenaries/mechwarrior-5-single-player-campaign

How MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries’ creators plan to rearm the series
The first single-player entry in 15 years features co-op, rampant destruction, and a whole lot of promise

For all the propulsive destruction and pinpoint gunplay of acclaimed shooters like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike, they don’t let you experience the physicality or limitations of a soldier’s body. You might as well be a floating gun, for the most part. When you step into the pilot’s seat in Piranha Games’ upcoming MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, however, you feel every tonne of the giant robot you control: smashing your way through buildings with comic ease, lurching around drunkenly as you take a full five seconds to change your heading while rockets detonate against your flank.

If, like me, you haven’t played a MechWarrior game in over a decade, trying to wrap your head and fingers around the game’s chunky, tank-like move-and-shoot control scheme can prove a tad galling at first. The game encourages you to throttle your mech forward in one direction while aiming and blasting ordnance in another, which takes a little getting used to, but becomes as natural as circle-strafing in time.

Like its predecessors, MechWarrior 5 is shaping up to be a slower, more deliberate breed of action game, especially in the pace of its combat. There’s plenty of smashing and shooting, sure, but they’re buffeted by layers of finesse and strategy that grant the series a frankly intimidating amount of depth. Rather than the starkly linear early entries, MechWarrior 5 follows in the footsteps of the beloved 2002 standalone expansion pack for MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, titled MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, which offered the player three different endings. According to Russ Bullock, president and founder of Piranha, the studio wants to modernise the choice-heavy format of Mercenaries in order to increase the game’s replayability, which he feels has been a historic weakness of the series.

“As much as we love the early MechWarrior games, I doubt any of them come in north of the ten-hour mark,” Bullock says. “All of the veterans who obsess over BattleTech and MechWarrior, they would play through the games, put hours and hours in the multiplayer. But then, well, if you wanted to play it again, you were just doing the same missions again, with little variance. We’re trying to make things much more replayable this time around.”

At least, that’s Piranha’s pitch. Tangible evidence of these deep, persistent systems is a little thin on the ground in the 25-minute demo that I play through twice at the developer’s headquarters in Vancouver, ahead of MechCon 2018. Instead, the demo showcases the weighty action that fans want to see, along with the game’s co-op mode and impressive environmental destruction – a facet which lacks any real precedent in the genre. As producer Alexander Garden points out, it’s a serious upgrade when compared to the studio’s previous effort, MechWarrior Online.



“When you would walk into a building in MWO, you would just stop in your tracks, like it’s a solid wall or something,” he admits. “In this game, you can just barrel right through a lot of buildings. It’s a great representation of the power and weight of your mech, but it has tactical uses, too.”

Those strategic applications are mostly lost on me as I joyfully lumber my way through gutted office buildings on the surface of a blooming springtime planet awash in colour. I have a grand old time shearing the brutalist towers of their concrete and lasering the enemy mechs into molten jelly. But, as Garden takes great pains to emphasise, in the final game the player’s particular flavour of mayhem will reflect back on their mercenary unit, factoring into which missions they take to how they target enemies.

MechWarrior 5’s lumbering mechs can be picked apart however you like. For example, if you concentrate fire at a foe’s legs, you could potentially take it out in exchange for lessened damage without damaging many of its components, which you could salvage and sell for a high price, or even commandeer for one of your squadmates. And if you stomp too many of a particular faction’s farms flat during a mission, you’ll stoke their ire, even potentially becoming an enemy of the state.



Garden compares MechWarrior 5’s gameflow to another modern reimagining of a cult series, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. By replacing the level-by-level blueprint of the previous games with hand-designed tiles that slot together randomly to give a massive amount of mission variety, Garden says that each playthrough will take roughly 60 hours for the average player, and no two runs will be exactly alike.

“In the current design, which might change of course, there’s no difficulty setting, and there’s a permanent fail state if you really mess up and piss all the factions off,” he says. “We do that because we want to be fair to the players, and we think that failure makes people have to make interesting decisions. There’ll be people who save all the time and reload, because they want every run to be perfect, and that’s fine. But that’ll be shown in their final rating at the end of the game.”

Between its total upending of the series’ traditional game structure and its tacit reliance on player choice, it’s clear that MechWarrior 5 is an ambitious project for a mid-sized studio like Piranha. After two years of development time the game is still in a pre-alpha stage, and the playable experience is far from bug-free – even crashing to a halt at one point.

Now that the game’s release has been delayed until September 10, 2019, however, there’s plenty of time to hammer out the kinks. Even now, if that signature ponderous feel of the demo is any indication, it’s clear that the series is in safe hands. This just might be one long-awaited sequel worth holding your breath for.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

It's going to probably be horribly broken in some fashion. PGI is a bad studio and they make bad games.

 

[Taskityo]

I'm curious if this turns out to be a train wreck or at least an 'okay' game.

 

[Country_Gravy]

MWO didn't turn out how I thought it would. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for this.

How come this franchise can't come back strong?

 

[lightbane]

I'm curious if this turns out to be a train wreck or at least an 'okay' game.

At least it cannot be worse than Battletech, right?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

MWO didn't turn out how I thought it would. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for this.

How come this franchise can't come back strong?

Mostly because mecha sims are among nichest of the niche, and MechWarrior isn't even a good poster boy for them because it's never reached above "okay." It is why instead your body should be seeking conflict. Though you'd still run into that problem with publishers not being interested in nichest of the niche.


Though to give credit where it's due, they are trying to make co-op core feature which is in principle kind of an improvement. On the other hand, randomized tile-based maps are hardly encouraging since 99% of that design principle results in awful.

But really, the short answer is that mecha sims are to games publishers a dead genre, like pirate movies were to Hollywood before Pirates franchise (and aside from it being squeezed to the last drop of cash, still are), musicals until recently were, or Western movies still are. Arguably the mecha sim is deader than adventure games ever were. Another major problem might be that there honestly isn't mass audience awareness for giant robots outside of Japan, so you have even less of a market interest in them. And from what I understand, even in Japan they're more retro, and focused on specific franchises in general consciousness like Gundam, so you can't sell MechWarrior in Japan either (and this really bears repeating, just the Gundam video games since 2000 have made more money than the entire BattleTech franchise in its history has; Gundam as a whole is more in the league of Batman in terms of how much money it makes and public awareness it has, except it's almost entirely focused in Japan). Heck, the Japanese are so insular to begin with that they (despite loving it like all the prior ones too) thought Mad Max: Fury Road was some sort of foreign knockoff of Fist of the North Star. Trying to sell a MechWarrior game to them? Yea, not going to work out (even before factoring in that the Japanese still by and large think PC gaming is for porn only).

And that's the only sort-of real market you have for mecha sims, so it's not exactly a surprise why it's been some 15 years since last MechWarrior (discounting MWO).

 

[Cael]

I'm curious if this turns out to be a train wreck or at least an 'okay' game.

At least it cannot be worse than Battletech, right?

Sure it can. MWO proved it by doubling HP across the board.

 

[Black]

MechWarrior isn't even a good poster boy for them because it's never reached above "okay.

MW 2 and 3 exist.

 

[Chippy]

Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries was the best. MW3 was probably my favourite out of the series though, mainly because the graphics were improved to the point that you could actually see what you were shooting and, and plan salvage - then it was all decline, DLC, and dogshit stories and characters from there. I feel the stirring of what might almost be a hard-on for what this game might be though. Like being short-sighted and seeing a girl who might be your type, and might be attractive from a distance...

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

MechWarrior isn't even a good poster boy for them because it's never reached above "okay.

MW 2 and 3 exist.

Inferior mech sims and games in general, like all MechWarrior games.

 

[Black]

You just
Shut
Don't even

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Awwww can't handle playing mech sims that require actual skill?

 

[Black]

Awwww can't handle playing mech sims that require actual skill?

Such as?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Awwww can't handle playing mech sims that require actual skill?

Such as?

Well I'll de-/gd/ a bit since I'm not really in designated shitpost area and serious post again like a good boy.

But, in general, the problem with MechWarrior games is that they operate on a principle that they are a) extremely slow, b) extremely accurate (especially after MW2), c) extremely durable, but most importantly d) targets are essentially stationary. It's a combination that actively prevents high-level play and ultimately bogs down to numbers, hitboxes, and not having the mouse agility of a sedated sloth. There's very little in the way of advanced maneuver, or indeed advanced mechanics to begin with. It's all very ponderous and safe, essentially a simple game of attrition. Skill caps to using torso aim and using shutdown override. Add to this the black sheep of MechWarrior's history, that until MW4 all 'mechs were just a tonnage number and a set of hitboxes.

By contrast, the gold standard against which all mech sims are to be measured and all fall short, Miyazaki's first masterpiece Armored Core For Answer is a) extremely fast, b) accuracy is a matter of skill and machine, c) durability is not guaranteed, but most importantly d) targets are mobile. Combine this with far more advanced customization systems and mechanics at work (boosters or FCS alone have more mechanics at work than entire MechWarrior games), a larger and more varied selection of weapons and equipment, and how all these interlink to high degree of player skill, and you have a far superior game.

Best way to illustrate this is by showing how battle is like:



(A minor detail worth noting in the comparison too is that MechWarrior 2, Mercs or no, is one of the ugliest games ever made, though that's kind of a given due to using basically neolithic 3D graphics)

Or:



(On a different note, MW3 has the weakest sound effects of the franchise, or would have is MW4's autocannon sounds weren't so astronomically bad to single-handedly swing this)

Contrasted to the highly skilled (and mechanically more intricate under the hood) dance of Armored Core:



Or for a different comparison, a battle in Verdict Day (which and V deserve special adulation just from having the most erection-tastic UI in any mech sim ever):