Video Game News and Miscellany

GasBandit

Staff member


If you guys will excuse me.

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From when I played a little of Mechwarrior Online, the only music that was acceptable when piloting an assault mech.

Eugh, gawd, Piranha still has the mechwarrior license... they're the ones who made MWO. At least they're using Unreal instead of Crytek engine now, I guess. I just hope they don't try to "balance" weapons and mechs like they did in MWO.
 
They try to balance it to make a good online game. HOWEVER, it still plays really well. It plays like a Mechwarrior game should. A single player game free of free to play multiplayer nonsense should, SHOULD, be good.
 
Hopefully they get that.

The game will play well, all they need to do is get the rest of the underpinnings right.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Heard MWO was disappointing, especially after they kept making DLC mechs
The Mechwarrior universe doesn't lend itself to a balanced experience for multiple players with a progression mechanic. Canonically speaking, there's no way a light mech would have a prayer against an assault, but they instituted a rock-paper-scissors approach to mech balance Where Assault beats Heavy beats Medium beats Light beats Assault, by way of making heavier mechs progressively slower and less responsive, so the torso/arms also move slowly, thus making the targeting reticle slow and ponderous, unable to shoot a swiftly moving lighter mech. It's entirely possible for a Locust to beat an Atlas 1v1 simply by running behind it and using its superior maneuverability to stay behind it and chew through the rear armor.

Additionally, they changed the mechanics of how certain weapons work, for example they gave gauss rifles a "charging" period, where you click and hold to begin charging the gauss, then when it is fully charged you release the button to fire... but if you hold the button for too long (a few seconds), the charge cancels and you'll have to start over before you can fire it. They also implemented "shadow heat" where firing more of the same weapon causes exponentially (rather than linearly) more heat buildup, so, for example, loading up a mech with lots of PPCs or AC20s will punish you with "extra heat out of nowhere." This is to try to force people to build balanced loadouts instead of minmaxing their mech's utility.

Here's hoping they do away with all that nonsense for MW5.
 
The Mechwarrior universe doesn't lend itself to a balanced experience for multiple players with a progression mechanic. Canonically speaking, there's no way a light mech would have a prayer against an assault, but they instituted a rock-paper-scissors approach to mech balance Where Assault beats Heavy beats Medium beats Light beats Assault, by way of making heavier mechs progressively slower and less responsive, so the torso/arms also move slowly, thus making the targeting reticle slow and ponderous, unable to shoot a swiftly moving lighter mech. It's entirely possible for a Locust to beat an Atlas 1v1 simply by running behind it and using its superior maneuverability to stay behind it and chew through the rear armor.
Strictly speaking, the major advantages of light mechs were:

- They were cheap to buy and maintain, so you could field more of them in a major campaign and thus better occupy/scout territory.
- They were fast enough that they could run away from heavier mechs. They've done missions about doing just this in previous Mechwarrior games.

That second bit is sort of key... if you can't escape a fight in a light mech because the game won't let you, there is no reason to bring a light mech to a fight. So really, they should have ether stratified fights by weight or gave the side with fewer big mechs more players to compensate for the weight difference: a Locust shouldn't be able to take out an Atlas, but 4-5 of them in concert shouldn't have any problem doing it ether.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Strictly speaking, the major advantages of light mechs were:

- They were cheap to buy and maintain, so you could field more of them in a major campaign and thus better occupy/scout territory.
- They were fast enough that they could run away from heavier mechs. They've done missions about doing just this in previous Mechwarrior games.

That second bit is sort of key... if you can't escape a fight in a light mech because the game won't let you, there is no reason to bring a light mech to a fight. So really, they should have ether stratified fights by weight or gave the side with fewer big mechs more players to compensate for the weight difference: a Locust shouldn't be able to take out an Atlas, but 4-5 of them in concert shouldn't have any problem doing it ether.
Yeah, a lot of us wanted to know why PGI decided to do strict 16-on-16 matches for all MWO battles, in mostly enclosed areas, instead of putting tonnage vs tonnage. There's often not much in the way of places for a light mech to "run away" to. They tried limiting each team to 4 of each class of mechs, but their matchmaker isn't perfect (whose is, really). So, under those constraints, they had to figure out a way for there to be any reason at all not to bring a team of 16 assault mechs. Thus, the Jenner became one of the most feared mechs on the battlefield, and the Spider became almost indestructible.

Also, they decided to make laser type weapons split their damage over time... IE, firing a laser turns it "on" for 1 to 2 seconds (depending on the laser). For example, a medium laser does 5 damage, but it apples 1 damage every 0.2 seconds for 5 ticks while firing... thus, if you're shooting at a small mech that is jetting and pirouetting through the air, chances are the damage will be evenly distributed across at least 5 damage areas (and half of it will probably miss entirely), and thus, is unlikely to punch through even the lightest of armor. You can compensate somewhat by firing multiple lasers at once, but there you get into that "ghost heat outta nowhere" mechanic I was talking about earlier.
 
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Interesting.

To me inherently, I lost all interest when it was announced as on only "Online" game.

I'd love single player, preferably with a storyline but I want sandbox mode.
 
There was a console game, I think it was Mechwarrior 3050 for the SNES, where you'd be using a MadCat (really a clan TimberWolf) OmniMech. You could use a Gauss Rifle as one of your weapon choices. But the in-game effect of the Gauss Rifle was a slow-moving, lobbed, area effect explosive projectile that you had to hold down the button to go further. And it was like, "Wow. Totally not what that would be like, at all."
 

GasBandit

Staff member
There was a console game, I think it was Mechwarrior 3050 for the SNES, where you'd be using a MadCat (really a clan TimberWolf) OmniMech. You could use a Gauss Rifle as one of your weapon choices. But the in-game effect of the Gauss Rifle was a slow-moving, lobbed, area effect explosive projectile that you had to hold down the button to go further. And it was like, "Wow. Totally not what that would be like, at all."
Oh, god, I remember that game. It was awful. Hated most how it was so God damn zoomed in you couldn't see anything more than ten meters away.
 
3050 sucked, but the SNES Mechwarrior blew my young mind. This was before we owned a PC.

Loved that game, except for the "defend this place" missions in which your only real chance was to load up with 6 small homing missile launchers because otherwise you couldn't do enough damage fast enough to enough enemies to keep them from blowing it up. And I know because I'd used an assault mech with 6 PPCs once and it wasn't as effective.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Sounds like Crytek might be circling the drain... scuttlebutt is they haven't paid their employees in six months.

 
Since I find it a little odd that a german company hasn't paid their employers for six month and get away with it (we have really strict labour laws) I searched for some more informations on german IT sides. Looks like Crytek has the same problems it had back in 2014 and pays the employers with a delay of days sometimes weeks.
Here some more informations
 
You'd think people would shy away from ever working with an employer who at some point or time held employees hostage doing that.

In Montreal, anyone who'd do this would risk losing so many assets so damned quickly to fierce market competition.
 
You'd think people would shy away from ever working with an employer who at some point or time held employees hostage doing that.

In Montreal, anyone who'd do this would risk losing so many assets so damned quickly to fierce market competition.
You'd think so, but with non-compete agreements and in many places an employers' market, employees often have to more or less lay back and take it.
 
Could a company you left because it didn't pay you hold you to that non-compete agreement?
Depends. There is likely an arbitration clause, which means the company would drag you to arbitrators it gets to pick out... who will rule against you (because they wouldn't get paid otherwise).

Arbitration basically needs to be outlawed. It went from a way to handle small issues without going to court to a systemic elimination for people to seek proper redress for corporate malfeasance.
 
Could there be a visa issue as well? If the people working at Crytek in Germany are there on work visas, and they quit their jobs at Crytek, would they be forced to leave the country, thus throwing their lives into a whole bunch of turmoil? I dunno what the labor and visa laws are like in Germany, it's just something that occurred to me.
 
Holy fucking shit you guys

[DOUBLEPOST=1481676532,1481676295][/DOUBLEPOST]To be fair, going on and on about OPEN WORLD and SANDBOX GAME but just showing a map screen is kind of shitty, but they sound like they're applying a lot of what works in PoE's Seasons and such.
 
I don't see how it's an open world sandbox game at all.

It's a procedure generated ARPG.

Looks neat, but I'm not seeing the open world sandbox stuff at all.
 
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Yeah, after skipping through the video again I feel like he should have leaned more on pushing the procedurally generated and/or branching quests similar to how Warframe does things. The video and his description of OW/sandbox don't really fit.
 
Holy fucking shit you guys

[DOUBLEPOST=1481676532,1481676295][/DOUBLEPOST]To be fair, going on and on about OPEN WORLD and SANDBOX GAME but just showing a map screen is kind of shitty, but they sound like they're applying a lot of what works in PoE's Seasons and such.
I think setting things to a simpler graphical style like this is going to allow them to actually fulfill some of the promise of their intent. On this scale, you could actually incorporate all kinds of worlds, maps, mission sets, and also the cultures and consequences of the various elements of W40k. The seasons could have different large scale issues affecting it, from warp storms to Necrons, Orks, Tau, you name it.

So though he hammers in the same point multiple times and shows more maps than anything, I'm actually more excited about this than if it looked like a WoW-type of game. Those tends to fall short of their potential. This one could excel.
 
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