5147075
story
Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday July 09, @01:16PM
from the as-in-beer dept.
Vamman writes
"In light of the recent announcement of the new MechWarrior game, Smith and Tinker has granted our online dev team MekTek.net (which has been supporting MechWarrior for almost a decade now) permission to release MechWarrior 4 entirely for free using the same type of distribution model that id Games used for Quake3's free release.
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I saw the trailer (Score:2)
And it was looking ok enough, let's just hope the gameplay is excellent :)
Woo-hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Excellent news about Mechwarrior 4. I wonder if the stand-alone Mercenaries spin-off (which I preferred) is also included (I note the expansions are)?
Also good news that if the screenshots/concept art are anything to go by, they plan on doing this properly. It doesn't look to me like some arcade-ified MechAssault type of game. I used to love the Mechwarrior games, partially because the complexity made it feel like you really were in command of a huge lump of metal. I don't expect they'll use half the keyboard on controls again, but if they can get something with even a vaguely sim-like feel, I'll be delighted.
I'm also very pleased that they're jumping back in the time-line. The Clans are great, and it would be neat if this game could feature the Clan invasion as its finale (like Battletech 2 and Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries), but I always felt that the narrative just meandered after that. Plus it's actually a lot of fun trying to survive in relatively primative mechs like the Jenner.
Re:Woo-hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Woo-hoo (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that was great as well. I quite liked the balance they reached in MW4 with that, where you had room to tweak, but had to keep the categories of weapons etc vaguely in line with the original ethos of the chassis. So a laser-heavy mech might only be able to use energy weapons in a lot of its slots. It struck me as a good way of finding a balance between allowing for customisation, without turning it into a game of pure min/maxing.
Parent
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ahhh medium pulse lasers.
Re:Woo-hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry but that just doesn't fly when you actually play a PC game. I think it's cute that people are that obsessed with how it was originally configured in a tabletop game but there's no logical reason to start forcing me to use lasers instead of autocannons just because that's whan someone else did.
Gameplaywise I think MW2 really had it set. You could do pretty much anything you wanted, including strapping nothing but machineguns and PPCs to a mech that'd been stripped down to a leafblower for the engine and 3 sandwich wrappers for a heatsink. You'd explode if you tried to fire and never get anywhere but you COULD do it. It was up to you to find effective loadouts, you weren't shoehorned into it by some consoleized list of restrictions.
Parent
Re:Woo-hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a matter of being cute, it was a matter of improving on the logic of the game. There you were in a Madcat, the most iconic of all the mechs, with what were clearly two shoulders filled with missiles (or something that looked pretty close to them) and you were --- what? saying "Pay no attention to those things that look like missiles, they're REALLY a mix of lasers and machine guns" ?
Video games are a visual medium. Function should follow form, especially in a giant robot. Especially in Multiplayer. Imagine playing Halo online and what looks like a pistol in your opponent's hand is really a BFG.
I think it's cute that people are that obsessed with how it was originally configured in a tabletop game
Seems to me you're the guy who should be playing the pen and paper game. Maybe upgrade yourself to a spreadsheet, and you can tweak your mathematical "what ifs" to your heart's content.
Parent
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Yes, I was going to repond to the grandparent, but you've said it all better than I would have done. For me, the biggest defect of MW2, particularly Mercenaries, was the way that all of the mechs felt so generic once you got into the tweaking. They were basically all just slightly differently shaped shells with a set amount of capacity for weapons.
As you say, in Mechwarrior 4, your mech's function actually had to match its form to some degree. There were actually mechs that had a lot of versatile slots for
Re:Woo-hoo (Score:5, Informative)
So the developers laziness or technological limitations are just cause for forcing players to choose specific loadouts?
No, it's the game canon. Most Mechs are not intensely customizable. They have some hardpoints for mounting, and it makes sense that some hardpoints might not have the hardware to accept any old weapon. Energy weapon hardpoints will have large power and coolant conduits. ACs and Missiles will have smaller energy/coolant conduits, and ammo feed mechanisms. Additional modifications would not be within the realm of possiblity for a mercenary lance or other small combat group.
It seems a fair assumption that the MadCat designers (in canon) would not find the need to place ammo feeds into the arms (where the PPCs were located) or high-power conduits to the missile pods.
Parent
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So the developers laziness or technological limitations are just cause for forcing players to choose specific loadouts?
No, it's the game canon. Most Mechs are not intensely customizable. They have some hardpoints for mounting, and it makes sense that some hardpoints might not have the hardware to accept any old weapon. Energy weapon hardpoints will have large power and coolant conduits. ACs and Missiles will have smaller energy/coolant conduits, and ammo feed mechanisms. Additional modifications would not be within the realm of possiblity for a mercenary lance or other small combat group.
It seems a fair assumption that the MadCat designers (in canon) would not find the need to place ammo feeds into the arms (where the PPCs were located) or high-power conduits to the missile pods.
Actually, you're very close to exactly right but not quite. Traditional 'Mech designs were like real world armoured vehicles in that their weapons & equipment loadout was pretty non-modular. Like the real world, however, there were also many revisions of most of the basic designs. In the tabletop game, altering the loadout of one of these 'Mechs was a significant engineering effort that required skilled engineers, technicians, and weeks of work.
However, the Mad Cat is a slightly different beast. One of
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The "Mad Cat" is the inner sphere designation for the clan Timber Wolf. It was named such because it looks like a cross between a Marauder and a Catapult.
Further, the Timber Wolf is an Omni-mech, it was specifically designed for alternative weapon loadouts. Which is to say, it doesn't have any problems with ammo or missiles going in specific locations, because the whole thing is modular. A Timber Wolf Prime carries the iconic LRM 20's, while the Timber Wolf A
Re:Woo-hoo (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. Classic CLASSIC BattleTech, where a 'mech was often a family heirloom, battles were as much ritual combat as anything else, and MechWarriors were akin to pilots in WW1.
All got farked up when the GDL found that damn Star League memory core and New Avalon Academy of Science started unlocking lostech....
(hope I remembered all that fluff properly - been a while, but dammit, I'm going to reread the Warrior trilogy tonight. Justin Allard for the win!)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sure. Start with the Gray Death Legion trilogy, then continue with the Warrior trilogy and after that the Kurita books:
Gray Death Legion trilogy:
Decision at Thunder Rift 0451451848
Mercenary's Star 0451451945
The Price of Glory 0451452178
Warrior trilogy:
En Garde 0451456831
Riposte 0451457188
Coupe 0451457226
Wolves on the Border 0451453883
Heir to the Dragon 0451455274
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Take a look at how many other mechs you destroy in the average mechwarrior game and at how readily we can retrofit things here on earth. If they can make a giant walking robot (which is already physically impossible by it's design) then it isn't much more of a leap to think they could just take the missiles out of what is essentially a giant empty rack and put something else in there and plug it in.
The mech universe is inherently self-contradicting if you go by what you've put forth. Mechs are a rare commod
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Based on my recollection of the original Mechwarrior RPG, the Inner Sphere states controlled between them somewhere between 300 and 400 regiments, each consisting of roughly 100 battlemechs. Add in all the mercenaries, pirates and periphery powers and figure that maybe there might be a total of 50,000 mechs.
That's for the whole of human space in the Battletech Universe of 3025 (the fiction also suggests that Comstar had its Com Guards, which had some vast and uncounted number of mechs).
Going by the game fic
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Up until (as a previous poster mentioned) LosTech (Old Star League technology) was rediscovered, what I said was true. All MechWarrior games after the first were set post-clan invasion, which is after the Inner Sphere began to recover methods and technology on the creation of BattleMechs. The Clans never lost that tech, so building mechs wasn't as large an issue for them. ... also, pretty much all of the MechWarrior games so far have been pretty Action/Arcadey. It's nescessary to have a multitude of enem
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Yep, MW2 had it set. I was pretty disappointed with MW3 and MW3 loadout ability. It was really restrictive compared to MW2. I couldn't use my favorite combinations.
I had a friend who loved the Jenner and, god forbid, the Uller for multiplayer. He'd strip the armor down to nothing, give it a handful of heatsinks and a jumpjet or two, boost up the engines to the max, and outfit it just a handful of small lasers. He was devistating against anything but other similarly equipped mechs: he'd avoid all incoming fi
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I played MechWarrior and Mechwarrior II a bit. I don't remember how well they handled custom/modified mechs.
I and some of my friends lost many, many hours of our lives to MechForce/BattleForce on my Amiga. That was an adaptation of the board wargame, with top-down 2D graphics. We loved designing new mechs and trying them out on each other. I hope that this new game makes it just as easy...
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Last time I went to Chucky Cheese, with a few friends (before they made the rule that u had to be over 18 and accompanied by childred).
Was that a joke? I just checked chuckecheese.com and the kid check page [chuckecheese.com] didn't mention anything about grown-ups not being allowed in by themselves.
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You don't know what you are talking about.
The event in question is the Eternal September [wikipedia.org], and that happened before Diablo. It also had nothing to do with instant messaging.
Re:Woo-hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to Slashdot.
Now start taking the time to use proper spelling and grammar. You're not in high school any longer, so act and speak like an adult or shut the fuck up and go play with the children.
Parent
Q! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
No, this is fre, which means you can only play three-fourths of the game. But luckily the last fourth is pretty much the same as the third.
That actually *is* a good question (Score:2, Informative)
To a question like that my first reaction was "RTFA! I am sure it is explained there.". Then I RTFA and... It wasn't. Then I followed the link to Battletech and didn't quickly find it there either. Then I googled for "Quake 3 free release", got to wikipedia and... Still found no mention of what this magical distribution method is.
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Quake 3's source code was released under the GPL, but the game assets remained commercial property of id Software.
They did the same thing with Quake 2, Quake 1, and Doom. Hopefully Doom 3's code will be released soon.
I don't know why the story submitter couldn't have said "source code released under GPL", like Slashdotters won't know what "source code" means?
Wait wait wait... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm looking at these announcements and they're saying the game is going to be released "for free". I do not see what this has to do with Quake 3 at all, or even how the two releases are similar. Quake 3 the game was never released "for free" unless you are counting Quake Live.
I think the submitter may have fucked up.
Parent
What about Mechassault 3? (Score:2)
I know alot of mechwarrior purists hate it for being too arcade, but they were FUN games.
Excellent! (Score:3, Insightful)
Aside from the original X-Wing trilogy, the MechWarrior series of games have always been my favorites! I can't even begin to account for all of the time I lost playing those online.
MW4 Mercs, FOSS In spirit (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know how many of you ever played Mechwarrior 4, but at its very heart it was an open source game. In Mechwarrior 4 mercenaries, you were allowed to model and add your own vehicles, weapons, and maps to the game. The Mw4 community added no less than 30 incredible mechs to the game, as well as a wide variety of vehicles and weapons that were throughly tested and balanced through extensive player testing.
It was this community effort that brought mechwarrior in line with its true battletech roots, and Microsoft gained a lot of my respect because not only did they allow it? They encouraged it, by making these extensions easy to build and distribute.
The only complaint I have is that the open source expansions broke Microsoft's expansion, and I couldn't use my WarHawk anymore. (Masakari, to you Inner Sphere Trash).
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Note, all of those mechs were hacked into the game by mektek.net, because of this work and their work on the models they were added this way.
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There, fixed it for you.
Open the MW3 and MW4 game engine! (Score:2, Insightful)
Unseen 'Mechs? (Score:2)
So if the game is really placed during the last years of the third succession war, do we get to see the unseen 'mechs?
I mean, you can clearly see the Warhammer in the intro, but aren't the developers afraid if a lawsuit?
I'd just love to drive a Shadow hawk (Dunkelfalke being the German name for that mech)
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The emphasis on the xbox 360 scares me. (Score:5, Insightful)
My gods, please don't take yet another PC game that works so fantastically with the keyboard-mouse combination and 'dumb it down for the masses' that use console controls. Note, I'm not saying console gamers are dumb, just the controls are in many types of games.
Your emphasis on keyboard mouse scares me. (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the primary reasons I disliked doom/quake was I knew it meant the death to other forms of input for video games for a long time to come. Ever since Thresh kicked everyone's butt at doom and later quake, I knew the keyboard mouse was here to stay.
The problem for me was I liked games that were 6FOA(6 Freedom of Axis)Descent being the most notable. At the time of Doom/Descent there was a lot of innovation for PC gaming. The Voodoo1 3d card came out, there was the spaceorb3d, the logitech mouseman, an
Future "MechCommander" games? (Score:2)
I'll echo the sentiments of a few others here with my appreciation for the classic MW games over the console-appropriate MechAssault, but I never hear anyone mention the MechCommander titles. Any speculation (or inside info) on the possibility that we'd see any more in the overhead-strategy vein?
Zone of the Enders 2 MechWarrior (Score:2)
MechWarrior is great and all but its often frustratingly slow controls makes it a snore fest.
I hope they improve on this major flaw. Its the one aspect of MechWarrior that hurt it.
I much prefer the faster paced, and stylistic movements of Zone of the Enders 2.
Mech games need to be fun, not just cool ideas that are "slow and boring" just to be "simulation like"
Re:Zone of the Enders 2 MechWarrior (Score:4, Insightful)
MechWarrior is great and all but its often frustratingly slow controls makes it a snore fest.
I hope they improve on this major flaw. Its the one aspect of MechWarrior that hurt it.
No, that's exactly why many people loved the MechWarrior games so much. They (the good ones, at least), are not arcadey action games, they are giant robot combat simulators. Hundred-ton hunks of metal covered in weapons are not quick, agile acrobats; they are tanks with legs. The more realistic behavior of the mechs makes combat more about strategy and tactics than twitch reflexes.
If that's the kind of mech game you want, there are other ones out there that cater to you (ZoE). Please don't try to change MechWarrior into something it's not.
Parent
In related news.... (Score:5, Funny)
Joystick manufacturers expect, once again, to be able to make a profit!
All of MechWarrior 4 will be free (Score:5, Informative)
a few features (Score:4, Insightful)
I stopped playing video games after Mechwarrior 4. Partly because I had other things to do (like raise a child) but partly because I haven't been able to get interested in computer games since.
With a new Mechwarrior out, I will probably go out and get a modern joystick and give it a shot. I'm especially glad they went back to the Clans, as they had the more interesting mechs and backstory.
I'm hoping that we see some new abilities in the new game. I always thought it was odd that in the 31st century you fired weapons by manually lining up a hood ornament on your enemy, when 20th century technology has object recognition and automatic targeting. Or, at least, some kind of helmet tracking. What, did computer technology get lost in the intervening years?
In a slightly different vein, it seems like in all that time someone would have thought to weld on a few weapons backwards on the chassis. (With associated hardpoint and weight penalties, of course.) A lot of knife fights depended solely on how fast you could turn your chassis to bring weapons to bear. This doesn't seem reasonable in the 31st century. I want to be able to glance in my rearview mirror and squeeze off a few rounds or missiles at that mech sneaking up behind me. Or -- this would be cool -- have the arms be articulate enough to temporarily point backwards.
It should be possible in this day and age to have the mechs be as fully articulate as the backstory led us to believe.
Re:a few features (Score:4, Informative)
I'm especially glad they went back to the Clans, as they had the more interesting mechs and backstory.
That's not quite right -- the game is being set in 3015, which is before the Clan invasion, and so it's unlikely you'll see any Clan technology in the game.
What, did computer technology get lost in the intervening years?
Actually, yes; in the BattleTech universe, centuries of warfare have caused the loss of quite a bit of scientific knowledge and technology. That's why Clan technology was so much more advanced than the Inner Sphere stuff.
Parent
Best game I got for $1.24 (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when Office Depot still had their 155% price guarantee, Best Buy threw Mechwarrior on sale for something like $14.99 while Office Depot still showed it at 39.99. Armed with about $20 in cash each, maps with all the Office Depots in town, and a Best Buy ad we set out, cleaning out all the copies of Mechwarrior 4 for just $1.24 each after the absurdly high price guarantee.
Also that same week CompUSA had put Riven on sale for 9.99 vs $29.99 at Office Depot (so it was free after the 155% price guarantee). They got rid of that 155% price guarantee after that. EVERYBODY got a copy of Riven and Mechwarrior for Christmas. It was great (and confusing for some)!
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New MechWarrior Announced, MechWarrior 4 To Be Distributed For
To Be Distributed For what???
For free. If you bothered to read the only sentence in the summary you would have figured that out.
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Are they going to show up at out house [wikipedia.org] with the CD and pass it ... [Emphasis and Link Added]
You are thinking of the Windows distribution model ... ;-)