That befits a series that began life as a tabletop strategy game, but any hardcore PC gamer who came up in the '90s remembers when the series' bombastic, first-person offshoot, MechWarrior, debuted as a drool-worthy highlight of the 3D-gaming revolution. And it's been a while since we've seen a traditional MechWarrior campaign game: 17 years.
As such, you can't take a single mecha-stomp through MechWarrior 5's gameplay without trampling some fields of nostalgia. For some players, that rewind may go back to 2002's MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries. For others, it's a brief rewind to 2013's MechWarrior Online, an MMO that's still in operation and resembles MW5:M.
My personal rewind goes further. I'm not a BattleTech or MechWarrior expert by any stretch; far from it. (And I never played MechWarrior Online.) But my early '90s exposure to the franchise by way of a mall entertainment center was enough to have me suiting up, quite elaborately, to test MechWarrior 5 ahead of its launch today—and to offer my altogether positive impressions.
Pod people
A major reason I'm writing this is because I came into custody of a Thrustmaster T.16000M FCS kit in preparation for another game launch: the 2020 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator (which I tested in preview form in September). Its closed tech alpha test will soon begin, smothered with non-disclosure agreements, and that'll likely benefit from controls other than keyboard and mouse. To that aim, Thrustmaster kindly sent a loaner kit for the aforementioned HOTAS ("Hands-On Throttle And Stick") rig, which includes a button-smothered pair of joystick and throttle, along with a robust foot-controlled rudder.
When the kit arrived, I didn't yet have MSFS access in my inbox. Instead, I noticed an email about MechWarrior 5, whose pre-release version landed at my home office while I was on a Thanksgiving vacation. There had been an internal update, the email read, to get the game up to snuff for owners of HOTAS equipment. That included a "plug-and-play" patch for the T.16000M FCS.
I connected the joystick and throttle (without the rudder, MSRP $160, but can be found for less), positioned them on my desk, and booted the game. And my head started spinning. I've done this before, I thought.
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An original BattleTech pod from the Dallas arcade center, recovered by collector Michael Lattanzi Jr.Michael Lattanzi Jr.
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Another angle.Michael Lattanzi Jr.
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One of many promotions used to draw new, eager players to the otherwise pricey BattleTech experience.Michael Lattanzi Jr.
Specifically, I had gone to a BattleTech play center at the United Artists movie theater complex in Dallas during the early '90s. (Maybe once, maybe twice.) The whole thing made the neighboring laser tag center look like a game of Candyland. Every player sat in their own "battle pod," and these cockpits were tricked out with an array of joysticks and pedals, along with a ridiculous array of roughly 100 buttons—which managed a ridiculous number of toggles, ranging from coolant loop shutdowns to power rerouting routines.
The pods' 3D simulation of BattleTech robo-combat, as seen from a first-person perspective, was projected via a pretty insane system: onto a beam splitter, then into a parabolic mirror for a pronounced 3D effect. The pods were also tricked out with five multi-function displays. After you picked your mech based on a brief stats comparison, you and your friends rumbled around and blasted each other in a slow, explosive deathmatch with attached speakers set to max.
But my mother had a firm rule about blowing cash on video game-related things ("you beat games too quickly; they're a waste of my money; use your allowance"), so it was a special treat for me to go to the BattleTech center. ($10 a pop in 1994 might as well have been $4,000.)
My most pronounced memory, quite honestly, was how difficult these mechs were to pilot. As an old friend reminded me when we got to talking about the BattleTech center this week, "Even the 'good-handling' Mars machines felt like piloting an ocean liner.'" That had to be part of the racket for the arcade center: entice kids with the promise of robo-combat, then make them beg to play (and pay) again so they might learn how it works and suck less.
Required work before trying the tutorial
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This gallery's first three screens are taken from live gameplay; the rest were provided by the publisher, but all look like apparent real-time gameplay.
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Leading my crew into battle. You can switch between third-person and first-person views at any time, with much of the GUI remaining consistent either way.Piranha
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This screen is a solid representation of the game's Unreal Engine 4 action at its prettiest. But once you see these landscapes and biomes over and over, the asset reuse can become apparent and annoying.Piranha
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The rest of this gallery is made up of a crapton of lasers.Piranha
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This first-person image is lacking the game's default UI, but it does a decent job showing some of the more generic military-city geometry.Piranha
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The odds are not good for the outnumbered mech on the left.Piranha
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Wolfhound, ho.Piranha
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Burninating the countryside.Piranha
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You'll see a lot of satellite dishes in the game. Why do 31st century military installations depend on the kinds of dishes you'd see in a rural farm in the 1990s?Piranha
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Efficient use of Unreal Engine 4 means that even when the game sometimes looks generic, it always runs efficiently on modest PC hardware, even with all particle effects cranked to maximum.Piranha
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Neither rain nor sleet nor snow will stop the boom.Piranha
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Sometimes, screens look like they came from a polished remake of the barren Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries of the 1990s.Piranha
Decades later, with HOTAS gear in my hands and MW5:M loaded on my high-end PC, I immediately tapped my smartphone to call my mother and laugh maniacally.
That's not true. But my inner teenager wasn't disappointed. I found myself quite enjoying my hardware-heavy throwback to the BattleTech pod era, albeit with caveats. And the new game struck me as an obvious reason for a certain class of simulation-minded gamer to dig out their HOTAS rig of choice and boot these fun-if-modest missions.
MW5:M includes both a linear, plot-filled campaign and an "instant action" combat option, and both of these work in single-player and online co-op flavors. The former includes progression over a series of missions, which means you'll accumulate currency, scrap, and weapons left on the battlefield, along with experience-point progress for both your general skills and specific weapons. The latter opens with a menu that lets you pick certain battling options--objectives, biome, enemy faction--and spawn a randomly generated mix of terrain and enemies; in these one-off scenarios, progress isn't saved.
I opted to test my HOTAS rig with the campaign, since it includes a control tutorial. The first issue I ran into while HOTAS testing was the need to keep a mouse and keyboard handy. You'll have to "walk" through a base between missions, which I couldn't figure out how to map to the joysticks. The second issue was that the tutorial was not built for alternative control schemes. Even with certain functions mapped to my joystick or throttle, the on-screen GUI still displayed keyboard-button commands—and worse, many tutorial steps wouldn't complete until I tapped the keyboard version of the demanded button.
Based on feedback from MW5:M developers Piranha Games, this issue will likely linger for a while after launch, if not indefinitely. If you want to play the game with preferred HOTAS hardware, even if it is supported by a "plug-and-play patch," you'll want to go into the options menu and map your every control function before starting the game (and write down your chosen functions on an index card, since in-game menus won't remind you of your button choices).
HOTAS = GOAT?
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If you want to skip the campaign mode and dive into one-off skirmishes, this option menu will let you customize some basic options before having a mission randomly generated for you.
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The skirmish mode also includes some pre-made options to pick from.Piranha
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A summary of the randomly generated mission to follow.Piranha
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Which mech would you like to take into your skirmish? The left-hand list includes each suit type in the "light" class.Piranha
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Left-hand list for "medium" mechs. (Notice that mech selection is bound to in-universe canon between the years of 3015-3049.)Piranha
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Left-hand list for "heavy" mechs.Piranha
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Left-hand list for "assault" mechs.Piranha
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A mouse-over reveals more about each suit subtype.Piranha
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In addition to picking through every weapon, armor, and ability part assignable to arms, legs, torso, and more, you can also robustly paint and customize each exterior. No microtransactions required.Piranha
With that annoyance dealt with, the game otherwise screamed on my Thrustmaster rig from that point on. Mostly, this was because the slow-and-powerful movement system of a robo-suit made more logical sense to me with my left hand on a thruster and my right hand on a joystick. I could manually pick my suit's exact degree of forward or reverse thrust. I could click on any POV switch of my choice to change my camera angle or zoom intensity. I could separately control whether my orientation movement affected my legs, or just my torso—a crucial point, since MechWarrior revolves around, er, your torso revolving independent of your legs.
These qualities and more didn't quite add up when playing on keyboard-and-mouse. Faking like I was playing Quake or Call of Duty inherently made me expect faster first-person combat controls—and lacked the fine-tuned, analog movement options I craved for the game's leg-and-torso manipulation. And the Thrustmaster throttle is a particularly killer control option, owing to its trio of POV switches and its analog rocker, all within convenient finger-and-thumb reach while gripping the primary throttle tightly.
MW5:M has you juggling up to six weapon systems at once, along with on-the-fly issues like enemy targeting and coolant-system management. If you're not erecting a 100-button array against your computer room's wall a la old BattleTech pods, the two-dozen buttons spread across an average throttle and joystick combo aren't a bad consolation prize, especially in terms of distance from your hands' default positions. (BattleTech loyalists will likely argue that the game could use more micromanagement options within combat; MW5:M isn't quite as complicated as the old arcade pods from the 1990s.)
By default, MW5:M's profile for the T.16000M FCS assigns certain rotation commands to the analog rocker, the left-to-right movement of the joystick, and the rotation of the joystick's handle. I wanted to change this so that the analog rocker turned my mech suit's legs, not the torso, but after running into settings-menu confusion, I had to get clearer instructions from the folks at Piranha Games—which required manually editing an .INI file.
You may argue that a target HOTAS consumer is accustomed to a peculiar tweaking routine to get their favorite sticks and pulleys working in sim and military games. I would counter that in 2019, a sim-friendly series like MechWarrior should make sure to expose every customization possibility to players without booting them into an .INI-hunting process. But Piranha seems to be erring on the side of transparency and helpfulness for all possible control rigs, if the team's friendly and lightning-fast replies to my queries are any indication.
Wait, it’s called WHATmaster?
Would I sing as positive a tune about MW5:M if I didn't have this conveniently timed Thrustmaster delivery at my home office? Not likely. The biggest issue from a first-person combat perspective is that we've seen this exact brand of MechWarrior combat in older games. Missions revolve around simple "collect items, kill robots" objectives, which is arguably a consequence of designing around "authentic" BattleTech movement. Nobody's adding magical warping portals or grappling hooks to the series' authentic, slow-and-sturdy mech-suit locomotion. Fair enough.
Instead, the game's biggest potential comes from its massive landscapes. They're all designed for multiplayer flanking and cycling around targets to take on MW5:M's epic missions, which don't include difficulty sliders for playing solo. You're in for a wildly varying difficulty experience if you play this game alone, which may very well be a consequence of Piranha cutting its MechWarrior teeth on its MMO game for six years. In good news, this game is entirely PvE, as opposed to a bolted-on recreation of the game's PvP MMO content. But I would've liked to see better tuning for the solo experience, in terms of tactical options. Currently, there's a lot of "walk into an open zone, then deal with enemies that magically spawn and automatically hunt you down" nonsense, which is only helped in solo play when you eventually recruit AI allies and issue commands to them.
What's more, MW5:M's levels, massive as they are, look like they've been constructed from largely generic Unreal Engine 4 assets. This is a shame, because picking through the menus confirms that Piranha Games has gone to great lengths to recreate dozens of unique BattleTech robot models, which players can eventually take command of and even paint to their heart's content. But you'll spend more time looking at the same kinds of generic, late-'00s sci-fi cityscapes and land formations than you will the cool, authentic designs of robots and drones.
But there's enough solid stuff in how the game controls on a bulky home-joystick rig, plus how your campaign progress is rewarded with tons of mech-customization opportunities. Between that and the AI-squadmate stuff, MW5:M isn't a lost cause by any stretch. But it's firmly interested in appeasing a dedicated niche, not drawing in newbies. Which, based on my giddy HOTAS-fueled combat, is likely the point.Video Games - Games - Google News
December 10, 2019 at 09:00PM
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