Much more at the link: http://www.pcgamer.com/mechwarrior-5-mercenaries-hands-on-the-series-goes-back-to-its-roots/
http://www.pcgamer.com/mechwarrior-5-mercenaries-hands-on-the-series-goes-back-to-its-roots/
"There's a huge contingent of fans that have been wanting a singleplayer MechWarrior 5 for years," Bullock tells me as we walk through the Piranha Games office. "Of course we wanted to make one, but being a smaller developer we had say, 'Okay first things first, we need to succeed with MechWarrior Online and that will allow us to make a singleplayer game.' And it took a while—a lot longer than we thought—but we're doing it."
Instead of a series of linear missions, MechWarrior 5 puts you in command of a mercenary unit and gives you the freedom to either rise to mythic status or crash and burn along the way. Around 300 planets of the Inner Sphere will be open for business, letting you travel between the Great Houses while taking increasingly demanding contracts and building reputation with each faction as you also manage your lances of warriors and supporting technicians.
It's one part MechWarrior and one part Football Manager, Russ tells me. Every bullet you fire and every mech you lose will have a cost, and it'll be up to you to make sure you're bringing in enough dough to keep your mercs on the payroll and their mechs in fighting condition. As you progress in prestige, the timeline also moves forward. Great Houses rise and fall according to the lore, new technologies are invented and sold, and eventually the ominous Clans come rampaging through the Inner Sphere like Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde.
Leveraging an ambitious dynamic free market economy, stunning destructibility, and the kind of freedom and scale that hasn't been seen since the first MechWarrior in 1989, Bullock is working to make MechWarrior 5 the ultimate realisation of BattleTech lore.
When you begin a new campaign, your mercenary company is in a sorry state. With only a weak mech at your disposal, you'll be scraping by and taking low-level missions from the periphery states of the Great Houses to keep money coming in. Little by little your business will grow, but it will be up to you to decide how.
"The free market is probably one of the biggest components of MechWarrior 5," Bullock tells me. Mechs, pilots, technicians, weapon systems—everything you need to form a mercenary unit will have to be purchased from MechWarrior 5's market. "The market is totally dynamic based on what year it is. In the year 3015, for example, they didn't have any pulse lasers or Ferro-Fibrous armour as all of that technology comes in later. And it's also going to depend where you are in the Inner Sphere. If you are in one Great House's space, you'll see mechs common among that house. That's going to provide a whole level of flavour to your play experience each time you start a new campaign."
To that end, MechWarrior 5 will feature an unprecedented number of mechs to choose from. "Most MechWarrior games have had maybe 12 to 15 different mech chassis," Bullock explains. ”We're looking at having upwards of 60 chassis with 300 to 400 variants. You could probably play the game multiple times within just one Great House's space and see different combinations on the free market."
But mechs are only as good as the warriors piloting them. Players will also need to be mindful of their mercs and technicians, who each have their own skills and specialties. Likewise, different manufacturers will make variations of weapon systems, giving players granular control over every aspect of their mechs. Profits made from mercenary contracts will be quickly eaten away by repairs, resupply, and the ever-present cost of replacing slain comrades. It's a huge amount of freedom but also an equally large responsibility if you're reckless on the field of battle.
One thing MechWarrior fans will love is that damage modelling has been taken to a whole new level over MechWarrior Online. Each component now has multiple stages of disrepair, making brawls even more visceral as armour peels back after barrages to reveal the delicate mechanical skeletons underneath
"Mechs aren't just these paper tigers," Bullock says. "You don't just one-shot things. It's all about a battle of attrition, of using the hills, rocks, and trees for cover and making sure that when you get your chance to shoot, you make it count. You manage your heat, your ammo, and your positioning and you win that battle."
Any veteran MechWarrior player knows that it isn't just about how well you're able to shoot, but also how you use the terrain to your advantage. And with 300 planets, each needing their own battlefield that feels distinct, Bullock says finding a way to generate fun but unique terrain was easily one of Piranha Games' biggest challenges. "We needed to create a level generator system that wouldn't be overly complex," Bullock explains, adding that since MW5's announcement the team has dedicated much of its time to solving this one complex riddle.
What they devised is an elegant system that takes ingredients, like different military bases, and places them together with various groupings of terrain. It's like playing an instrument: you have several notes to work with, but how you arrange them can create vastly different songs. After my demo, Piranha Games' senior game designer David Forsey give me an opportunity to peek behind the curtain at the development back end of MechWarrior 5 to toy around with making different kinds of maps.
Similar to creating a new map in Civilization, MechWarrior 5's map tool lets you dictate the density of foliage, terrain patterns, weather, time of day and more. Now, all of these might not sound like they matter, but in the brutally strategic world of MechWarrior, they absolutely do. Wind storms on a Mars-like planet might blind you, forcing you to rely purely on thermal vision to see enemy mechs through the tempest. Likewise, dense forests can now cover the battlefield since Piranha Games doesn't have to account for all the challenges of syncing up 24 different players over the internet like in MechWarrior Online.
http://www.pcgamer.com/mechwarrior-5-mercenaries-hands-on-the-series-goes-back-to-its-roots/