So after many months of beta both open and closed, Mechwarrior Online is to finally to be
launched in proper to the public. Displaying far more of the supposedly first
person combat aspect than Mechwarrior
Tactics, it’s the title fans of the video games will be most drawn to.
Having undergone many changes and tweaks over an extended beta, how is the released
product?
The story here is set several years prior to the Clan
invasion, relatively early on in Battletech’s
timeline. With multiple houses in a state of continual war against one another,
massive battlemechs scavenged from the technology of old are sent against one
another to take worlds or rob their foes of talented warriors. Beyond a few
factual points however, the story barely comes into this.
The game’s big draw is naturally building towering mechs and
proceeding to fight others with it. Selecting the one best suited to your
skills tooling it up to carry the weapons you can use best and fragging people
with them. These it definitely gets right with the sheer variety of weapons and
mechs to take.
There are a large number of mechs divided into various
weight classes, each capable of carrying out their own set role with different
set ups and weapons slots. For example most versions of the Catapult are
missile slot heavy, making them perfect for support roles while the Dragons are
more varied in their layouts. There’s a good deal of flexibility with each one
as each slot doesn’t designate a specific weight or class of weapon, only their
type. For example, a laser slot could go for anything from a small laser,
effective only at close range and very weak, to a Particle Projection Cannon
AKA the “I just blew your arms of at 800 meters” gun. This has led to many
kinds of customisations, such as huge AC/20s being mounted on light Raven mechs
for sudden ambushes.
The only real limitation with what you can give a mech are
two things: Heat and weight. Heat efficiency is judged by a counter to the
right in the mech bay and shows how many times your mech can fire continuously
before it shuts down. At that point you’re left exposed, unable to move or
fight back for several seconds. The higher your efficiency, the more times you
can fire continuously so you need to add as many heat sinks as you can to stay
in the fight.
Weight is the obvious one, but everything has a weight value
along with a maximum load each mech can take. So long as you don’t exceed that
limit you can carry as many big guns as you have slots. More or less all the
internal components save for essentials or those in a fixed position can also
be shifted around. Storing ammo in a place less likely to cause harm if it
explodes is one use of this and even points of armour can be removed to save
weight or shunted to one specific place.
Much of the above is basic stuff, present throughout most
games set in this universe, but Piranha Games Inc. are sticking with
what works in this respect. Further allowing customisation can be made with
bonus add-ons like the ability to cap bases faster or consumables like calling
in air strikes. Admittedly the latter example isn’t worth the cash though.
The actual fighting environments are well varied and
designed. While by no means the most complex of maps, the variation between
urban, frozen and volcano locations is decent as is their size. In some brawlers
will have a clear advantage while others are so vast that anyone who can pick
off people with a gauss rifle will be taking heads. You can’t choose between
them specifically and the map you turn up in is completely randomised, which is
definitely a good way to force strangers to adapt and work as a unit. Well,
sometimes anyway.
The map variety is only further improved by the two game
modes of Assault and Conquest, the former emphasising upon combat while the
latter relies upon racking up points via capturing various bases. This has gone
a long way to solving the cap rushes which once plagued the game and it adds
some very welcome additions to the title.
The combat itself is
definitely solid on the whole. As each mech has segmented areas to fire upon and
specialisations, meaning you can have your arm shot off and keep fighting, but
will lose anything you had in that arm. Some are harder than others thanks to
higher armour values, others are essential to remaining operational (head,
centre torso, at least one leg), but it allows you to stay in the game with
horrendous amounts of damage. It also forces you to be tactical with where you
are shooting and opt where to hit the hardest in extended fights. A mechanic
which never fails to make firefights feel far more enjoyable than the common
FPS problem of killing someone with one bullet by shooting him in the foot.
With the addition of various capabilities such as the now thankfully balanced
ECM, jump jets for additional manoeuvrability and flexibility with all mech
designs the most advertised points are definitely very strong.
The unfortunate thing is that the design, planning and good
ideas in combat is almost ruined by the matchmaking system. Online runs on an ELO rating system for
planning matches and selecting players, which only works in theory and is a
very strange choice for a team based game. Originally designed for one on one
matches, it’s fine with teams who’ve banded together but just doesn’t work with
individual players. Oh it’s been modified to supposedly account for this, but
it honestly just doesn’t work and can’t account for team balance, weight balance
or the possibility of greater co-ordination between other players. In fact, the
system itself seems to have an adverse reaction to victories.
After you’ve been PUGing for a while here’s the sort of trend
you’re going to fall into: You end up being completely steamrolled by the enemy
for a good number of matches. Over time this eventually becomes less and less
until you’re losing, but your side takes out almost as much of the opposing
force as they do of you. Then you win a couple of matches, two or three at
most, and the system promptly throws a fit. It suddenly thinks you’re a god
among players and you end up being thrown against players far above your skill,
and the cycle starts again. Others might have different experiences, but for
myself and those I’ve spoken to playing individually, this always happens. It
ends up just removing a lot of the fun from matches as they become predictable
with you losing a good 85% of the time.
Unfortunately for the Mechwarrior
Online, its problems don’t stop with matchmaking.
While the core basics of the game are solid, there are a few
elements which work against it and other things which need to be accounted for.
As it’s an MMO this is namely its friendliness to new players and future
developments.
New players are thrown in at the deep end and tend to have
an even harder time than other people due to the mechs they have available.
Rather than models which have been bought by people and then customised to
their needs, players are stuck with stock designs. These tend to have multiple
weapon groups already set up, poor heat management and a good number seem to be
built to try and be “Jack of all trades, master of none”. As such you tend to
overheat much more, can’t specialise in what you want to do, and have a weapons
set up which the tutorials don’t explain very well. The first two points do
have their exceptions, mechs designs are cycled every few months to new models,
but you’re almost never not going to be fighting an uphill battle with them.
Having stock, ready built mechs would be fine if you were
only in games facing people with these pre-built designs but you’re not.
Instead you’re thrown into matches where people will turn up with their own
tweaked designs intended to rip everyone to bits, like Hero Cataphracts with
three Gauss rifles. You’re just going to die a lot, even ignoring the poorly implemented
matchmaking.
Even if you loathe light mechs I’d still recommend buying
one just to have a fighting chance, as the few bonuses are meant to give an
edge to new players don’t work. Hell, the implemented gameplay choices intended
to make it easier to learn do nothing and often teach the wrong thing. Third
person perspective only seems to encourage solo-play rather than co-ordinating
as a group as it removes all need for spotters. Not to mention it makes jump
sniping tediously easy. Throttle decay is a hindrance more than a help as it
feels as if it’s taking control away from you. The only useful one is Arm-Lock
for beginners as that helps getting used to aiming, but removes the ability to
make precise shots meaning you’re going to want to turn it off after only a
short while.
Besides that there’s the tutorials which effectively just
explain the bare basics of the game. You know the barely interactive walls of
text which try to ram information down your throat a-la Final Fantasy? It’s just a step about that. You’re faced with
pop-up screen after pop-up screen with paragraphs of text at a time telling you
what to do, then occasionally allowing you to actually act out what is stated.
They feel unintuitive and you’d honestly have a better experience learning
through trial and error on the testing grounds.
All of this could have been overlooked were it not for one
thing: The developer. PGI seems utterly rudderless when it comes to having a
focused direction, improving upon problems and above all actually catering to
the audience it already has. The problems with trial mechs compared to bought
ones is something which has remained unchanged throughout the entire beta. The
few additions feel like steps back and when they do follow suggestions like
with the tutorials it feels like a bare bones inclusion.
Many problems and balance issues go unfixed for months it
seems and are often only solved via making something else unbalanced. Just for
example, the Jenner was infamous for being the ubermech during months of the
beta. It could cut the other two lights at the time to ribbons, had seemingly
no weaknesses and thanks to lag-shielding could merrily take multiple mechs on
at a time without much risk of being taken out. The only way to accurately take
it out it seemed was thanks to Streak SRMS which could lock on and always hit
the centre “torso” armour. This weakness was going to be removed by giving it
ECM until a forum wide poll widely opposed this decision. As a result Jenners
began to have some actual competition with the other light mechs, but only
because they were armed with the new game breaking item ECM.
ECM turned into an “I win” button as it prevented target
locks, made the mech and any allies nearby invisible, and effectively switched
off enemy radar once in range. It turned the game from a tactical MOBA into a
borderline Call of Duty rush-brawler
as no one took LRM missiles, and light mechs couldn’t be hit by anything. Worse
still, for some reason they refused to fix this game breaking problem for
months. PGI only agreeing to give very
minor tweaks to power and ability before eventually bringing it down to
something remotely balanced.
While this isn’t how every patch, inclusion and update has
gone, it’s how too many have gone and continue to go. There’s no clear
direction to each decision and it feels more like the group is making things up
on whims at times than following any concise plan for a finished product. Or it
is taking the Star Wars: Galaxies
route of ignoring its current community in a desperate attempt to draw in some
new unknown audience. This has been an accusation repeatedly seen for some
time, and has only gotten worse since the inclusion of a third person
perspective.
PGI has repeatedly gone back on its word time and time again
to the point of completely contradicting the basic outline of Mechwarrior Online when it was released,
even outright lying to its players. This needs an entire article to itself to
really examine, but if you’re interested in the problems on the developer side
look here, and see an analysis of their response to their latest PR disaster
here. For the sake of space: They are unreliable and cannot be trusted in the
slightest by its own customers.
Mechwarrior Online is a good game at first glance, but
the longer you look and the more you play it, the more problems become evident.
For all the issues weapons currently have, fighting against mechs is the most
balanced it has been in a long time and can be genuinely fun. Building and
customising your down designs is definitely a fun point even given the
grinding, as actively fighting other people makes it much more fun. At least
when you’re getting between 80-100K per match anyway. Despite that however,
there are just way too many problems in the game’s current form to properly recommend.
If you have friends who all play it or join an active House/Clan/Merc
Corp then you might be able to have some fun with this one. The game is
designed for teamwork and it really is the only way to properly play the title
while having fun (or at least occasionally winning). Otherwise, give it a miss until
PGI includes more features they promised or start to address its bigger
problems.
