Bueno...como veterano fan de esta franquicia solo puedo decir: "por fín". Por fin podré volver a sentir esa adrenalina fluyendo de la emoción de pilotear y combatir en estas bestiales maquinas de guerra del Siglo 31. Sentirte parte ingeniero y piloto, hacer ajustes en plena batalla de acuerdo a la situación, planificar y modificar tu Mech de acuerdo a cada misión (se recuerdan del Mech Lab?) y estar siempre al pendiente del calor!
Warning... Heat Level Critical... Shutting Down.
He estado viendo y leyendo los developer interviews y wow! Esto realmente promete... ojalá y no defraude. Free to Play, CryEngine 3 y los DLC que me imagino la mayoria van a ser pagados.
Parte de un reportaje de IGN (en Inglés):
Mechs are complex creatures. Fail in the cockpit, and you can retreat to the garage to scrub everything off the drawing board and restart from scratch.
The worry with MechWarrior Online was that this nuance would evaporate because of its business model, or from being in the hands of a developer whose closest experience to making MechWarrior was contributing to a poorly-received Transformers game.
Nope. After seeing the game at GDC, I’m reassured that the minutiae we associate with mechs might finally be paired with the modern technology it deserves.
A cool example (literally, hurr hurr) of this was learning that planet climates will globally affect heat. “You might sacrifice some armor for heat sinks if you’re on a desert planet,” Bryan Ekman, Creative Director at Piranha, told me. “On an ice world, you could run fewer heat sinks, but more lasers. It’s all part of our ‘role warfare’ pillar: players will learn to take different mechs and different configurations into different levels and different scenarios.”
Thermal vision (itself a separate system that you’d install) would also interact with this. If I’m trying to spot a “hot” enemy with a thermal vision mode, their signature will be harder to spot on a desert planet than on an arctic one due to the ambient heat.
Bodies of water interlace with these mechanics, too. Dipping your mechs’ legs into a river would dissipate heat, but only if you’d actually installed heat sinks in your mech’s legs. That’s exactly the sort of fidelity I’m looking for—design that connects what you do in the garage with moment-to-moment tactics, and rewards something like an improvised, tactical skinny dip.
You can't see it here, but targeted enemies' weapon loadouts and damage is displayed in a top-right panel.
Piranha is intent on preserving mechs’ physicality as lumbering bipedal bodies, too, and that includes allowing them to fall ungracefully when physics would dictate.
“These mechs take a lot of skill to pilot,” says Russ Bullock, President at Piranha. “In certain situations—maybe if you’re getting rammed by an enemy mech, or someone with jump jets is landing on your head, there are situations where those mechs are going to fall to the ground and you’ll have to pick yourself back up. All those things will damage your mech.”
Knockdowns can also be caused by high-impact weapons. Take an autocannon to the chest, my mech will flinch backward from the impact. If my mech is still reeling from that shot and gets punched by another autocannon, that extra impact could topple me. But I wouldn’t fall if I got shot in the front, and then the back of my mech. Those design details absolutely matter: modeling knockdown in this way would make shot timing and placement affect something other than where damage is dealt.
I didn’t get an in-game look at MWO’s persistent metagame, but Piranha mentioned that the timeline of the game will mirror the canonical timeline of the BattleTech universe, and hinted that that’ll be linked to the roll-out of new weapons, tech, and big events. “Technologies will be introduced into the world as they happen in the calendar. Obviously if you look at our calendar [right now], March 8, 3049—we’re less than a year away from a Clan invasion. So…that will happen, as it happens [in the fiction].”
In terms of the in-cockpit experience, I was glad to see free-look in there, but even happier to see separate crosshairs that independently correspond to where torso-mounted weapons and arm-mounted weapons are pointed. In other words, if I turn to aim at an enemy up on a ridge at my 10 o’clock, I probably wouldn’t rotate my entire body to face them—I’d just aim my arms, and maybe only have access to a few lasers rather than my full loadout. TrackIR support is also confirmed, thank goodness.
So, I’m pretty pleased: nothing I saw outright worried me. Then again, I didn’t get any look at mech customization itself (the interface of which needs to be sexy, well-organized, and built with a mouse and keyboard in mind). Piranha also made a few mentions of information warfare as a primary part of the game’s design, but didn’t show anything to back up how they said it’d influence mech detection. Melee won’t be implemented at launch (meaning it’s unlikely we’ll see an Axman), but may be in the future.
But overall, everything shown to me walked and talked like a MechWarrior game. The lumbering locomotion of movement and delay of throttle responsiveness felt familiar. The cockpit camera rattled when we got tickled by a cloud of LRM-20s. CryEngine 3 seems like a great choice—mechs and surfaces lacked the gloss I associate with Unreal 3. Connecting a medium laser with a Jenner’s rear armor as it fled down a trail made that spot of metal glow molten with heat. MechWarrior is in the hands of people that revere it and get that it’s a very specific style and pace of combat that has a place in modern gaming.
Algunos screenshots (cortesía de IGN
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Mas información y las principales promesas del desarrollador Piranha Games:
Welcome MechWarrior!
Piranha Games is proud to bring you the next instalment in the MechWarrior® franchise. It has been a long time coming and this synopsis will help to answer some of your questions. If you've read through Dev Blog 0, you'll know that we are a premium Free-To-Play game based on the bestselling BattleTech® Universe. When coming up with the core game features for MechWarrior® Online™, we create and focused on four pillars of design and player experience. These pillars include:
Mech Warfare – The embodiment of Mech to Mech combat.
Role Warfare – The ability for player's to customize their experience to suit their own style of gameplay.
Community Warfare – The ability to let the players take part in epic combat for territorial control.
Information Warfare – Bring a new element to the battlefield that incorporates information technology to help control the fight.
Mech Warfare:
We want to make sure we bring the roots of the MechWarrior® titles back to the surface and also incorporate the basic rules from the BattleTech® Universe. Players will be able to customize their BattleMechs with weapon and armor upgrades as well as customize their cosmetic appearance in the MechLab. This means players can look unique or fall in line with their Merc Corp colors and truly represent themselves in combat. The next part of Mech Warfare is controls/piloting a BattleMech. Since our key platform is the PC, it only makes sense to really bring the simulation control system back for seasoned players, with the option to have easy access configurations for newer players. When dealing with controls, we really want to bring skill back into combat rather than heavily assisted combat as seen in most modern day first person shooters. The interface between the MechWarrior® and the BattleMech is being revisited as well. A new 3D HUD system is being designed for the neurohelmet pilot information display. The view point of the game is from the pilot (MechWarrior®'s) point of view. Players will be able to look around their cockpit and even customize the interior to suit their tastes.
Role Warfare:
When it comes down to play style for any given player, we want to make sure that we have as many options as possible to cater to as many player types as possible. This is where things get really interesting. Everything from choosing a BattleMech to how a MechWarrior® is trained, will allow a player to truly customize their own personal game experience. What is a player's preferred role when playing MechWarrior®? Scout? Attacker? Defender? Commander? Whatever it is, a player will be able to train their MechWarrior to specialize in their style of gameplay. Players are highly encouraged to participate in team based gameplay. The fast manoeuvrable scouts will be able to relay information back to the commander units who in turn relay that information to the attacker and defender units. As players advance their MechWarrior in a role, more skills and abilities related to their role will become available. Remember, a team who plays together will always win together.
Community Warfare:
MechWarrior® in all of its incarnations has always had a loyal following of players in one of the strongest on-line communities in gaming history. Piranha-Games hopes to bring this community together in a friendly conflict of universal control. This may sound a little odd, but it is the fun competitiveness that will keep the game alive and kicking for years to come. Utilizing the BattleTech® Inner Sphere, we plan to have skirmishes amongst the Great Houses in BattleTech® lore. Allowing the player to have an active part in this conflict is one of our key directives in designing this game. Players will be able to create, manage and customize their Merc Corp's player base and appearance, while banding together to really delve into the Inner Sphere conflict where House alignment reigns supreme. Merc Corp leaders will bid and fight for occupation rights to some of the most valuable planets across the Inner Sphere and challenge other Merc Corps for control of planets reaping large rewards.
Information Warfare:
Evolving the MechWarrior® experience required a new layer of gameplay. Instead of large open expanses and circle strafing parties, we wanted to examine the core play experience of the previous MechWarrior® titles and see if we could bring a more tactical/strategic experience to MechWarrior® Online™. Relying more on line-of-sight and incorporating information technologies, we feel that information warfare will bring a new level of realism to the fight and help enforce the idea of team based multiplayer even more. Another aspect of Mech Warfare, something that we can do with new technology, is urban combat. The battlefield is no longer open areas with mile long sightlines. . Tactical manoeuvres will be required now more than ever and the key to success is using InfoTech alongside great team play. The newly implemented Battle Grid will give commanding units a bird's eye view of the battlefield and scouts will be able to feed real time recon information to them. The battlefield commander will be able to call in air strikes, artillery strikes and other support unit requests.
Agosto 2012
