Re: Ooh! Mechwarrior 5: The Clans is Out

On Wed, 23 Oct 2024 04:07:34 -0400, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
>

On Tue, 22 Oct 2024 05:56:38 -0400, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:
>
>

>
I've got Mech5:Mercs.  I love it, but it's a bit repetitive after a while and
I'm starting to lose interest.  I haven't purchased any of the DLCs and am
only about 10 missions in.

>

I should have looked at my steam library before posting.
>
What I have is mech5:mercs not mech5 basic.

>
Mostly because there was no "Mech 5 Basic".
>
On PC, the Mechwarrior franchise included:
  Mechwarrior 1
  Mechwarrior 2 (with MW2: Ghost Bear's Legacy and MW2: Mercenaries)
  Mechwarrior 3 (with MW3: Pirates Moon)
  Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance (and MW 4: Mercenaries)
  (Living Legends, unofficial)

>
You forgot MW4: Black Knight
>

  Mechwarrior: Online
  Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries
    and now
  Mechwarrior 5: Clans
>
Because MW5:Mercenaries was, for the last 5 years, the _only_
Mechwarrior 5 game, the 'Mercenaries' subtitle was often dropped. So
you'll hear people talking about "Mechwarrior 5" but what they really
mean is "Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries"
>
MW5:Mercs isn't a bad game. I enjoyed it enough to not only play it
multiple times, but buy a bunch of the DLC. But -as mentioned by
others- it does get fairly repetitive, and the AI is significantly
lacking.
>
The maps are re-used a lot and a lot of the procedurally-generated
missions (which form the bulk of your adventures as a mercenary) are
identical other than a reshuffling of what enemies you face. The
brain-dead AI has the enemies run right into your fire (no attempt to
flank or try to take you out from afar), and the developers are forced
to rely on numbers rather than smarts to provide challenge. Too many
missions require my tiny four-men squad take out literal dozens of
bad-guys. It's tedious, and goes against the tone of the setting,
where expensive battlemechs are never tossed away so haphazardly.
>
"Clans" apparently (or so claim the reviews) improves on the former,
as its single-player campaign features mostly hand-crafted missions.
But it's still not clear whether the AI has improved any.
>
Still, damn if I'm not tempted to buy the game already rather than
wait for it to drop in price (and get all the bugs and kinks worked
out). I just love me some rompy-stompy robots!

>
Yeah, the MW ones, the "gears" of Heavy Gear 1+2, and another one I
vaguely recall called Slave Zero.

Slave Zero was a very different game; it was really more of a
third-person shooter that just happened to feature a Kaiju-sized
robot* as its protagonist. It was fun, but so different in tone and
style as to be more akin to an FPS than a proper 'mech game'.

But there were a bunch of similar titles; the aforementioned "Heavy
Gear" games -made by Activision after they lost the Mechwarrior
license- but also titles like the Front Mission and Armored Core games
(originally just for Playstation but migrating later to PC), titles
like "Gunmetal" (although that was more of a shooter), "Ultrabots",
the Gungriffon titles, Looking Glass' excellent "Terra Nova", "Metal
Fatigue", the Earthsiege games, "Iron Assault", Bioware's forgotten
"Shattered Steel", Monolith's "Shogo" (that was more of an FPS
though), "Krazy Ivan" (again, more shooter than sim) and probably more
than I'm just not remembering at the moment.

    [Oh, like the Strike Suit Zero games! Although those were
     more swoopy-zoopy-shooty robots in space]

But the Mechwarrior games remain the grand-daddy of them all, and
-IMHO- the best of the bunch.


Warning: Resistance levels to buying MW5:Clans at 52% and falling...




* technically, a biomechanical creature telepathically puppeted by an
offsite operator