Mechwarrior!

So I hear on the Internets that there’s a new Mechwarrior game coming. I found out about this a few days ago. As you may know, I quite like my big robot games; my subsequent internal monologue went something like this:

New Mechwarrior game! Awesome!

Christ, I hope it doesn’t suck.

Woo! New Mechwarrior game!

Hm. These developers worked on Revenge of the Fallen. I hear that game’s not good.

Hey, Jordan K. Weisman! This might be proper Battletech!

Cool, a Warhammer!

Awesome trailer.

Maybe I should be cautiously optimistic about this.

NEW MECHWARRIOR GAME!

If this turns out to be another MechAssault 2, I will stab someone.

I am a long-time Battletech fan; I played the original board games way back when and have played almost every video game based on the property that’s ever been released.

Yes, even The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. That game was awesome.

I remember reading that Jordan Weisman, one of the creators of the original game, had recovered the licence from the now-defunct FASA Studio in 2007, and at the time thinking “cool, now maybe we’ll get a new Battletech video game that doesn’t suck”. Then nothing happened for a while, and I forgot all about it, as is my way.

Then along comes this Q&A at IGN and the accompanying trailer and my teenage self wakes up inside my brain and starts jumping up and down and shouting about how awesome this is going to be and my cynical adult self is really, really worried that it won’t be and is steeling himself for another MechAssault-2-esque disappointment.

Some of you may at this point be wondering “why all the hate for MechAssault 2, Simes? It wasn’t that bad a game, surely?”

Well, if I may digress briefly: MechAssault 2 was a good game. But for all the trappings, it wasn’t a Battletech game and that was what disappointed me most about it. If they’d made that game but invented their own universe for the story to take place in, I would probably have been happier with it. I tend to feel that if you’re going to play in an established universe you should not throw out the bits of how that universe works which disagree with the story you want to tell; if your story doesn’t fit with the universe you’re trying to tell it in, that means it’s not the right story for that universe, not that the universe is wrong. That said, I’d probably still have given up at the stupid near-indestructible giant jumpy spider robot even if the game had been set in a universe where those actually existed.

So, anyway, Mechwarrior. From the Q&A it seems like they are much more keen to be like previous Mechwarrior games than like MechAssault and I hope they bring back the customisation that I enjoy so much. I wouldn’t mind a Mechwarrior 4-style hardpoint system for people who don’t want to deal with all the details, but I at least want the option of having all that customisation available. They also say that they’re rebooting the franchise entirely, which is why this game won’t be called Mechwarrior 5 but will be set in 3015, pretty much right at the beginning of the “playable” timeline in the Battletech universe.

(And on the subject of Mechwarrior 4, they’ll apparently soon be giving away Mechwarrior 4 and all its expansions for nothing at battletech.com. Seems like a pretty good deal.)

So, yeah. 3015, classic BattleMechs, “action sim”, and a trailer which claims to be in-game footage and looks pretty cool. I’m going to go with “cautiously optimistic” and see what happens.