Jump into MechWarrior Online
Staff writer Patrick Do speaks to the developers of MechWarrior Online about the much-anticipated action title.
MechWarrior Online is the reboot of an IP that hasn’t seen a new title in a decade. It is slated for release in mid-2012 and is being developed by Piranha Games based out of Vancouver, Canada. On Monday, I had the opportunity to speak with the President of Piranha Games, Russ Bullock, as well as the VP and Creative Director, Bryan Ekman, in a roundtable interview regarding the upcoming IP. We got a lot of new information about the game and I am here today to share my nerd candy with you.
According to Bullock, fans of MechWarrior can expect a modernized version of a thirty-year old IP that still maintains the franchise’s original conceit; “At its root, MechWarrior is a simple concept: it’s about taking a giant robot … and laying waste to other robots.”
MechWarrior has always been about using cunning and subterfuge to outmaneuver and defeat enemy pilots; but the games have never appropriately reflected that mandate. In past iterations, winning in MechWarrior could be distilled into a fairly simple proposition: sweep the leg. Bullock spoke to this point, adding that, “[MechWarrior] was a game that we used to love to play; but we’d just run around in circles shooting each other’s legs off.”
Piranha promises to create a version of MechWarrior that is closest to the original vision we all had in our pimply heads growing up. They stressed the idea of Role Warfare: each mech serves a different purpose in a battle and is optimized to excel at certain functions. Lance units—or four-person mech teams—will need to work in harmony to survive in the BattleTech universe. Creative Director Bryan Eckman explained, “If you perform your role on the battlefield, you will be rewarded with experience for that.” He added that experience points were not handed out solely based on kills or assists. Support or command classes would be awarded experience for fulfilling class specific tasks during battle.
One of the more exciting topics broached on Monday was the matter of controls. According to Eckman, the gameplay itself is fully customizable. “If you are familiar with playing a mech warrior game you’ll know what that means.” Learning the controls in a Mech Warrior title can be a game unto itself. “[Mechs] have a lot of controls and respond in the traditional style of MechWarrior play. You have torso twisting, you having aiming; you have weapon firing, weapon grouping, group firing. You have jump jets to jump in the air; you have a throttle, which dictates how fast you run in forward in reverse.”
Eckman went on to add, “We’re supporting a full keyboard and mouse set up, we’re supporting joystick setup, we’re going to have some partnership announcements in the future to talk about hardware which is going to be really exciting. But we're focused on using the PC and input devices to the max, we’re going to allow players to customize those devices however they see fit, and we’re going to support as many devices as possible.” I’m positively aroused at the prospect of driving a mech with my Xbox 360 racing wheel. Of course I’m kidding, but it’s going to be interesting to see the different homebrew set-ups people come up with involving the Steel Battalion controller.