Mechwarrior 5 - FEUDALISM. IN SPACE.

The game is just called Mechwarrior, since its a series reboot. It still isn't too clear to me why a series reboot is justified in having a name that allows it to be easily confused with the original Mechwarrior game. That just sounds stupid to me.

"Hey lets reboot Spiderman and give him a new image that will rejuvenate the franchise"
"Alright, so we want to make it different from the original Spiderman right?"
"Yea, for sure. The old Spiderman is too boring, so we're making him different. This way fans can't even complain about inconsistencies."
"Uh okay. So what do we call it, if we want to make it differentiable?"
"How about... Spiderman?"
"..."

Seriously, that must be the conversation that occurs in Hollywood or wherever reboots may be made. Only God knows what is wrong with these people... And how they should be punished in hell accordingly.

So anyway, I will be referring to this new upcoming 2009 game as Mechwarrior 5, since it makes far more sense. Here is a trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl4eI3htAuA

It uses the UT3 engine. Cool that they were able to adapt the UT3 engine; it looks good. Not so cool that I can already bet that many sacrifices to gameplay were made to cater to this engine. Also, when a developer reuses an engine, they save development time and money. I fully expect that these resources are reinvested to the game itself, and the game should be even better than if it had its own engine. So, the bar has been raised, even though the game hasn't even been released. Well, they brought it upon themselves.

So whats the problem?
There is no problem! Yea! What a surprise, coming from me, the pessimist of the century. I am actually glad they are doing this game, as I am a big fan of Mechwarrior, and although I hate unfaithful adaptations, Mechwarrior's franchise was dead because its original IP holder, FASA had been liquidated. Microsoft held the rights, but they weren't going to touch the money-losing franchise with a 10 feet pole. Basically, the Mech fans had lost hope of having another game for ages... And here we have an opportunity to restart it... And its on PC! Man that sounds great way to bring back some old memories. Considering how I've been waiting on a MW mod that has been in development for years (and still is)... You can see how eager I am to play MechWarrior again.

With my optimism though, there are some things that bother me, although I won't really mind either way. Just think of it as a wishlist.

- I don't think that MW5 will support fully customizable mechs like in MW4. It may be following more of the boardgame rules in this sense, and only allow pre-set variants. That's a shame, because it makes it a little less fun, but it comes with the benefit of cutting out cheap variants that can abuse certain aspects. The gameplay will be more well balanced instead. I can appreciate both results in this case, although having full-customization for unranked or offline play would be the best of both worlds.

- The date in the trailer says 3015. The clans invaded in 3050 (late 3049 if you're really anal) so clan tech will probably not be in the game. That's a shame, since a lot of my favorite mech designs were from clans, and some of the best weapons in the game were also clan weapons. While this is alright from a lore perspective, clan weapons have always been plain superior upgrades relative to standard weapons. It made standard weapons instantly obsolete and redundant. I can understand the advantages to having clan weapons in the game, but also not having them. Like I said above, having the option in unranked/singleplayer would be amazing. However, I doubt clan chassis will be in, since that requires a lot more work for the developers. A friend though notes that the Atlas-C in the trailer is a variant made in 3080, so it could be possible that the reboot cheats the standard lore a little bit, and clans could be in anyway. How's that for geekdom?

That's really it for my wishlist. I'm really excited about this game, like I have not been for a game in a long time. I hope it'll have a larger and more tightly knit multiplayer community than the previous games.

Edit: Apparently the game is being called MechWarrior 3015 by the community. Fair enough.