Mechwarrior Online

So I paid for the MWO closed beta, and its a regret.

Today I get an email stating they are re-introducing the economy system.  Finish a battle, pay for repairs.  Know what this does?

Totally makes MWO suck the big one.

Why?

Because, the good players will have the best equipment, best mechs, most money.

Those that aren't good, will be dead broke, having to go into battle with broken equipment, no ammo, etc... heck, in fact, if you aren't good, you simply won't be able to afford anything but energy weapons.

I knew F2P would suck, but had high hopes.

They could fix this easily... if you are on a winning team, you all get the same percentage of income leaving it.  However this can be abused by "elite teams" out there just wiping the floor with "automatically matched teams".

The game has no imagination, no strategy, pathetic design, no "character".  It is simply a poor FPS, with decent graphics, and giant robots.  But at least the sensor model is *completely* broken, so a mech standing 30m behind you can shoot you all day long and you'll never see a blip on your radar.  Or a light mech will literally run circles around your assault, killing you easily if your without support, or better yet, the heat engine is so freaking bad that you need 50 heat sinks to continually fire your 5 medium lasers... oh wait, they doubled all armor, so it'll take you for freaking every to kill stuff like that.  At least the maps are... dang, those suck too.... but the mech models... well, nevermind, they aren't all that impressive either.

Some of you will still love the game, but I suspect it'll die pretty quickly as your first game will play the same as your last.

I'll give it a 3.5/10.  I'd give Tribes Ascend an 8.5/10 now (they mitigated many balance issues, and the F2P nickel and diming players drops 1 point).  

I'm already extremely bored with it, and was after I played each map a couple times... they get new maps, but the game hasn't changed much.  *ANY* previous mechwarrior game is still, in this day and age, more fun.  Graphics are nice, but after a few minutes all you notice is the gameplay, not the mediocre graphics.  If they had a bit more resources over at MWLL it'd make for a FAR better game IMO.

None of that surprised me, in fact, as negative as I was based on screenshots and F2P, the game *still* let me down.  When I mentioned it during beta, I got the whole "its just a beta!!!!!", but obviously those folks have no idea what "beta" means.  Beta is bug testing and playing with numbers, not game design, and I could easily accept some numbers being off, but the game itself is designed poorly.

I hope Mechwarrior Tactics is more fun, though I'm betting it can't get a rating over 5 by me, hopefully I'm wrong on that one in the positive way I was wrong on MWO in the negative.

Look what I wrote today at work:

Its real time with 100 pixels per "hex" and 10 seconds per "turn", and since I have so much data already, it'd be pretty easy for me within an hour, to let you move around and rotate the turret of 5000 canon BT units.  I'm going to add a bit of code to use a mouse instead of a keyboard to aim your turret and move, any level zooming, then some code to target other units, then some terrain, then some weapons... maybe I'll focus on this over labor day weekend :)