Having not really followed the game until recently, I just got done with about 15 hours of it over the weekend. I'll repaste my impressions that I wrote on another site.
So some friends tried to get me into this a few weeks ago at a LAN party. I wrote it off because I too thought it was the crappy arcadey one. Man am I glad I was wrong and gave it a real try.
I would have preferred straight tonnage math, because I find the hard points an unnecessary restriction designed for progression reasons (people would never want or need more than 4 mechs w/o hard point restrictions.)
That said, it does add diversity to the mech lists, which isn't a bad thing.
This game's probably most shining feature to me is the short matches. They are a godsend. They make me want to play more instead of less. Compared to a 30 to 45 minute FPS game, I gobble up these 10 minute matches and losing, losing horribly or just doing mediocre doesn't make me want to put it down. I'm just eager to get to the next game. Contrast to Planetside 2, which I also just started playing, the action is almost near constant, especially when you have two mechs to play with and can just drop the match as soon as you're dead.
Which is all a good thing, because man I sssuuuuuucccccckkkkkeeeeddddd my first 30 games. Playing the Cicada trial mech, I was getting obliterated because I simply didn't get what kind of game it was. (Despite having played the table top games since I was a little kid.) It's all about staying with your team. Once I quit doing a 129km/h jog in front of the entire enemy team, I stopped dying like a ***** so often. It's kind of amazing to me how well they've captured the dynamics of the table top game, from sniping from behind to cover to all out fire fights in the open.
Still, once I clued in to how I should be playing, I continued to die without getting a great match score, or even an average one. I bought a Cataphract FX and still couldn't seem to make the magic happen.....and then there was this one game....
My team was sitting around the base, and I had my left side to the left wall that cradled it, slightly ahead of my team and looking out toward the enemy cap point. Well, the light mechs come in a back entrance and start shooting me in the back. Panicked, I turn and start walking back towards the center of the cap point. Then I start taking MORE rounds in the back from the approaching enemy mediums, heavies and assaults. Now critically damaged, I've barely hurt anyone at this point. I narrowly get away as the rest of my team engages, taking the enemy's attention off of me, and I move to the back of the cap point with my team in front of me. I start sending out LRMs as target locks begin appearing, as the entire enemy team rolls in.
3 minutes later, most of my team is dead. As damaged mechs keep pushing through our lines, they find me at the back, pouring LRMs, med and large lasers into them. We win the game, 10 kills to 8, with me and one other team mate still alive. I got 3 kills.
I'm not going to say MWO isn't hard, it's unforgiving as ****. Victory is all about numerical superiority, positioning and timing. It's a really refreshing change of tactics compared to your average FPS, where it's about dudes hiding in corners or running up behind you and killing you before you can turn around. Victory in Mechwarrior isn't solely about your twitch skills, or even necessarily your build. I like how every mech class feels useful, and am completely blown away by how useful light and medium mechs are in a game like this. A friend of mine runs a spider with just two medium pulse lasers, and I watch him go to town shooting heavier mechs in their cockpit, while running by at full speed, and getting kills.
I still don't make a lot of kills (as I'm now really paranoid about being even the 3rd person to engage) but I put up a decent match score instead of being at the bottom all the time. As a heavy mech, you have to find the right balance between aggression and caution. Without the mobility to get OUT of a fight quickly, ending up in an unfavorable position can completely screw you. I'm still learning to process a lot of the UI info as well. Took me a while to realize I was often shooting at guys out of range. Again it's refreshing to have UI data that's useful and important, compared to your average manshooter where you don't want or need half of what they show you. I wish the enemy mech readout panel was not in the upper right corner. I often forget to look at it, in the heat of combat.
The only things I don't like about the game are: the clunky menu UI in the launcher, the abusive microtransaction model (or I suppose, rates. Camo is ****ing ridiculous) and the level selection. Most levels are fine, at least they have topography and there's variety. But the newest ice level they just released? Yeah, **** that one. Letting one team stand on a giant hill and snipe the other team at 1000m across a wide open ice plain is balls. As starter maps they're not bad, but they need to be better.
Can't wait until this game has a more time under it's belt and they can get into the clan mechs and really fill out the equipment lists. Gotta have that MASK and Long Tom.
TLDR:
Pros- Visually spot on, good effects, proper mech handling and feeling. Fun, tactical combat. Mostly faithful table top adaptation, engrossing mech building, micro-transactions aren't game breaking, quick matches keep you playing.
Cons- Learning curve can be a little disheartening, can't modify controls in-game or setup some mech stuff out of game. Microtransactions and visual customization options like camo are priced kind of abusively. There's quite a bit of grinding. Levels could be better.
All in all I think it's pretty awesome. I can put up with most of the cons. If microtransactions had any more impact on game play I'd have a problem with it. They give you just enough non-gameplay customization that can be bought with c-bills that I can deal. For a game that's captured the essence of Mechwarrior this well, I can take some stupid stuff. When the game is out of beta and they start rolling out new content more regularly, it's going to get even better.
If people were scared off of it from earlier, I'd say check it out now. The balance on all the things that revolve around microtransactions is in a place where I can live with them, and the game is honestly FUN and the matches are quick, which makes the grinding a lot easier to tolerate. As an American, I had great ping...but I did see a lot of 200 ping players, which I'd assume are the Europeans. I noticed few if any bugs while I was playing.
If you do start, I'd advise playing the trial mechs for a good long while. They suck but you can still make kills with them if you are smart. You want a good understanding of the game AND some extra cash for new weapons and systems, before you spend your starter cash on your first mech.
Author
Topic: Mechwarrior Online (Read 108482 times)