Mechwarrior Living legends: now 100% more living!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Mechwarrior Living legends: now 100% more living!

sgnl05: Jan 16, 2007; Lurker

What is it?
It's a free multiplayer mechwarrior game for PC. Not free to play, just free. Basically you stomp round in a giant robot blowing up other giant robots, or tanks, infantry or aircraft. It's actually a mod for Crysis Wars but the devs have bundled it with the demo into a single installer so you don't actually have to buy Crysis.

How does it play?
Like Mechwarrior crossed with battlefield. The main game mode (and the best one, I'm going to say) is basically battlefield's conquest mode, where you win by capturing and holding control points while trying not to lose too many guys. The biggest difference is that you earn money by capturing points, doing damage and generally helping your team, which can be used to buy better assets. The game also has a free-for-all deathmatch mode which can be fun, and a team deathmatch mode which I personally don't like much, but different strokes I guess. The team modes offer a nice variety of different ways to play, like as a scout or spotter for your team's long range missile assets, fire support, anti aircraft etc.

I'm a huge battletech nerd. Are the mechs appropriately mechy?
Yep. If you've played a mechwarrior game before it's all going to be pretty familiar. WASD controls your legs and throttle and the mouse turns the torso. The mechs have locational damage and destroyable components, a heat system (shoot your guns too much and your mech gets hot and turns itself off), radar with various upgrades that extend the range, make you harder to detect etc. The mechs are well animated and move pretty nicely, and you can even unlock the aiming reticule and move it around the screen to aim your mech's arms independently of the torso if you want.

Didn't this get shut down years ago?
Yes, but a new team has picked it up and started working on it again anyway. Basically what happened is that PGI (the Mechwarrior online guys) put pressure on the original developers to stop development, but without issuing a formal cease and desist, cause that would have made them look bad I guess. The new team have said that they'll keep going until PGI tells them to stop, but its been months since they released their first new version and apparently they've heard nothing from PGI, so what happens next is anyone's guess.

What's new?
Currently, a total balance overhaul, new loadouts for every mech and a new aerospace flight model. The devs have said that the next patch will add new aerospace and further tweak them to make them play better, and the patch after that will add two new battle armor (infantry) types. New vehicles, mechs, and bugfixes are also in the works.

Where do I get it?
Here. Make Sure to download and install 0.8.0 First, and then the 0.8.3 patch.
If the download is slow try the torrents, which you can also find at the link above.

Ok I got it. How do I play this dumb game?
I thought I'd try write a basic tutorial for total beginners. I have no idea if this will be useful or not. I'm assuming you've never played a mechwarrior game before and you're using the default controls

I'm going to assume you've managed to join a server and pick a team. As soon as you've done that a map with a bunch of blue hexagons should pop up. Those are spawn points. Pick one with a robot icon and double click it to spawn.
You spawn as battle armor, which is like infantry but with a jetpack. The controls are standard FPS but holding down spacebar lets you fly around a bit with the jumpjets.
press comma to open the buy menu. You'll notice that most of the assets are greyed out because you can't afford them. You get more money and rank by doing damage, getting kills, capping bases, scouting and spotting for artillery (more on these later). Higher ranks mean you spawn with more cash. Getting kills isn't actually all that important so don't stress about your K:D ratio. Seriously.
Pick a mech you can afford and click on it to buy it. After a few seconds it will spawn. A blue box will show you where it is so you can find it. Use your infantry jumpjets to get on the head/ cockpit section of the mech and press F to get in.
WASD controls the legs. W increases the throttle, S decreases it, A and D turn you left and right. X brings you to a full stop and you'll want to get used to using it cause it stops you more quickly than throttling down, and mechs turn more sharply at lower speeds.
Your mouse controls the torso of the mech, which lets you aim and shoot in a different direction to the one you're moving in.
z lets you zoom in.
See that grid in the top right of the screen? That controls your weapons. The rows are your different weapons and the columns are buttons on your mouse. You can use the arrow keys to move through the different columns and rows, and enter to turn a weapon on or off for a particular column/ mouse button. Left mouse button fires the currently selected column, rmb fires the second, mmb the third, and the fourth and fifth are the side mouse buttons. Since lmb fires the current column I'd recommend leaving the left most column selected when you're done adjusting the weapon groups. Personally I assign identical weapons to the same group, but you can do it by range, or you can be an idiot and map everything plus the kitchen sink to left mouse button so that when you click it every gun you have fires at once and your mech overheats and explodes.
Talking of heat, that's displayed on that bar to the right of the big circle in the middle of your screen, towards the bottom. When you fire weapons your heat will increase. Energy weapons will increase it a lot, while ballistic weapons will only increase it a little. Ideally you want to keep your heat under that orange line about three quarters up the bar. If you don't your mech will take damage and eventually shut down. You can override the shut down by pressing O, but then you'll take even more damage. If you do shut down you can turn your mech on again with P (this also turns it off when it's already on). Pressing C vents coolant which cools you down very quickly, but you only have so much (shown to the left of the heat indicator) and the less you have left, the more easily your mech heats up so you don't want to use it unless you really have to.
The circles in the bottom middle and top left are your radar. Whether an enemy shows up on it or not depends on asset type, distance, equipment and whether your radar and theirs are on or off. Basically, turning it off reduces the range at which you detect and are detected by enemies. You can toggle it on and off with R.
If an enemy appears on your radar you can target them. This has a couple of advantages. Firstly, it shows them on the HUD as a red box which can give you a better idea of where they are if you don't have line of sight. Secondly, it lets you see which parts of their mech or vehicle are damaged. If an enemy's torso is mostly green but their leg is red, aim for the leg and shoot at it until they fall over. You can target the nearest enemy with E, cycle through them with T, and target whatever's under your crosshairs with Q. Incidentally, M opens and closes your map.
Before you leave the spawn, check and see if you have any free tons free for extra ammo. It's listed under the weapons panel in the top right. If you do, open the buy menu again and buy more under the ammo tab.
If you're not in a mech, the weapons tab in the buy menu lets you buy better infantry weapons. Most of these are dropped automatically if you enter a vehicle, so only buy them if you actually want to play infantry
If your mech is damaged you can take it back to the mechbay where it spawned and repair it by turning it off in there. This costs money. You can also sell it by turning it off in the mechbay and pressing J. Note that you don't get the full price back for it so it's not worth doing unless you've made a reasonable amount of money.
You can transfer money to teammates with Right Control. As a new player it's often worth begging in team chat (U) for extra money so you can get yourself into some bigger mechs. Global chat is Y and is mainly used for asking what button does what (you won't need to do this cause you read my cool guide) and abusing the enemy team.
In terms of general strategy the most important thing is to stick with your teammates, since that will keep you alive much longer, and to try not to die cause that loses your team tickets. It can seem like a great idea to eject from your mech when it's about to explode so that you can continue to fight as infantry, but if you do this and then die as infantry your team loses even more tickets, so most of the time it's better to go down with the ship.

Shut up and post youtube videos already

Here you go

What does this thing do?
If the thread gets enough attention I might write an equipment guide, but there's a shitload of content in the game and I want to see whether this sinks like a stone before I type all that out. But if you want to know about something specific, post and I'll answer.

sgnl05 fucked around with this message at 11:51 on May 10, 2017

# ? Feb 11, 2017 09:08

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# ? May 20, 2024 23:26

Plek: Jul 30, 2009

For anyone wondering MW:LL is actually more alive than this thread.

# ? Feb 17, 2017 06:57

tactlessbastard: Feb 4, 2001; Godspeed, post; Fun Shoe

Mechwarrior 3 with a joystick with a hat switch on it was the most fun I ever had as a kid. I've never been able to get it to run right on Windows 10 though

# ? Feb 17, 2017 07:06

sgnl05: Jan 16, 2007; Lurker

No idea about MW3, but I know MWLL has joystick support. I don't know if you can use a hat switch with it though

# ? Feb 17, 2017 07:10

tactlessbastard: Feb 4, 2001; Godspeed, post; Fun Shoe

sgnl05 posted:

No idea about MW3, but I know MWLL has joystick support. I don't know if you can use a hat switch with it though

I meant the game itself, but that's neither here nor there. Thanks for the writeup of this one, I'll check it out one day.

# ? Feb 17, 2017 07:14

Drone: Aug 22, 2003; Incredible machine

Plek posted:

For anyone wondering MW:LL is actually more alive than this thread.

How is the population on this?

# ? Feb 17, 2017 15:28

Scope: Jun 6, 2003

sgnl05 posted:

No idea about MW3, but I know MWLL has joystick support. I don't know if you can use a hat switch with it though

You should be able to assign hat switch functions using the insano control configuration thingy in the MW:LL launcher. It's a little inconvenient to have to quit out of the game to change controls after testing, but once you get them all set up you shouldn't have to mess with it again.

This game is one of my most favorite games of all time. I'm super glad there is a team working on it again and giving it frequent updates. The mixture of mechs, tanks, and aerospace make for a very unique and fun time in the mechwarrior setting. I'll type up some gameplay tips if I can during lunch, or after I get off work today.

*edit* Here's a few words I posted about MW:LL in the MWO thread. Things work a bit differently here than MWO and this is useful stuff for beginners.

Scope posted:

You don't pick what weapons or accessories are on your mech, there are preset mech variants you purchase with c-bills you earn during the map. An example here with the Hollander II: http://wiki.mechlivinglegends.net/index.php?title=Hollander_II (note: the loadouts on the wiki are probably out of date, as this latest community patch changed a lot of stuff) A vehicle usually has a Prime variant, then variants A-E. Sometimes they'll be loaded to top mech weight, sometimes they'll have a few free tons for extra ammo of your choosing.

TTK is much higher here than MWO, leading to much longer brawling, meaning much more fun. Mech handling is a little different too. Turning radius is more affected by speed. If you're running 200+kph in a Solitaire you're not going to be making tight little circles around an assault's ankles like you would in a Locust in MWO. Your turning radius is more football field-sized, and hit and run tactics would work better. There are of course lights that you can run circles around mechs with, but at a slower speed. Mechs can also crouch if stationary, and this allows you to aim your guns higher to hit aircraft. The battle armor you start off in is also a fun thing. You can hitch a ride to the frontlines on top of a friendly mech, and be an irritating bug flying around blasting enemies with BA-sized PPCs and lasers and tossing explosives, and hiding easily. Too many great things for me to continue typing about at work right now, there's tanks/hovercraft/aircraft too, drivable long tom artillery, etc...

There's just so much stuff that's good about this game, if you're wondering what PGI could have done better in MWO, it's probably already done in MWLL.

ALSO NO GHOST HEAT!!!!

One of the biggest things to pay attention to is your turning radius/speed. If you're running a faster mech or hovercraft you'll have slow down to make tighter turns to dodge fire.

Scope posted:

More variety in missiles. There are of course SRMs, SSRMs, and LRMs. There's also MRMs, ATMs, Thunderbolts, and ELRMs. And ArrowIV artillery missiles. Bombs for aircraft.

LRMs are way better too. LRMs are locked by line of sight only, and once locked and fired they will continuously track the target until they hit something or run out of range. Your radar has to be in active mode and you have to visually spot the enemy. Lock time is also affected by stance, so if you crouch your lock time will decrease. LRMs fired without a lock will automatically track any NARC or TAG signal they pick up, without alerting the target they're homing in. A good time is to sneak up near the enemy in a BA with a TAG, have your team fire lots of LRMs from out of LOS over the enemy and as the missiles pass over TAG someone and bring it all down on their head with no warning. Same thing with ArrowIV missiles too. ArrowIV missiles have also received a workover. Each launcher no longer fires a single missile but a salvo of 5, and they spread the damage out over a larger area.

PPC weapons have a heat effect on targets and also an EMP effect, where receiving a hit will shake your aim and scatter your HUD for a few seconds making it difficult to aim. PPCs will also disable a NARC, so if a friendly is NARCed you can PPC the ground by their feet and the splash damage will take the NARC off.

You will respawn as a Battle Armor, and you have a unique set of weapons available to you. You are equipped by default with a small beam laser and an SSRM2, both with infinite ammo. In fact, all BA weapons have infinite ammo except for grenades. As a BA you have the following secondary weapons available to purchase: A BearAC, small autocannon only useful against other BA. A micro heavy laser, good for jumping on top of a mech and burning through into the cockpit. A BA PPC is the most used and best way to damage mechs, it also has a recoil that you can use to push yourself out of the way of incoming fire. C8 explosives, Inferno grenades (does heat to a mech), and NARC grenades that last 60 seconds when attached to something, versus 30 seconds from the standard NARC missile. If you get in a vehicle, you'll lose any arm mounted weapons like the AC/heavy laser/PPC. Also YOU CAN GET OUT OF YOUR MECH. Your entire on-foot experience in MWLL is in a BA, so if you're taking heavy damage you can eject and escape or continue the fight in your BA. (Unless you're lucky, it'll be a short fight. BA has little health and a direct hit from any weapon will smear you)

And did I mention no ghost heat?

Scope fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Feb 17, 2017

# ? Feb 17, 2017 17:37

Plek: Jul 30, 2009

Drone posted:

How is the population on this?

Annoying and variable. But lately there has been 1-2 mostly full servers going in the evening (CST) and a handful of others. They do some tournament thing most weekends too from what I can tell. The game is a pain to get configured perfectly and it refuses to ignore my gamepad but otherwise it feels a little closer to a sim than a shooter.

It isn't really pretty anymore, it has some weird loving bugs and trees will wreck your poo poo, but it is a nice compliment to MWOs bullshit once in a while. Just hope you don't end up on the team opposite of one of the handful of seal-clubbers.

e: Like MWO, it has a desperate need for new maps and either maps or modes that focus more heavily on aero/vees and toading around.

# ? Feb 17, 2017 23:49

sgnl05: Jan 16, 2007; Lurker

I usually find that there's always some players online, although depending on the time there won't always be a lot. If you find that there aren't many players on though you can always try and talk whoever's online into joining a Solaris Arena (free for all) server, since that game mode works fine even one on one.

Plek posted:

e: Like MWO, it has a desperate need for new maps and either maps or modes that focus more heavily on aero/vees and toading around.

Map wise I think it's fine, just cause there are actually a ton of community made maps out there and the game will download them for you if you don't already have them. Aerospace centric maps are an interesting idea though.

Here are some pics of the new battle armor that's coming, in case anyone's interested:

Personally I'm looking forward to these more than all the other new stuff combined. Battle armor is so much fun but compared to mechs, vehicles and aerospace it really hasn't been developed nearly as fully. Hopefully the new suits will change that.

# ? Feb 18, 2017 11:06

Vorenus: Jul 14, 2013

Edit: The game itself is very well-made and has a lot of potential, but is only fun if you define fun as "trying to make sense of unintuitive and unexplained mechanics while fighting against players who have been mastering this game since before MWO existed".

Learning curve and "git gud" is all fine and well, but most of the matches I've played tend to be one team of mostly veteran players mercilessly cheesing and slaughtering a team of mostly new players. In MWO terms, it's like putting a PUG team with 10 matches' experience each against a Lords premade. Potentially great game, terrible cheeselord community.

Vorenus fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Mar 1, 2017

# ? Feb 27, 2017 14:30

Willfrey: Jul 20, 2007; Why don't the poors simply buy more money?; Fun Shoe

Yeah gently caress it I'll give it a go. MWO got stale

# ? Feb 27, 2017 14:51

Mordja: Apr 26, 2014; Hell Gem

Bumping because this game is live as poo poo. Every night I've played there's been a full server, hell, today there were at least two.

Idk what the gently caress I'm doing, it's great, hop on in!

# ? Mar 25, 2017 23:27

sgnl05: Jan 16, 2007; Lurker

Bumping cause there's a new version out, which you can grab here. The changelog is pretty long but the highlights seem to be two new clan aerospace, a reworked flight model and rebalancing for all the existing ASF, new weapon sound effects and a few new VFX, and some new maps and map changes.

# ? May 10, 2017 02:37

New Zealand can eat me: Aug 29, 2008

I would suggest linking to the torrent files in the OP as the http downloads seem to be slammed right now. It's like a 15 minute download vs many hours

# ? May 10, 2017 06:32

Grognan: Jan 23, 2007; by Fluffdaddy

Dling this, who in MWO plays this?

Edit: Also where do people that play this meet up?

Edit2: ok it is asking for a key, it seemed like this was free. Wtf is going on?

Grognan fucked around with this message at 07:48 on May 10, 2017

# ? May 10, 2017 06:40

sgnl05: Jan 16, 2007; Lurker

New Zealand can eat me posted:

I would suggest linking to the torrent files in the OP as the http downloads seem to be slammed right now. It's like a 15 minute download vs many hours

They're at the same location as the regular downloads which I've linked to, but I've added a note saying to try them if the download is too slow. Thanks!

Grognan posted:

Edit: Also where do people that play this meet up?

Edit2: ok it is asking for a key, it seemed like this was free. Wtf is going on?

I think most people just play on the pubs, but I know there's some sort of league thing called chaos march. As for the cd key I have no idea, but yes it absolutely is free. I'd suggest trying the discord server: https://discord.gg/XzUZHcx. They have a tech support subsection so you should get a pretty quick reply there. That's probably also a good place to look if you want to find people for organised play.

# ? May 10, 2017 11:58

New Zealand can eat me: Aug 29, 2008

There should be a "generate random key" right below that box that you can click :unsmith:

Edit: So far the best "cheese" I've found is them voting for maps that lag/crash people out unless they're using the one specific autoexec they distribute from their discord.

New Zealand can eat me fucked around with this message at 20:50 on May 10, 2017

# ? May 10, 2017 17:36

sgnl05: Jan 16, 2007; Lurker

That sounds right. I think it gives you the option to put in your own key in case you have a legitimate one. There's an option for servers to validate cd keys so if you're using a random one you can't join them, but I'm pretty sure almost no servers use that option as all it does is prevent most of the playerbase from joining them.

Like they're actually picking maps to cause players to crash? I've never seen that before. On the whole I've found the community to be pretty good. They'll absolutely stomp you without remorse but at least they tend to be polite and helpful, and are usually willing to balance teams. I don't know what custom autoexec they're handing out on discord, but I use the one you can find here

# ? May 11, 2017 06:36

Grognan: Jan 23, 2007; by Fluffdaddy

That discord invite doesn't work.

Also I am trying to get the game not to exit randomly when I look for a server.

Edit: yeah, about a minute in it just closes.

Grognan fucked around with this message at 06:53 on May 11, 2017

# ? May 11, 2017 06:50

sgnl05: Jan 16, 2007; Lurker

I think this should work:

https://discordapp.com/invite/XzUZHcx

I do get crashes but not when I'm looking for a server so unfortunately 'ask in the discord' is about the only advice I can give.

# ? May 11, 2017 10:23

Commoners: Apr 25, 2007; Sometimes you reach a stalemate. Sometimes you get magic horses.

I played probably ~30 hours of this and had some fun. The vehicles are more fun than the mechs, but the jump jets absolutely own in this. The scale of the maps is really cool too, because it feels like you're actually fighting on some planetary campaign in some important region. It has a few too many netcode problems for me to really like it, and the small community means you get people playing from the middle of loving nowhere where they get horrible lag shields against anything that you throw at them. The community also having its long-time players that teamstack and rarely split up to try to even teams can really ruin matches that would otherwise be fun, and it has some game flow issues where teams that are getting poo poo on have no recovery method, but even when they are getting poo poo on the game won't end any faster (especially since some people will opt to prolong the game so they can continue playing with their big toys instead of just ending it in a closeout.)

It's a very impressive mod all things considered, and it's totally worth trying out.

# ? May 11, 2017 10:55

sgnl05: Jan 16, 2007; Lurker

0.8.4 is out

It's mostly just a hotfix but there are some minor gameplay changes as well. You can find the changelog in the link above.

# ? May 15, 2017 04:47

Scope: Jun 6, 2003

Posting to say this game is still fun. More people should play!

# ? May 23, 2017 02:55

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# ? May 20, 2024 23:26

SpookyLizard: Feb 17, 2009

Do any goons organize to play this? I finally downloaded it after watching some people play on youtube and I'm terrible, but it's scratching the mech itch that Brigador has reinvigorated.

# ? Jun 9, 2017 07:08

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