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Runa posted:There's a lot of little and extremely specific complaints to be made about PGI and if you only take them one at a time without ever considered the existence of the others, or the negative picture they paint about the company's management of their game as a whole, then it can be easy to handwave them away. But if you actually look at the big picture, it's easy to see why MWO failed and who made the decisions that led to that failure. What is your metric for failure here? The game's nearly 10 years old which is a hell of a long time for a video game to still get updates at any cadence, it's still getting new content and mechs every once in a while. The playerbase on Steam looks largely unchanged in numbers since 2020. It's nowhere near Fortnight numbers or anything, and I wouldn't call MWO a huge success, but that's far from what I would define as a failure.
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May 18, 2023 21:53
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modern MWO is successful for, broadly, three reasons: 1. The core gameplay is pretty good 2. Recently they handed balance changes over to players and they made a bunch of tweaks that revitalized it 3. Mechdads have money to spare and love nostalgia it's certainly not a failure of a game but it's a lot less than what it could have been
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May 18, 2023 22:29
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Okay I'd we're going to be strict with the definition of failure to actual shutdowns then any game that manages to scrape by with a modest but enthusiastic core player base won't count, but there's a shitton of f2p games that I wouldn't consider successful that don't meet this harder qualifier for failure. So I count MWO in this incredibly large category of games with big ambitions that fell very short of their initial goals and apparent potential. Also lol if you've never played or are not currently playing a failed game. Gundam Evolution is one of the best hero shooters by core gameplay but their match structure is incredibly bad and they, plus a lack of crossplay, absolutely killed its population. I count it as a failure even if there's still people playing it both in the US and Japan. I still play and enjoy it. I consider it a failed game anyway.
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May 18, 2023 22:49
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And the failed game I'm most bitter about is actually Titanfall 2. The way EA treated that game is a drat travesty. It's still technically playable, still has one of the best single player FPS campaigns in recent memory and people keep it alive with private servers. It also sold millions. If you tried to tell me it wasn't a failure then I could possibly agree on a rational level with the right justifications, but everyone would know in their heart that it wouldn't be true.
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May 18, 2023 23:00
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Runa posted:And the failed game I'm most bitter about is actually Titanfall 2. The way EA treated that game is a drat travesty. Titanfall 2 was brought out back and shot by EA, it would have "failed" even if it was the best selling game of the year
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May 18, 2023 23:04
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Improbable Lobster posted:Titanfall 2 was brought out back and shot by EA, it would have "failed" even if it was the best selling game of the year I know and that just makes it worse
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May 18, 2023 23:06
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Mwo has never progressed past being a really bad world of tanks reskin that was never as well put together as wot. Even trying mwo years later it still wasnt as good as closed beta wot when it only went up to tier 6 arty
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May 18, 2023 23:36
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I truly never thought I'd see the day when someone would defend PGI post MW5 but here we are I'm not even trying to dog. I'm genuinely dumbfounded
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May 19, 2023 01:43
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I R SMART LIKE ROCK posted:I truly never thought I'd see the day when someone would defend PGI post MW5 but here we are I know exactly how you feel, but I can't deny they did help with the decades long legal problem even if their management of the gameplay and community was a casebook of what not to do.
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May 19, 2023 02:42
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Amechwarrior posted:I know exactly how you feel, but I can't deny they did help with the decades long legal problem even if their management of the gameplay and community was a casebook of what not to do. even your worst enemy can do good. no matter how unlikely
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May 19, 2023 03:32
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Also, mw5 with a big ole pile of mods is legitimately very very fun in coop and Plenty Fine in single player. I'd have enjoyed a better single player campaign, but with all the dlc stuff, there's still enough.
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May 19, 2023 14:22
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MW5 is one of those games that is very reliant on mods to flesh out an extremely bland, mediocre base product. The DLC campaigns honestly make the base game look even worse because even the relatively basic setpieces in them are infinitely more fun and interesting than normal MW5 missions which consist of walking up to a perfectly formed square of procgen city located in the middle of a giant desolate field and shooting infinitely spawning enemies that pop out of the ether just out of your line of sight until you either finish the mission or get bored and leave.
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May 19, 2023 14:27
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I've long given up on reasonable and balanced mechs in MW5 in favour of gimmicks like an assault mech with maxed out hardened armour, biggest possible engine, and a giant katana.
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May 19, 2023 14:36
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The Mechwarrior 4 competitive multiplayer community was huge (relatively speaking, for a game in a niche genera). There were several active competitive leagues and a robust modding community that produced mechs and weapons that were balanced for and used by the leagues. The Microsoft devs were, to their credit, responsive to the player base and introduced balance patches and produced two expansions and two mech packs (in modern terms think 4 DLC packs, two of which had full campaigns, and the other two just containing mechs). The point being that there was a large community of people who knew how Mechwarrior games worked. They knew what worked, in MW4, what didn't work and needed to be fixed, and what was missing and needed to be added. The short version of "what went wrong with MWO" is that PGI did not know these things, and completely ignored the community that did. The turning point, IMO, was the release of the clan mechs. They had been promising 'community warfare' (think a persistent map thing, like what Roguetech has), for a while. It was impossible to run the kind of leagues MW4 had (which had persistent maps, mech production metagame, etc) because you couldn't run custom games in MWO, but CW promised to bring us something like MW4's multiplayer, but centralized and for everyone. They announced and released the clan mechs, including the ridiculous gold mechs, before CW was released, even in alpha. It should have killed the game but the sick thing is that it worked. It was then that I realized that there were enough scrubs with too much nostalgia and too much money to sustain MWO just by releasing new mech models. MWO is a Gacha Game with an arena mode.
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May 19, 2023 15:04
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MW4 mercs single player owns and it sucks that every version available bugs out on the Steiner path now
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May 19, 2023 15:10
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Like seriously. PGI killing BATTLETECH 2 is something I'd joke about because 'lol PGI ruins everything', but then they went and did it. gently caress Russ. gently caress Paul. gently caress absolutely everyone in management.
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May 19, 2023 15:11
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Making good Mechwarrior games is lostech. I can't imagine Russ and Paul orchestrating something like the goofy MW4 live action opening cinematic. These guys can barely put together a ray tracing demo.
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May 19, 2023 15:14
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I feel like a lot of you were expecting fancy steak dinners from PGI when they brought fast food. I was fine with and wanted fast food. A massive community warfare map sounds like the least interesting thing to me, I liked the low friction play a few rounds in multiplayer of MWO. That whole MW4 online multiplayer persistent map situation you're describing sounds like the last thing I would want out of a Battletech game. It's great offline, but I wouldn't want to deal with player politics for an online experience.
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May 19, 2023 15:14
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I just wish the bt engine was multithreaded or whatever the key problem is that makes it stutter on my machine that should handle it without blinking
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May 19, 2023 15:19
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Chainclaw posted:I feel like a lot of you were expecting fancy steak dinners from PGI when they brought fast food. I was fine with and wanted fast food. gently caress off, Russ
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May 19, 2023 15:21
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Captain Foo posted:I just wish the bt engine was multithreaded or whatever the key problem is that makes it stutter on my machine that should handle it without blinking Roguetech takes so long to load I'll often just leave it running all day, or kick off a mission and go do dishes.
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May 19, 2023 15:22
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The MW5 hangar reminds me of when EVE Online introduced "captain's quarters" where your character could sit on a couch and that was about it. I also enjoy getting quests like "Talk to Ryana" because it tickles my imagination with all the other kind of quest notifications I might someday receive.
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May 19, 2023 15:33
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Chainclaw posted:Roguetech takes so long to load I'll often just leave it running all day, or kick off a mission and go do dishes. Bta takes A While, yeah
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May 19, 2023 15:34
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Surprised nobody mentioned how they planned to put MWO on life support a decade ago, as they were moving on to their next big project. Which was a StarCitizen clone so blatant, they stole art assets from SC for their not-actually-a-Kickstarter. Then when they only got like a grand in pre-orders (out of an expected half a mil) they suddenly announced 'oh hey we're updating MWO again ignore that last post' and said that Clan 'Mechs were coming.... Basically PGI fell into a money pit when their simple in concept 'Mech arena shooter game got big due to the fanbase having nothing decent for 10 years, outside of the Living Legends mod. They got an easy windfall since the fanbase was happy to have anything with stompy 'Mechs, so even with the glitches and uninspired gameplay, it was good enough, and there was promise it'd follow the Wargaming route with clan battles (and Clan battles) and more game modes and maps all that good stuff. We got that (mostly poorly implemented, hoo boy was the meta game a mess when it first dropped) but also changes that were questionable to the point of almost being purpose made to make things unfun. The big one was when they added the Highlander, and it turned out the anti-poptart feature didn't actually do anything (shaky aim while jumping, but once the jets are off you can snipe fine so) and then when people countered with the Hexstalker builds, we got Ghost Heat. Game can be fun, I've sometimes joined mates who are big into it, and also MW5 (with the caveat that they run a ton of mods, including their own custom ones to make if playable and fun) But it's so much less than it could have been, purely from management decisions and some incompetent programming, like the many times they'd make a change that was good and cool, and then the next patch reversed by accident.
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May 19, 2023 15:34
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Chainclaw posted:I feel like a lot of you were expecting fancy steak dinners from PGI when they brought fast food. I was fine with and wanted fast food. Most of us were expecting PGI to make a game at least as good and involved as the then-11-old predecessor in the series. The community warfare maps in MW4 Mercs didn't replace quick matches. Quick matches still existed. PGI basically fell into the poo poo by producing a game in a dead franchise that players were desperate for another entry in, so they got a lot of default players who played the game because they had no other options, and instead of meaningfully improving and iterating on the game they just kind of sat on it indefinitely. They would have abandoned it long ago if their other attempts at projects weren't complete failures, as outlined by the post above. MW5 Mercs came out in 2019 and is a fundamentally worse experience in basically every respect other than visual fidelity than MW4 Mercs, a game that came out in 2002.
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May 19, 2023 15:57
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Kanos posted:Most of us were expecting PGI to make a game at least as good and involved as the then-11-old predecessor
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May 19, 2023 16:13
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Marx Headroom posted:The MW5 hangar reminds me of when EVE Online introduced "captain's quarters" where your character could sit on a couch and that was about it. You can also talk to Fahad, who gives you helpful hints like "don't get shot".
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May 19, 2023 16:22
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I enjoyed every time the campaign made me talk to him to get "cor blimey guvnur the mechs ave all fallen down apples and pairs innit!" I got MW5 on sale and for an unmodded run + a modded run I'd say that was about the right price for what I got out of it.
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May 19, 2023 16:27
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The correct price for MW5 is $0, because any amount of money spent on it enriches PGI.
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May 19, 2023 16:33
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Are there good clan mech mods for MW5 yet? Last time we did a coop playthrough, I think there was just a Timberwolf mod. What I'm seeing in a search is there are a few more models ported over from MWO, but most of it's IIC stuff using the MW5 base models, so not interesting enough to start another playthrough soon.
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May 19, 2023 16:38
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Paingod556 posted:Which was a StarCitizen clone so blatant, they stole art assets from SC for their not-actually-a-Kickstarter. "You can fly ships in our ship flying game" was the $1,000,000 stretch goal, lol.
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May 19, 2023 16:41
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Organ Fiend posted:Like seriously. When / what was this all about? I've always thought that the only thing HBS licensed from PGI was the mech artwork, to make less work for them and keep things visually consistent between the two games. Pretty sure that PGI only had rights to the 'Mechwarrior' IP, not video game production rights to the BT franchise as a whole, so if the license ran out for HBS to make another Battletech game, that wasn't on PGI.
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May 19, 2023 16:46
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Captain Foo posted:MW4 mercs single player owns and it sucks that every version available bugs out on the Steiner path now You know what's kind of funny is that I remember when MW4 Mercs came out a lot of grognards kept griping about how it wasn't a real BattleTech game ,the mechbay was too simple, and Mechwarrior 3 superior in every way. As a teenager I could not figure out how to make MW3 work, and just liked the splodey mechs I could have in 4.
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May 19, 2023 16:56
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:You know what's kind of funny is that I remember when MW4 Mercs came out a lot of grognards kept griping about how it wasn't a real BattleTech game ,the mechbay was too simple, and Mechwarrior 3 superior in every way. As a teenager I could not figure out how to make MW3 work, and just liked the splodey mechs I could have in 4. That was definitely a thing, but even at the time they were dumb and wrong. I played a lot of MW3 and MW4 multiplayer in clan vs clan stuff(clan as in the ancient term for "group of internet game players" rather than the battletech term, ofc), and MW3 was kind of a hopeless mess. The game's broken netcode and completely freeform 'mechbay ironically sanded off any mech variety because the game was fundamentally about boating as many medium lasers as you could on a small, fast moving chassis like a Shadowcat to kill people in two or three alphas without getting hit. Even the off-meta builds that weren't just medium laser spam were different kinds of boats, typically LRM or Streak SRM boats because those weapons could function in the game's bad netcode(though they were off-meta because it was possible to cram like 4 AMS onto a standard build and nullify anything less than like 80 missiles, lmao). MW4's hardpoint system honestly offered more options to the player than MW3's completely freeform system, because the inability to just boat a million of the best weapons in your build forced people to try different things and made different chassis attractive. Instead of competitive MW3 team fights which consisted of a dozen mediums running in circles trying to leg each other with medium laser alpha strikes, you actually had a variety of mech types on the field. Yeah, you still had some lame poo poo like poptart gauss assaults and missile boats, but there were honestly a ton of viable options.
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May 19, 2023 17:06
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Chainclaw posted:I feel like a lot of you were expecting fancy steak dinners from PGI when they brought fast food. I was fine with and wanted fast food. it's okay to like something other people don't but this is not the first time you've handwaved replies with non-responses like "oh well that's too specific" or "oh well you just wanted too much" and that's kind of a lovely thing to do when people are responding to your question, in good faith, about why they don't like PGI. Their opinions are equally as valid as yours, even if you disagree. tl;dr you asked the question, don't be like this to people answering it Runa posted:And the failed game I'm most bitter about is actually Titanfall 2. frontier defense alone would be an incredible game. The campaign alone would be an incredible game. Attrition alone ... you get where I'm going here. It's ridiculous. Psion fucked around with this message at 19:16 on May 19, 2023 |
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May 19, 2023 17:10
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afflictionwisp posted:When / what was this all about? I've always thought that the only thing HBS licensed from PGI was the mech artwork, to make less work for them and keep things visually consistent between the two games. Pretty sure that PGI only had rights to the 'Mechwarrior' IP, not video game production rights to the BT franchise as a whole, so if the license ran out for HBS to make another Battletech game, that wasn't on PGI. It's purely speculation, there's no actual reason to think that PGI was the reason for no battletech 2.
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May 19, 2023 17:32
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Maybe we can expect another game in 2028
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May 19, 2023 17:54
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Chainclaw posted:Are there good clan mech mods for MW5 yet? Last time we did a coop playthrough, I think there was just a Timberwolf mod. What I'm seeing in a search is there are a few more models ported over from MWO, but most of it's IIC stuff using the MW5 base models, so not interesting enough to start another playthrough soon. There's a lot more clan mechs now, including most of the ones that I remember as iconic (notably missing Warhawk and Kodiak, as well as some great lighter mechs. Though running 2 adders and 2 cougars in infiltration missions is great). My current main lance is a Blood Asp, Savage Wolf, King Crab, and rotating last slot to fit tonnage requirements. Often a Hellbringer or a Mad Dog. Check out Yet Another Clan Mech and the associated YAML mods to see the clan stuff that's there now. The Blood Asp, Stone Rhino, and Dire Wolf all have pretty good models. There's another modder who put in some decent mechs too, most recently the Hollander, with pretty great models. I dunno if it'll be enough for you but I'm still having a lot of fun. I bought mw5 right before Rasalhague, played the original two campaigns unmodded and then imported my save into Rasalhague unmodded. That was, like, fine. I got everything except Rasalhague on sale and I feel like I got my money's worth but only barely, if that makes sense? But the modded game has really given it a new lease on life and I have put more hours in modded than unmodded in two careers now - (one starting at clan invasion time period to experience the new tech, the second starting earlier to do Kestrel Lancers and Rise of Rasalhague with slightly more varied but still mostly IS equipment going in). I really like the modded game. Psion posted:it's okay to like something other people don't but this is not the first time you've handwaved replies with non-responses like "oh well that's too specific" or "oh well you just wanted too much" and that's kind of a lovely thing to do when people are responding to your question, in good faith, about why they don't like mwo. Their opinions are equally as valid as yours, even if you disagree. This feels pretty unfair to me. Chainclaw articulated their position and here is trying to summarize the difference, which is a difference in expectations. They don't say that it's wrong to expect steak, or that steak is bad, or that anyone is a dummy for expecting steak in the first place (though expecting to be able to turn the mechs heads is a head scratcher for me, that's for sure). Just that they had lower expectations and that's why they're happy enough with how things turned out. It doesn't read as dismissive to me, but as summarizing the difference in opinion in a way that lets people agree to disagree. Ultimately I think you're the one invalidating someone's opinions, and the clear minority party in a discussion at that.
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May 19, 2023 18:36
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Kanos posted:That was definitely a thing, but even at the time they were dumb and wrong. This guy gets it. Who did you play with? Anyone in NBT4 or UTS?
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May 19, 2023 18:39
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Gwaihir posted:It's purely speculation, there's no actual reason to think that PGI was the reason for no battletech 2. More or less process or elimination.
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May 19, 2023 18:41
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