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[BATTLETECH/Mechwarrior] The [MW5: Clans] are about to Invade the Inner Sphere!
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Use a save editor to give you enough money for the ship upgrades to get you to dropping heavies and use YAML/YAWP? It's not really cheating so much as fixing a gap in what YAML assumes about the start that isn't valid for Rasalhague.
I am really not a fan of that cockpit movement. MW5 had just enough to give you the feeling of a walking vehicle, but the amount of sway that Hellbringer has goes back to the way MWO felt for me— like your pilot seat isn’t connected to your cockpit.
The Clans suck.
I mean, so does the Inner Sphere of course
But the Clans fuckin' suck and I want to giant robot stomp them by abusing the rules of their dumbfuck culture.
(I'm still absolutely going to be playing this)
Gimme.
I love these absurd 90s cartoon-ass villains.
So I suspect my impressions are incomplete, but mostly the clans sound like the Edgy Western Mecha Property version of elves.
You pretty much got the Clan culture correct there. They are also a caste-based culture where their entire society is built to support the warrior caste. The other half of it was when the Clans got introduced to the game they also came with massive power creep with advanced weapons and equipment. We're talking Clan gear was straight up better in every single stat (more damage, more range, less weight, less heat generation, etc) with zero tradeoffs compared to all the existing equipment in game. Obviously a lot of people love playing with such overpowered bullshit which is a big chunk of their overall popularity.
Now lore wise Clans fight for honor and glory so when they enter a fight, they are supposed to issue a battle challenge (batchall) where they bid down to the least amount of forces and equipment they believe can still win the battle against their opponents listed forces. This was included theoretically as a lore based way to balance the technology advantage but it's very rare that anyone actually plays the game that way and no video games include such a mechanic.
Clans have pretty much dominated the games and all of the lore since they were introduced. That's why many people were happy that HBS Battletech and MW5:Mercs were Clan-free. Of course both games were modded, pretty much as soon as it was possible, to add the overpowered Clan mechs and weapons to them.
I was a small bean when this stuff was brand new, so I trust this perspective. Save for "dominated the games and all of the lore", that hasn't actually been the case for a while now. They are certainly a big part, but like, so are the Great Houses?
Things are INCREDIBLY different nowadays, with current lore showing off what happens when two gigantic Clans burn their own military arms to the ground at Terra, and leave their empires to fend for themselves. For example, the bulk of the Jade Falcon merchant cast have formed the Alyina Mercantile League, where the weight of authority is out of the warrior caste's hands. Meanwhile, next door, the highest ranking surviving military member is so progressive (in direct contrast to normal Jade Falcon MO) that freeborn warriors are an integral part of the warrior caste, to the point of new bloodnames being awarded to them. There are multiple instances of Clans integrating with Spheroid nations, in various ways and with mixed results.
Mechanically, tabletop Battletech uses point systems for balance, nowadays. Classic BT uses Battle Value 2.0, and it's considered good enough to trust (mostly). Clans are actually somewhat disadvantaged, thanks to core weaponry like the cERMLAS and cERPPC being SO expensive to use. You almost never see, say, a Nova Prime or any Hellbringers (outside of Random Assignment Tables), because they are so severely overcosted for what they actually bring.
Using a number of examples of Clan-based lore to claim the lore isn't dominated by the Clans isn't a particularly strong argument.
And I specifically used "lore-based" when talking about batchalls because BV as a balancing mechanic is unrelated to it and is about general TT game balance. Clans were introduced to the game in 1990. BV 1 as a balancing mechanic wasn't introduced until 1997. BV 2 came out in 2007.
As for villains... honestly the entire Battletech universe seems to be assholes shooting each other in an eternal crab bucket forever while normal people get stomped on, from where I'm standing? It's not 40K but it's not a lot more hopeful, just less free murdery, in my mind. So the Clans just seem another set for the big pile'o'dickheads, just their rust buckets are fancier and shinier!
Like, that's their point. That's the irony. They left because they noped out of all the petty warmongering of the Inner Sphere, only to come back and somehow be even worse.
You have Clans that are honorable like Wolf and that goes back and forth depending on the writer. But at least as far as the initial invasion is concerned the Clans are capital B for bad.
Also, if the new game even subtly hints at the incestuous nature of the sibkos, it will put a smile on my face at the commitment to lore.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
We got a launch trailer with some new stuff in it. I'm getting a big vibe of
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
They glassed a city from orbit during a temper tantrum, and did get annihilated.
If your speculation is true, that seems like a good way to piss off a lot of people.
I just wonder whether it's going to be dlc and standalone and if so how it's going to interact with the mods I had, because while I could live without most of them I did need to use one whose name I don't remember for the game to not work like absolute shit, and then I had a few QoL things that would be hard to go without.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
It's standalone, and technically on a different engine (they upgraded to ue5), so yeah, it'll be a while until the are mods
MW5: Mercs had a full, bespoke story-based campaign, and most DLC's had their own bespoke story-based campaigns as well. But the game also happens to have infinite procedural contracts to serve as filler content and is the primary source of that game's long term replayability. Which is actually my main concern with Clans is that there is no indication there's any replayability to it once the story campaign is done and that would be a huge waste of the new engine they've built.
It's what I would expect though.
There's some misconception here because if you wanted to play MW5: Mercs as a one and done campaign you can absolutely just do that. If there's a problem with the Mercs story it's due to PGI's poor writing, not the structure of the game.
Yet I would have respected them more to tell that story than taking the easy/lazy way out.
I mean, the campaign exists, but most of the missions are not very designed and the campaign pretty much requires you to spend the majority of your actual play time doing random procedural missions to gear up. It's not really paced like a proper singleplayer campaign or anything.
. . .hopefully, even with the emphasis on a narrative adventure, there's still good replayability here; from what I remember about MW5W, replayability wasn't in the game at first but added in later. Would feel weird for what is clearly a lead forward in game design to not also have it at some point.
We hadn't had a proper MechWarrior game in a very, very long time. If this game had come out just a couple years after MW4 I would have been a very sad MechWarrior. The campaign is more fever dream than Battletech. I'm fairly certain the entirety of all the research the writers did was merely read the back of a few Battletech novels. The DLC stories are markedly improved though. There were also a fair few design choices that made me scratch my head.
However!
Mods! Lots of good mods allow me to make this game what I want and that is worth soooo much to me.
In regards to MW:5 Clans I expect a heel turn. The Jags are bad, bad, very bad, not good people. I mean hyper-uber-bad. Not just for what they did during the Clan invasion, but how they treat their own people. Their Warriors casually murder lower caste members for basically any reason. Oh you almost bumped into a Trueborn Warrior in a hall? Well now your skull is caved in against the bulkhead. What's that? There's a food shortage? Easy fix, cull the lower caste. Fuck you other Clans for offering to take some of our people to alleviate the problem! Stay out of our business!
If there is no heel turn then I expect the reason would be for one of two things;
1) They whitewashed Clan Smoke Jaguar's eccentricities.
2) PGI didn't really do their research and Clan Smoke Jaguar is merely accidentally whitewashed.
It seemed like a pretty typical Battletech story to me. But the DLCs were a big step up specifically in story mission design, and integrating with the key conflicts of the era.
I guess I should say the main campaign is like if an AI wrote a Battletech story. The broad strokes are there, but the details of the setting are iffy.
You mean like how the campaign was set in 3015 and they still couldn't stop themselves shoehorning the damn Clans into the story.