After building a new computer I sat down and started to
install all of the shit that used to be on my old computer. That was, more or less, a huge failure. Windows 8 is just riddled with issues, from
hardware detection to updates to stability and connectivity. The fact that my old install of Vista wasn’t
terribly stable doesn’t help. So after
hours and hours of trying to figure out how the fuck to get this system to
work, I sat down and installed Mechwarrior Online.
I’ve barely even thought about patching up Steam, my
drivers, Starcraft and Heroes of Newerth since.
Mechwarrior Online is fucking incredible. It is, more or less, exactly what you’d
expect: an updated, reskinned version of the amazing Mechwarrior games of old. The physics, the kinetics of the play, the
pacing, it’s all there. It’s an intensive, in the cock pit, fuck accessibility
romp through Mech to Mech combat. You’ll
gracelessly clash with other players, many of whom will be considerably better
than you could ever hope to be, you’ll get frustrated time after time as you
try to play your Mech the way you think it should be played and then you’ll
have a sudden moment of epiphany when you actually play it the way it’s
supposed to be played. Which will be as
surprising as it is perfectly logical to you.
The thrill of the lucky headshot into a light Mech’s cockpit
as it runs rings around you, pounding the shit out of you, the rush as you just
barely evade an Atlas crushing you with its multitude of weapons and duck into
a tunnel, just barely still breathing. There’s
something visceral and intellectual, graceful and awkward about every
engagement in a Mech. The energy I feel
when I gush about it borders on shameful, but there’s something special about
the Mechwarrior play that makes people come back to it, something about that lucky
shot landing or that hail mary strategy working that sets Mechwarrior games
aside from other shooters.
I’d gush at length about the balance between heat
management, ammo management, range and mobility, but that’s not really what I
want to do here. What I want to do is
speak briefly, and frankly, about how free-to-play games can break.
Because the gameplay is the only sound design element of
Mechwarrior Online. It is riddled with
so many flaws, it’s insane. The UI is
ugly, the controls are unintuitive, documentation is atrocious and the client
is designed in a fashion that makes it seem like a browser based game, despite
the fact that it plays in a separate window, which is a literal window most of
the time but can become a full-screen display if you try really, really hard
and navigate a browser based option screen.
Every single config option that would normally be accessed by tapping
the escape key and clicking on an options menu has been buried under layers and
layers of social-media inspired design.
It makes for a frustrating out of game experience between matches.
And then there’s the customization sub-menu. While there are overarching breakdowns that
list things like available hardpoints and equipped gear, the actual position of
those hardpoints, and the process of customizing gear, is a great deal trickier. If you want to do that you’ll have to wade
through list after list of specific Mech locations, which will be loaded with
totally unexplained information that only the most erudite fans will know the
meaning of offhand. To be fair, there
are a lot of die-hard fans who are coming to Mechwarrior Online, so that last
bit is actually sort of forgiveable. But
what’s less forgivable is the absence of any kind of specific data about
hardpoints (in abstentia of the equipment provided on default Mechs, which
often doesn’t actually take up all the available hardpoint on a given
configuration) which makes actually planning out potential changes a huge pain
in the ass.
If you want to make some bigger changes to your loadout by adding
in things like ferro-fibrous armor, endo-steel skeletons or double heat sinks,
then you’re in real trouble. In order to
acquire those items you’ll have to navigate to a separate menu from the “put
specific weapons in specific slots” menu, which means you have to be sure of
the changes you’re making to your Mech before you try to tinker with their
armor or structure or heat sinks. This
wouldn’t be a big deal if the changes you made to Mech configurations weren’t
permanent, and didn’t cost C-Bills, the game’s earned currency which, after a
generous but brief initial grace period clearly aimed at letting players buy at
least one class of Mech to play outside of the trial Mechs, become extremely
hard won. It also wouldn’t be quite such
a big deal if these changes didn’t interfere with other alterations you might
want to make based on the changes you’re already making.
For example, let’s say you wanted to add ferro-fibrous armor
to your Mech to free up a little weight so you could squeeze in another weapon
or two. You’ll notice, as you read about
what ferro-fibrous armor actually does, that you’re going to be losing “critical
slots,” a resource in Mech customization separate from weight required to mount
certain types of equipment. If you don’t
know the count of critical slots on your Mech off hand there’s a good chance
you’ll find yourself without enough room to actually make the alterations you
planned on making, since there’s no easy way to see how many critical slots
your Mech should have at a glance. And
if you do make the equipment purchase and then navigate back to the previous
menu to find that you can’t make the changes you’d hoped to make, you’ve just
spent a substantial sum of C-Bills changing something that, in retrospect, you
didn’t want to change. And if you want
to shift it back to the way it was? It’ll
cost you. Quite a bit, actually.
And there’s the real rub of Mechwarrior Online: money. There are four forms of currency in this
game. Three of them are gained through
play: Mech specific experience, GXP and C-Bills. The fourth, “MC,” is purchased using real
world money. Experience and GXP are
fairly distributed to players, if a bit ill-conceived: each of these currencies
allows players to upgrade their performance, either in a specific Mech or in a
general way that significantly changes the way the game plays. So players who have been playing longer will
actually accelerate faster, turn sharper and dissipate heat more quickly and
efficiently than new players. They’ll be
able to look farther and acquire information about the battlefield more
rapidly. They’ll just be better than
older players. But since there’s no real
world money changing hands, this just seems like an ill-conceived design choice
that generates a community hostile to beginners.
MC and C-Bills have a more disturbing relationship. MC can be used to buy all sorts of neat
doodads, custom paint jobs for Mechs, slots to put new Mechs into, dashboard
ornaments and decals that you can slap on your custom paint job. It can also be used to buy things you’d
usually have to spend C-Bills on. Things
like additional Mechs. This might seem
minor until you realize that only purchased Mechs can gain experience, and that
certain benefits only unlock after a certain number of purchased Mechs have
reached a certain level of customization.
There’s a healthy number of free Mechs to play which rotate on a regular
basis (in one of the better design choices that Piranha made/stole from League
of Legends) but those Mechs often don’t allow players to fill every role, and
when placed against certain high-end purchased or customized Mechs, which have
been heavily altered with all the C-Bills that their owners had left over from
purchasing the Mechs themselves with real world money, can’t really stand up
for long. There are even Hero Mechs,
which can only be purchased with C-Bills and possess unique loadouts and
structures while providing their pilots with bonuses to C-Bills and experience
earned.
I know it’s childish to whine about this sort of thing
impacting a free to play game, and I don’t think that it’s necessarily bad to
sell Mech designs. In fact, I think it’s
a good idea. But the manner in which it
impacts gameplay, paired with a customization system hostile to new players, is
unsettling. Giving players who want to
financially support the game more flexibility in terms of how they can play is
great. Letting them customize their Mechs
in neat little ways? Even better! But the way that Mechwarrior Online currently
employs free to play mechanics effectively gives a gameplay advantage to
players who spend more money. That’s
something that we’ve long feared, and something that promises to kill
free-to-play for all but the most hardcore players – a big problem in a game
like Mechwarrior Online, where the barrier of entry is already substantial and
the players who are going to stick around seem, to be frank, a little bit less
likely than Farmville players to dump shitloads of money into the game over
time.
Mechwarrior Online is amazing. It’s also distinctly problematic: I can see
new players foundering miserably and not making it through their first few
matches. I can see veterans forming a
tightly knit community where they know each other’s name, a community that simply
cannot support the costs of running an online game. I can see a lot of potential problems with an
incredible game, a game that reminds me of the wonderful failed Battletech 3025
that briefly flared up in 2001. I’m a
great deal more optimistic about its future, and it is currently in beta, but
the manner in which the virtual marketplace of Mechwarrior Online operates
concerns me as both a gamer and a fan of the Mechwarrior series. Here’s hoping the kinks get ironed out soon.
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