I expressed concerns at both MWO’s free-to-play ethos and
its somewhat slapdash, buggy design in previous posts. Since then I’ve been playing MWO ceaselessly,
watching it change and grow. I’ve spent
money on it and, following a recent UI overhaul and the release of a bevy of
new mechs, I’ve got to say, I’m incredibly happy about paying for MWO.
I’ve paid for other free-to-play games in the past and
regretted it. SWTOR, for example, after
it went free-to-play. I have no idea why
I spent money on a game I barely played for benefits that, to me, were pretty
unclear. Heroes of Newerth, which I
spent a whopping $30 on, is now free-to-play, and shifted to free-to-play
without so much as a nod to its paying customers (though I believe I may have
received some gold coins at some point in the past as a thanks for my
money). Tribes: Ascend seemed like a
good purchase at the time, but now all I do is just play a Pathfinder that I’ve
used experience points to unlock gear for so, in retrospect, having spent money
on other classes seems a little silly.
But MWO, with its slow burning progress and its movement
from “iffy venture” to “solidly constructed game” has made me feel like I’m
receiving a constant return on my investment.
It’s still far from perfect.
MWO crashes spectacularly, occasionally locking up my entire
system. Though I’m no longer being
blinded by my own UI, I do still run into game-breaking bugs and crashes,
usually at a rate of twice a week.
Disconnects and partial or unbalanced teams remain par for the course. It’s still a mess, a work in progress filled
with whiny assholes who seem more interested in airing grievances than they are
in playing a game.
But amongst these dickheads there’s a robust core community
interested in teamwork, in problem solving and coordinating to play one of the
more original and interesting titles to emerge in this decade. There are plenty of derivative multiplayer
games, but MWO, with its map-control centered game modes and its queer
positional play (wherein relative positioning is essentially at the core of
every engagement) isn’t one of them, even though it’s emerging from a well-trod
intellectual property and lineage.
Perhaps because it’s emerging from a well-trod piece of intellectual
property.
At its core, MWO is a game for people who loved the
Mechwarrior games of old. Old school
gamers without peer who actually come together online for the sake of playing
games coalesce around its steel hulks and engage in honest-to-god conversation
sometimes in order to accomplish goals, and it is incredible. It’s far from universal, of course. There are dicks on MWO, but the dick count,
overall, is quite low, and the volume at which the dicks shriek, which is
normally beyond cacophonous on the internet, is actually quite low in MWO. The people who stick around, the people
willing to spend a little money and play hour after hour, grinding up their
mech xp and earning c-bills to mod their hard earned chassis, are by and large
the kind of people you’d actually want to sit and have a beer with.
I have no idea if this is a result of MWO being a labor of
love, of it being a Kickstarted FTP game, or of it being a dense, relatively
inaccessible game that doesn’t fit neatly into any other genre. After all, it’s not a first person shooter,
and it certainly isn’t an RTS, though it has qualities of both. But regardless of how the alchemy of MWO has
operated to make its community so solid, it’s a good thing that it’s worked as
well as it has since MWO relies almost entirely on this community to make its
game work.
I’m not simply talking about drawing in passionate people
willing to shell out a couple of bucks here and there to keep servers running,
though those people are tremendously important to MWO. I’m talking about people willing to talk to
one another in order to win a match, people who are willing to play a game in a
way that doesn’t always make them feel heroic or allow them to do the most
damage in a given match so that they can accomplish something as a team. MWO is all about that kind of sacrifice and
cooperation.
Of course, it helps for me that I’ve got a pretty solid
group of friends playing MWO consistently.
Having even one teammate hooked up to you over VOIP makes a tremendous
difference, and coordinating second to second to adjust to circumstances, even
as you’re taking fire, allows for some pretty epic acts of cooperation. My friend Mark, for example, often pilots
mechs with stripped down armor and heavy weapons set inside their paper-thin
frames. I usually pilot big, hulking
masses of armor designed to survive a pounding, but incapable of anything that
even vaguely resembles Mark’s damage output.
The end result is a two-person dance where I hold a target’s attention
while Mark approaches it from behind and knocks out an enemy in one or two
shots.
These tactics are what make MWO interesting as a game: the
act of jockeying for position, of working with a team. And these tactics rely entirely on a team of
players coordinating to achieve their goal.
Is it perfect? Of course
not. Is it impressive for a free-to-play
game to assemble such a community and even more impressive that they continue
to improve both the game itself and the community surrounding it?
Fuck yes it is.
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