It has been announced in tandem with the new MechWarrior game in development that they will be releasing MechWarrior 4 for free and all of its expansions at http://battletech.catalystgamelabs.com/

Has anyone played 4? What do you think? I am having trouble remembering which one I played at somewhat great lengths.

Nice. Never turn down a free game...speaking of which you can now download The Elder Scrolls Arean and Daggerfall for free at the Bethesda site. Anyway as far as I can remember, I think MechWarrior 4 was quite fun from I can remember. Sorry I can't furnish it with the details, I'm not exactly a massive MW fan. It did get simulation of the year in 2002 I think.

I already own the game, but this is good news. People who didn't experience it back then can see what they missed.
I was actually playing it the other day... It's very fun. I always preferred to play MechWarrior with a joystick though, and the ones I have are kinda messed up. You can play it with a keyboard but it's pretty clunky from what I've seen. The joystick controls do a lot to make it feel like you're actually controlling a mech.

Yea, I played MW4. And MW4 Mercenaries. Mercenaries is much much better. But uh... generally, I'd say it's a step down from 2 and 3. Very much dumbed down and arcadey. You don't have the flexible arm targeting from MW3, it's just fixed arms. Aesthetics aren't good. The cockpit, for example... looks terrible. Complete shit when you look at the great MW3 cockpits. And uh, the Mech art direction was horrible too. Really bad garish textures on the Mechs, bad Mech designs... like the Mad Dog. They completely butchered the Mad Dog, so it doesn't even look like a vulture. And of course, the Summoner had identical arms, even though it's supposed to be assymetrical. Uh... the Atlas had two big blocks with two black marks on each block, in order to represent hand actuators. It's just awful. The missile ports are all hexagonal for some goddamn reason. Lots of giant Xs on armor plating... lazy art like that.

They also changed the terrain for MW4. People complained that the environment was too flat, and too little cover in MW3, so they made these really hilly maps for MW4. Lots of giant steep mountains that you'd climb with your Mechs, which just ended up looking pretty silly, ya know? A giant Mech scaling these steep inclines... I dunno, it got to be a bit much. Uh, the civilians were all sprites, instead of polygonal models like in MW3.

Mercenaries is better then MW4 just because they made an actual branching and somewhat open campaign. So you can choose sides in the FedCom Civil War, like a real merc outfit. Go planet hopping, even head to Solaris VII to become Champion... that's really fun. They have this Solaris announcer named Duncan Fisher doing commentary during the matches, it's very very well done. Managing pilots, buying weapons and Mechs, handling salvage... it's all there.

Multiplayer was much better then MW3, just because they did a much better job on the net code. Pretty low latency, good combat. You saw a lot of ERLL useage in MW4, but they toned it down for Mercs. People would use other stuff like LPLs or RAC5s.