Had completely fallen off my radar to the point of "Why doesn't this list of anticipated games in 2020 have MW5 on it?"

Looks like PB didn't send out too many release copies but the current reviews are kind of what you would expect with a low 70s average. And checking a few folk who already bought it and it sounds like a proper successor to MW3/4. Looks like it is the MWO engine and gameplay but they went out of their way to show that HOTASes are supported for those of us who value style over efficiency.

And gameplay demo from November shows it has some of the more streamlined tabletop/campaign/salvage rules of HBS's Battletech which makes me excited... and may result in me just reinstalling that until this gets a few patches.

Currently only on EGS. I don't really care about EGS/Steam (especially as I have GoG Galaxy) but will have to see how this works out mod wise. There are already inklings of another mektek

It uses UE4 for graphics engine. I've heard the campaign is good, but the game is buggy. I'm curious to try out my dual joysticks on it though.

The HBS Battletech game got me into the Battletech universe in a major way, and I intend to buy this game and play it as soon as I get the kids in bed this evening.

I hadn't really heard anything about it until a few days ago, though. Odds of it getting any GB coverage?

@catsanddogs: I never even thought about if GB would cover this game. I guess there is always a chance, but I'm thinking no. It doesn't seem like any of them have ever played a MechWarrior game before, but I could be wrong.

@casepb: I know that Austin(of course) and Vinny had a quicklook years back of MWO and Dave Snyder was a fan and played MWO on a special stream but I don't think the rest of the existing crew were into these games at all.

Edit: Also I forgot that Drew I think took part in MWO Beta but not sure if he got into it at all.

I think Waypoint will have a cast or something. On GB, maybe Vinny will do a thing?

Edit: Also, while the story for this is super simple and bad, the action is the stuff I liked out of MWO. I'm excited to get further in, I was only able to play a handful of missions today.

This game looks so good. I had no idea the MechWarrior games and Battletech shared the same universe. I've been on a big Battletech kick lately, and never played a MechWarrior game before, but this looks like it would scratch a very similar itch.

I've only played a little bit so far, but I feel satisfied with my decision to buy it. It's maybe lacking some polish; the post-tutorial cutscene was clearly intended to be dramatic but some of the special effects were...not convincing, even on max settings. I also got some really weird pixelation effects when I turned down the anti-aliasing, even at 1440p, which is odd because I always minimize AA at 1440p and it's not an issue in any other game. The controls and mechanics generally seem sound, so I'm looking forward to playing more whenever I can find the time.

I have, however, heard that joystick/HOTAS support is hit-or-miss depending on what model you have. I have a Thrustmaster T16000 and TWCS throttle, and luckily the game recognized it just fine, I just had to map all the buttons and axes. For less-common joystick models, you apparently have to do some arcane edits to a config file, which sure doesn't seem ideal. Hopefully they'll fix that in a future update.

I played 3 hours of it last night. This is my first MW game, although I've played a lot of the HBS Battletech game. It's a decent game, but not great. Here's my hot take:

Good

• Piloting the mechs feels right. This is probably the most important thing in the game, so it's good that they nailed it.
• Mech customization! You can paint your mech any color that has a hex code, and the game offers a decent variety of different patterns. You are also free to change your mechs' weapon loadouts, armor levels, etc.

Not Good

• NPCs on your ship are pretty wooden -- both in terms of the animation and scripts. I kinda wonder why they bothered at all with the Mass Effect-style ship interior stuff, given that they didn't have Mass Effect's budget. I think this game would have been better served by the approach HBS took in their Battletech game -- static ship scenes with partially animated characters and some minimal voice acting, but mostly menus and text boxes.
• My first impression of the combat is that it's hard to avoid taking damage, since it seems like the AI rarely misses with painful stuff like PPCs and autocannons even when I'm running at full speed in a light mech. There's no difficulty settings, so the only options to mitigate this are to grind my pilot's evasion skill higher or just get better.

Minor quibbles

• Missiles launch in big, simultaneous clumps. It doesn't feel right. I'd prefer to see a stream of missiles pouring out one-by-one at several millisecond intervals. I'd also like to see a bit more squirreliness and variance in their paths, given that the guidance systems are supposed to be a bit primitive.
• Controller support is imperfect. I can use my XBox 360 controller for most things in battle, but the game has more inputs than my controller has buttons, so I inevitably have to press a key every now and then. I have to use a mouse when I'm on the ship because for some reason forward-back on the L stick doesn't work on the ship (although it works fine in battles). The controller doesn't work at all in menus.

Anyway, I expect I'll probably put at least another 10-20 hours into it, but I don't expect that it will hold my attention like the HBS Battletech game has.

I remember playing MW3 when it first came out. It was unlike anything I'd played before. Using nearly every single key on the keyboard - I remember keys 1 through 0 being hotkeys for tenths of throttle, 1 being 10% max speed to 0 being 100% max speed I believe? - was an effective way to immerse me into piloting a giant bipedal machine and lasering the hell out of other mechs. That ended up being my only exposure to MechWarrior; the next MW game I saw was MechAssault, which sounded like an arcade'ing of the series that I had no interest in. This new game and Battletech might be a fun way for me to get that nostalgic feeling back!

So Austin weighed in https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxeenn/mechwarrior-5-mercenaries-review

Between that and a few video reviews I watched (what the fuck happened that now it is acceptable to have god damned ads for a poster company in the middle of a review?) it looks like this is more a successor to MW4:Mercs than MW3 or MW2. Which isn't bad, but I definitely suspect I'll be playing for the skirmishes rather than the missions and definitely not the story

Ended up buying it last night to "support" the game and will probably boot it up this weekend to get a few bits in. But between reports of crashes and just general polish issues as well as going on travel again shortly (and not having my HOTAS) I'll probably just play Battletech again and come back to this in early January.

But Battletech/Mechwarrior is a series I feel strongly enough to pay the extra 10-20 bucks to help boost up their day one sales in the hope of getting a MW6 that is totally as good as 2 or 3 was.

I was excited for this until it officially released. It is almost literally an FPS version of the HBS Battletech game. Down to the loadout screens, missions, and salvage. The campaign is the same free form style of the HBS game, not a "real" story driven campaign which is what I was looking forward to.

I didn't get into the battletech universe until MWO and had played the tabletop game for a while and picked up the HBS game(which is an almost literal port of the tabletop rules).

This being an FPS reskin of that game was sort of a bummer. I'll pick it up, but will wait till a sale hits or they add more to it(Electronic warfare at the least).

Being unable to play MW3 has been depressing so in that respect i'm looking forward to it, just gotta wait for it to come to Steam, but by the sounds of it they can make some improvements before then.

Played a little bit of skirmish just now and hate how TAA blurs the image so badly. Turning it to low however is even worse and creates some incredible amount of noise on shadows and foliage. I guess this is a UE4 thing but it's awful. I'm wondering why turning off TAA does this.

If there are people who like mechs or the old games (don't forget MechCommander) and somehow managed to not play BattleTech last year, you should really check it out. Amazing tactics game. And that was at launch.. they have since done three decently packed DLCs. My 2018 GOTY.

As for this MW5 game.. ehh I'm not sure I'll pick it up. It looks and seems to play more like a FPS game, and MechWarrior Online appeared to be that already.. where as I think I'm looking for something more like.. a mech sim? I'm imagining like DCS World but for Mechs. I want lots of highly detailed systems, top notch visuals, VR, and peripheral support. Slower/more weighty combat. More tactical.

I have some of the old MechWarrior games and back then, they were like crazy PC sims. Now they aren't of course because games and their complexity have evolved so.. yea. To me, this just looks like another one of those old games, but I'm still waiting for a crazy-in-todays-standards kinda game.

@seikenfreak: DCS for mechs would probably result in a Summer of George level of atrophy for me.

But while I can't speak for MW5 specifically just yet (went down the path of replaying Battletech), I think the series (at least since 3 because my 1 and 2 memories are so hazy) was always kind of an FPS. 3 had the "advantage" of coming out at a time when most FPSes still felt clunky but 4 was always best played with a mouse and keyboard.

But if you just pull out the HOTAS and handicap yourself a bit it gets nice and clunky in all the good ways.

I would be shocked if this scratched your proper sim itch (no MW game ever has for me) but it might be worth just grabbing the MWO launcher and running through the tutorial/training bits to see how it feels.

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I remember loving Mech Commander but getting frustrated because they had the same problem Homeworld did. The game was very clearly built around you crippling and salvaging mechs and you were boned if you didn't. But that resulted in every battle being about crippling and salvaging all the best stuff and you rapidly outpaced the game and everything after the third or fourth mission became trivial.

@gundato: Yea, MW4 is definitely in line with what 5 looks like in my mind. And I had some fun with 4 way back when, I think. Did it use the MSN "The Zone" site for multiplayer?

My tastes have changed of course. Back then, I would've probably still been playing stuff like Counter-Strike. CS was like the thing everyone I knew casual played together for years. And then that stopped and I haven't touched it or have any interest in it, or really any competitive game in general. I still remember those times fondly though.

I'm guessing that's why Online or MW5 isn't really what I think I want even though I liked 4 a bit back in the day..

Maybe it doesn't need to be DCS level crazy.. but like Brad is always talking about managing systems in a spaceship cockpit, that's what I want in a Mech combat game lol A big "Coolant Dump" button my character smashes on the dash. Or coolant vent and then I become much easier to spot on a thermal camera at night etc etc. Some good physics-y action. Can I spray mini-gun fire into an oncoming missile salvo and thin the number? Watch as they blow up etc.

Just to update:

Played for a couple of hours (bought a heavy and used it for five or six missions). Felt a lot more sluggish than MW4 but maybe that was just me misconfiguring my hotas (more on that...) or it was something changed by the unofficial patch (mektek?) so long ago that I forgot it wasn't like that in the base game, but I had a lot of fun. Cockpits are gorgeous and lights feel surprisingly dangerous in a way that I like.

Damage is way too prevalent, but repairs are inexpensive and I felt zero need to head back to industrial sectors for anything other than an AI getting cored. Every single mission seemed to result in a month of downtime but the payouts were sufficiently high that I never felt the need to push forward with fewer mechs. Maybe that gets alleviated once you have a decent bay of mechs but it mostly just felt like unnecessary clicks on a menu screen. A menu screen that I have to use half-assed FPS controls to get to.

And the missions get VERY samey VERY fast. The opening stretch was great even if it was a bit shitty how you regularly fight mechs with five or six tanks unloading on you with PPCs at the same time. But then it just feels like I am grinding in a game with really bad drops to the point that I am not even sure if I care enough to play the campaign where I work for Adam Jensen (who is almost assuredly the bad guy) because I can play the exact same missions with fewer load screens on the main menu. Maybe it gets better but... eh. Really feels like I am just paying 40 for an expensive MWO DLC... which I am kind of all for.

Still, really enjoyed the game and was looking forward to getting back to it after a burst of travel. Yeah...

For those unaware, the controller support is horrendous. Horrendous in the sense of needing to find a google doc and copying text into a hidden config file to add support for popular HOTASes, let alone older ones. And then needing to fiddle with them to set deadzones and sensitivity. And THEN going in and booting up instant action to run through the axes and buttons until you set them to whatever you want them to be with a LOT of trial and error.

But hey, it is a sim game (not really) and you don't buy a HOTAS unless you are looking forward to spending hours configuring and adjusting your setup until it just feels right.

But because PB are still trying to fix this they are also making changes and I came home to finding out that my pedals no longer work and all my buttons are different. Evidently they pushed an update to fix things and overwrote all of my changes.

So I am glad I bought this because I had a blast and eventually I'll come back to it. And I hope this helps to encourage indie devs to do a better job of cashing in on the sexy mech niche. But why the fuck would any developer think it is a good idea to clobber over a HOTAS config?

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Controls and bullshit aside, I think the main problem is that it is the MWO ruleset. Again, maybe I have rose tinted glasses on, but I remember mech fights being brutal affairs where you may launch ten or even twenty salvos at each other before you do enough damage to take out your enemy. This it feels like one alpha strike from a prebuilt (so god help those who face off against the Uziel equivalents) will shred all the armor on a limb and fights go fast if you have a decent rate of fire. And that is fine if you are trying to streamline the mech fights themselves, but that also means that tanks are a very significant threat. I was usually more afraid of seeing one of those vtols spawn too close to me than I was two lights spawning right behind me. Which is probably closer to how a real mech fight would end but just hurts the magic of it.

Hmm, I wonder how hard it is to get mw4 and mektek running these days