RollinThundr wrote on Oct 10, 2012, 21:16:
Basically, it's simulation mechwarrior and free to play at that. While I still find it a shame that no publisher wanted to fund a full fledged MW sequel, Battletech being one of my favorite franchises, I'll take it. MWO is extremely solid.
It'll be interesting to see how their plans for a metagame pan out. That to me is really the questionable aspect at this point, the game play itself is really good.
The one thing I really hate at this point is cheese builds and how the heat system favours cool running weapons.
Cheese builds are:
-The 'gaussapult', the k2 variant of the catapult which replaces 2 machine guns with
2 gauss rifles, giving it one of the highest sustained alpha's in game
-The high speed Jenner with a bunch of small pulse lasers (lag and hit box issues make it very difficult to kill these)
-The dedicated LRM boats which can kill an Atlas with constant (simply put, the do not overheat) fire in about 10-15 seconds. You literally cannot fire back because you're constantly being rocked by explosions and your view is all but 100% obscured by explosions. Even 2x AMS systems can't save you, it just slows down your death.
Irt to high heat weaponry, the PPC is the stand out as one of the worst guns in game. Heatsinks don't work like tabletop where you could run in overheat and chance a shut down or negative effects, it builds up slowly and drops slowly. Repeat firing a PPC leaves you heat choked and given the time to kill, most cooler builds (gauss for example) do more damage with greater fire rate and more than enough ammo to last a full battle.
In TT, ballistic and missile weapons are cooler to fire and do better damage because you have a limited number of shots. It was not unusual to run dry on ammo or spend your ammunition randomly damaging fresh armour rather than exploiting the huge hole in the side of the torso you had created. In MWO, there are few scenarios where you will run dry on ammunition (apart from stock models which are built according to classic TT builds rather than the frankenmechs you see in MWO).
As a long time fan of TT and the games (played everything since Crescent Hawks Inception), I really want to love this game, and it's look and feel is brilliant and visceral, but the current FOTM (favourite of the month) mechlab variants are killing it for me. I can't even imagine how depressing it would be to grind up to owning your first mech in the rentals (you use trial mechs, get reduced income but no customisation) which are exclusively classic builds.