MechWarrior 4: Vengeance Preview

Even though PC games based on the Battletech universe have been around for over a decade, it wasn't until the 1995 release of Activision's MechWarrior II: 31st Century Combat that mainstream players paid any attention to the series. Activision's game featured a great graphics engine, a high level of customizability, and intense action, and as a result, it pleased diehard Battletech fans while still enticing gamers who had previously been unfamiliar with the series. In fact, MechWarrior II was so much of a success that it spawned a number of add-ons and expansion packs that fans graciously bought into. The game's success did lead to some undesirable side effects, however. Many companies sought to cash in on the giant-mech craze generated by MechWarrior II, and the genre was soon flooded with clones that didn't offer much of anything new.

In order to compete, MechWarrior 3 strayed from its predecessor's formula: "With MechWarrior 3, we felt the need to differentiate, to make it more complicated than [MechWarrior I and II]," explains Jordan Weisman, one of the original creators of FASA's Battletech universe, and now a creative director at Microsoft's game division. "We're going back to our roots, and making action the focus of our next game while keeping it relatively simple. This won't be Falcon 4.0." That next game is, of course, MechWarrior 4: Vengeance. Originally unveiled earlier this year at Microsoft's Gamestock event in Redmond, Washington, MechWarrior 4: Vengeance promises to have the same effect today that MechWarrior II had over five years ago. The game is being designed at Microsoft under the auspices of Weisman and a number of other FASA veterans like Dave McCoy and T.J. Wagner to ensure that it has character and style that's true to the Battletech universe.

Earlier this week, we sat down with Jordan Weisman to talk about the evolution of the MechWarrior license, and we were given a chance to play the latest build of MechWarrior 4: Vengeance for an extended period of time. Although the game has now been publicly shown twice - once at Gamestock and another time at E3 - we were nonetheless impressed with what we saw of MechWarrior 4's progression. Let's take a look.

Bringing Back the Fiction

The Battletech universe has always been filled with rich stories about Machiavellian power struggles and betrayal between ruling houses of nobility, and yet the last two MechWarrior games placed you in the role of, essentially, an ordinary grunt, and thereby seemed to ignore the traditional Battletech fiction. In addition to bringing back the earlier game's focus on action, MechWarrior 4: Vengeance will reintroduce the notion of an epic power struggle to the series. The game's campaign is completely story driven, and character interaction and advancement will play a very important part.

In Vengeance, you will assume the role of Ian Dresari, son of the Duke of Kentares IV, one of the many planetary systems of the Inner Sphere. Twenty years prior, Ian had left his homeland, bitter at his father's methods of ruling, to fight in the crusades against the Clans, a warrior society who had split off from the Inner Sphere because of ideological differences many years earlier. This epic struggle between the Clans and the Inner Sphere has been well documented in the Battletech universe, including in the MechWarrior series of games. While launching a daring assault on the Clans' homeworld of Strana Mechty, Ian befriends Victor Davion, the leader of the assault against the Clans, and another member of nobility whose family presides over the Inner Sphere. Their attack, while victorious, is costly, and many brave MechWarriors die during the operation to remove the Clan threat. Weary from years of battle, the friends return to find their homeland locked in a civil war. In his absence, Victor's sister Katrina had usurped his power and cast another noble family, House Steiner, as the ruling body of the commonwealth. Ian's home planet of Kentares IV has been occupied by Steiner forces, and his family holdings have been completely sacked.

As Ian Dresari, you'll have to lead a rebellion against the occupying forces of House Steiner, and eventually purge them from the commonwealth altogether in order to reinstate the balance of power. Along the way, you'll have to answer moral questions that will test your disposition and define your character. Who will rule Kentares IV when House Steiner is defeated? What responsibility do you owe to the people of your homeland? Will you rule in the same way as your father? This drama will unfold through a series of in-game cutscenes, scripted dialogue between you and other characters, and a blend of live-action actors and prerendered animations, as in games like Command & Conquer.

The Mechs

The battlefields of MechWarrior 4: Vengeance are reminiscent of a futuristic holocaust. Your homeworld has been devastated by the Steiner forces, and you begin the game at an extreme disadvantage. As in previous MechWarrior games, you're initially given a light mech to pilot, but you'll be able to gradually work your way up to heavier and more powerful war machines. Microsoft is including 14 of the most recognizable mechs in the game, including the Atlas, Mad Cat, Thor, and Vulture, as well as seven mechs new to the Battletech universe. Two of the seven new mechs were revealed in a contest that ran on GameSpot a few months ago; the 40-ton Chimera and the 75-ton Thanatos. The latter will be one of the most powerful mechs available in the game, and as such, it will be one of the last you'll be able to pilot. While details of the final five mechs weren't going to be revealed until the final game shipped, Microsoft did show off the brand-new Mad Cat Mark II to us during the demonstration. An enhanced version of the popular Mad Cat, the Mark II features more powerful legs and LRM launchers that are tilted 45 degrees upwards. Its arms don't drop downwards like the older Mad Cat either, but rather stick outwards from their sockets.

At the start of each mission, you're given the choice of using one of several default mechs, or you can head to the Mech Lab to customize your own weapons and armor loadout. In previous MechWarrior games, this option tended to scare away novice players because of its complexity. Even though they allowed a high degree of customizability, Mech Labs in previous games had an interface that was cumbersome and unintuitive. In addressing this issue in MechWarrior 4, the designers took care not to dumb down the Mech Lab, which would disappoint the diehard fans of the series. Instead, they simplified the interface by making hard-points color-coded by weapon type. This not only makes swapping out weapons much easier and quicker, but it also maintains the individual character of each mech. Weisman used the Mad Cat, with its telltale shoulder-mounted LRM launchers, to explain this point. In previous games, those hard-points could be used for non-missile weapons such as lasers, which isn't really what the Mad Cat is supposed to carry on its shoulders. With the new color-coded system in place, you won't be able to assign mechs any weapons that they weren't designed to carry. You won't be able to fiddle around with the mechs' engine characteristics either - another step taken by Microsoft and FASA to ensure that each mech retains its distinct style.

The Campaign

The game's campaign will comprise around 25 single-player missions that span seven different terrain types including lunar, alpine, arctic, swamp, urban, and desert environments. The seventh terrain is actually the area around a noble palace where the final missions of MechWarrior 4: Vengeance take place. While linear, the campaign will actually be dynamic in the sense that you'll be able to control a number of variables. Before each mission, you'll be given the option to choose the time of day of each attack, the drop zone and extraction locations, and your mech loadout. But more importantly, the campaign will rely on a persistent resource model throughout the entire length of the game. That is, you're given a set amount of resources like money, supplies, and mechs, at the beginning of the game, and it'll be your responsibility to make sure that you maintain enough of each to get you through the campaign. If you lose a mech in any given mission, it'll be gone for the duration of the game. The advantage is that you keep any supplies that you capture throughout the game, including enemy mechs.

Your lancemates that fight at your side will also adhere to this persistent resource rule. These lancemates aren't nameless grunts; each will be a character that plays an integral role in the progression of MechWarrior 4's story, and each will excel at a certain aspect of piloting a mech. Microsoft wants to convey the sense of being in a leadership position in charge of an elite squadron of MechWarriors, and thus is making each of the supporting characters completely unique. Before choosing your lancemates, you'll have to take into account that they all have three variable factors: their personality, their piloting skills, and their mech. Understandably, you'll want to consistently choose pilots with a high skill level and a powerful mech, but you risk losing them permanently by doing so. According to Microsoft, each mission will force you to weigh the benefits against the negatives when choosing which lancemates will fight by your side, and which will stay on base.

Over the last decade, the design team at FASA has seen some amazing players come through the 28 Battletech: Virtual World centers scattered across the country. "Over the years, these guys have developed some awesome tactics," says Weisman of the Battletech players. "We've watched some of them very closely, and have built their same strategies into the AI of the game." Microsoft is injecting these battle-honed tactics into all the computer-controlled MechWarriors in the game - enemies and friendlies alike.

Coming to Life

The intriguing world of MechWarrior is brought to life by an extremely impressive graphics engine that can render terrain at great distances and draw objects with great detail. As in most new 3D combat games, the textures appear to be very sharp in MechWarrior 4, and the dynamic lighting causes weapon effects to look especially impressive. These effects, as well as shadows cast by the giant mechs, can easily be appreciated just by taking a glance at any screenshot of the game. However, the game's animation system has to be seen in motion to be fully appreciated. Each mech in MechWarrior 4: Vengeance has more than 140 individual animations for everything from walking sideways, to falling down backward. Additionally, each mech's actions makes use of inverse kinematics, so things like collision detection with the ground and other objects, as well as blast recoil, are animated with a very high level of realism. What adds even more visual realism to the mechs' movements is the ability of the game to blend up to 36 different animations simultaneously, meaning that a mech can be rendered doing multiple actions - running, firing, and getting hit at once - completely accurately. But this technology isn't just for eye candy. Blending animations makes switching directions faster, since the game no longer has to finish the animation of, for instance, walking forward before starting one of the mech moving backward. As a result, the control of each mech seems much more precise but doesn't take away from the sense that you're actually piloting a lumbering 80-ton robot.

The multiplayer component of MechWarrior 4: Vengeance will support up to 32 players simultaneously over the Internet and will have eight different modes of play, including the intriguing KingMech, wherein you become "it," and your only defense against the attacking horde of mechs is your lancemates.

Weisman says that all of the missions are currently complete, and the team is putting the finishing touches on the full-motion-video sequences and is chasing down the remaining bugs. Microsoft is referring to the status of the build we played as "pre-beta," and it anticipates that the game will go gold during the first week of November - and should be available on store shelves on November 16. By Weisman's own admission, MechWarrior 3 strayed from the tried-and-true formula set by MechWarrior II. But if what we've played of the latest game in the series is any indication of the quality of the final product, then MechWarrior 4: Vengeance will certainly please fans of the Battletech universe and action fans alike.