Holy shit! I can't believe I missed this interview that was released with the video I posted at the beginning of the thread:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/100/1002164p1.html
Here's some highlights:
One of those, for instance, in terms of dealing with the types of mechs, is to make sure that each class of mech really has its own unique role on the battlefield. So a light [mech] is not just something you pilot on your way towards a medium, a heavy, and eventually an assault; that a light [mech] has a really different play dynamic, and a reason why in any larger scale game that people are going to want to take lights; the same for mediums and all the way up the scale through the four classes. So we definitely see this, especially when you get into multiplayer, but even in the single-player and co-op, which we hope to incorporate into the campaign, that it really is all based on lance dynamics. Russ, do you want to pick up on that?
So, in your lance, you're going to want a light scout mech, and he'll go out there and find out where they are and tag them. With the buildings, you can take cover and if you lose your enemies in the buildings, they'll lose you as a target. All those things that you couldn't do before – once you were a target in the past, you could never really escape; they could keep that red box around you no matter how many hills you ran behind. You can just see how now, between the buildings, getting on top of them, hiding, finding the information – we're going to make every class valuable again. So you have your scout mechs, have your medium class mechs, and then you want to have your assault class mechs when everything's all primed for the trap [to] take things out. That's going to really play into the single-player campaign, and it's hard to go into a lot of details because we don't know what might change through some discussions with the publisher.
-----------------------------------------------------
Great! They're balancing the mechs! I always liked Mediums like the Bushwacker so now I have incentive to play him.
--------------------------------------------------
So you remember having that sense from the early days of MechWarrior. We want to establish that again. The mechs are so valuable and so important: they're more important than the guy you've got in the cockpit. You can find another guy, but the mechs are so valuable. Salvage will take on more of a real meaning in the game, right down to a rudimentary level of "keep getting enough parts to keep fighting" rather than "I have another six chassis in my inventory to just throw on the market." So we really want to get that feeling again. Along with that comes the personality: those enemy mechs, you'll recognize that one Atlas with the horns or something because you'll know who that is--it's that main enemy commander. It won't be like fodder; you'll see him throughout the game. Stuff like that really gives the personality and the importance back to the mechs.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Also excellent. Especially unique custom mechs.
Also it seems THERE IS some sort of RPG elements!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
We have some really cool ideas about how to reward players for specializing not only in classes of mechs [but] in specific mechs, so that they build up that relationship and also a reason, potentially, to develop totally different characters in the on-running multiplayer campaign. As you develop different characters that have different expertise in different mechs, much like you would develop a warrior and a wizard because you want to have two different play styles in a fantasy game. That relationship is something which the fiction has always really dealt with but the games never really had the capabilities to do so, and we think that we've got some ideas on how to apply that and make that come to life.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
unfortunately for you vlad, they seem to be thinking of a CoD4 system:
I think that the persistence level that we'd like to have, on just simple terms, is if you look at Call of Duty 4 and just how immensely popular the multiplayer is with that experience based persistent aspect of your character. It's one of those things that the bells go off in your head and you say, "MechWarrior is just absolutely perfect for something like that." We talked a lot about how we would do that, whether it would be starting with the small mechs and building your way up and that idea had some traction, but that got changed as we thought well, "Some people might want to start in a heavier mech." You don't want to make them go all the way up there. So that's how we got to what Jordan mentioned earlier, where we want the player to become very specialized in the mech of their choice.
So, someone might get into a sixty-ton Rifleman and play that mech and continue to get experience and get all of the autocannons and lasers up to their maximum potential and even say twenty percent beyond maximum potential because they're so good at the Rifleman. We're giving them that reward to get really great at a mech or at a certain class of mechs. So you might have those guys in those light mechs that have been playing it for so long and are so good at it that they are a legitimate force on the battlefield inside that urban combat setting. So there's a lot there, and I think that there we can only give you brief details at this point.
There's a lot to discuss as we continue on, but you can kind of put together a mental picture together of that persistence and that personality of seeing that one guy with the annoying tagname that's just so good with that certain class of mech that it creates a lot of personality that way.
Everyone should check out the interview for a lot more stuff, like the new information warfare mechanics and discussing publisher relations and the Xbox360 port.
