MechWarrior Online Developer Interview #4
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MWO: How does the '˜Role Warfare' aspect of MechWarrior Online affect what you do?
[Omid] It has a huge impact, (Role Warfare) describes what everyone on our gameplay team is working towards. For one, it means each class of 'Mech needs its own feel and strengths. Controls are an extremely important part of that; they need to be intuitive while still retaining the "Sim" feel of piloting this huge monster of a machine. One of our first steps was to identify what aspects of movement we could vary to give the different classes of 'Mechs their own personality, while preserving that sense of piloting a Battle Mech.
Beyond that though, a key part of Role Warfare is about creating purpose for the various roles. Information Warfare is a big part of that, and it's really exciting to take MechWarrior beyond circle-strafing slugfests: When losing sight of your enemy can mean getting blindsided at the worst possible moment, the game becomes about more than just following the little red targeting triangle on your screen. This has definitely been the most discovery-inducing aspect so far.
[Thad] When we designed the original concepts for the levels we took great care to ensure that the environments we conceived were varied enough that they could accommodate all classes of 'Mech and styles of gameplay. It's our job to make sure that no matter which 'Mech you are piloting, you will have the opportunity to be a decisive figure in winning the battle for your team.
[Kevin] Role Warfare is a big-deal pillar to MWO to me, and I have always been drawn toward team based, role based games where an organized team playing to their roles will always beat out a collection of good singular players.
As a technical artist it falls on me to work directly with the engineers to figure out how we can best accomplish whatever cool new feature Paul, Bryan, and David have just sprung on us / promised to you guys. The R&D phase of any new feature always extremely fun and challenging. The "problem solving" part of my brain is used most during R&D and bug fixing, needless to say the R&D phase is infinitely more fun. After we figure out "how can we possibly do this?" it is always about maintaining a proper balance between 'awesomeness of feature' and cost of implementation'.
Almost every vision mode adds a layer of complexity to the environment artists during asset creation, requires level design & code support, and requires additional HUD and post FX to really sell it. Giving buildings a proper heat signature for infrared vision is important, but where do we draw the line between creating accurate internal heat signatures and only having time to create a handful of buildings for the entire level? Being able to see through objects with the Magnetometer is awesome, but how do we stop players from seeing through all the blockers in a huge level and having their frame rate drop through the floor?
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MWO: What makes MechWarrior Online unique?
[Omid] I've never worked on a project where we've been in such close touch with the community from the beginning - as a developer, it's a really cool experience to actively create a feature while the fans are being introduced to it. And as a fan, it's awesome to see how the community can get involved and influence development.
[Thad] I think MechWarrior Online is going to be the first MechWarrior game where the different classes of 'Mech really mean something on the battlefield instead of being transitory steps to pass through on your way to piloting the big shit kicker. There will be specific and very legitimate advantages to piloting each and every 'Mech in this game, and because of that the battles will have a great deal more character than multi-player MechWarrior battles from the past.
[Kevin] In my opinion there is still a lot of room for improvement in what free-to-play means. It is up to us as developers to deliver a solid core game, ensuring that paying players have no unfair advantages while creating incentives for people to actually pay, while fostering a culture where it is actually perfectly fine for someone to not pay a cent yet play the game for years. I have a lot of hopes for MWO to be able to really push this entire (premium) free-to-play market to somewhere really positive.
