[PC] MechWarrior 5 Clans

[briareos_kerensky]

It's finally time to don a Clan neurohelmet, the first time since MechWarrior 2 and its expansion back in 1995.
Unfortunately it's Smoke Jaguar neurohelmet, but hey, I can use double ER PPCs without having 'Mechs melt down due to excessive heat, so I'll take what I can.

Technical impressions: so and so. So far I've only played on my laptop (Ryzen 9 HX370 and 4070), and preventively scaled down rendering resolution to 1920x1200, medium details, and only 2x AA. The game defaults to a borderless window, and switching to fullscreen forced the game into a window; quitting and relaunching the game solved this, but this isn't exactly the best first impression for my first UE5 game...
Performance is generally good, but you can feel the framerate dipping in busy environments, especially when complex vegetation is onscreen. I've read many other people are having much worse performance even with beefier machines, I'll see how the game performs on my desktop in the following days.

MW5C takes place in 3048, just before the Clans launch their invasion of the Inner Sphere. If you know BattleTech lore, your character's first Trial Of Position takes place hours before the Outbound Light jumps above Huntress, and after the first two missions, you are thrown, along your starmates, right into the invasion.
Although you are not a mercenary, you must still manage some logistics. By completing missions you get a series of resources to improve your Star: money to purchase weapons, equipment, and 'Mechs; 'Mech experience to improve the performance of a specific chassis; renown to requisition more techs to repair 'Mechs, or scientists to research stuff like improvements to armour, weapon cooldown, and others; your character (called Jayden) and starmates gather experience to improve their stats, and even acquire specialisations. Starmates have their own favourite weapons and abilties, making them more unique than any of the pilots you can recruit in MW5 Mercs.

The game plays well, mission structure is much more varied than MW5 Mercs, and tries to be more similar to MW2 and MW4; you can scan certain buildings to gather more salvage or even hack turrets or repair bases, and the missions I've played try to recreate some battles described in various BattleTech sourcebooks.
Combat is fast, and weapons feel great. The roar of PPCs and the thunder of autocannons is especially rewarding, though I think hitboxes are not perfect and at times shots don't connect correctly, often being stopped by debris at very close ranges. As this is based on MWO, damage values are different from the tabletop original, and the effect of some weapons might not be as you might expect, like a Flea being able to absorb two Clan ER PPCs in the center torso and not going down.

There are plenty of cutscens that do an excellent job in introducing what's going on and give all characters a degree of personality, and in general the game does a great job in using know art of famous personalities.

[briareos_kerensky]

I've made good progress in the campaign, unlock all 'Mechs with the exception of the Dire Wolf, the last one; I think one more mission and I'll be able to get it.

The game continues to be fun, but several small and medium snags have cropped up. The biggest thing is your starmates' AI: it's generally good, switching targets o their own without you having to micromanage them, though I really want a "ignore my target order", as many times someone else took my kill right before I triggering what would have been my last salvo. Battles also tend to degenerate into close quarter combats, with allies and enemies all clumped together and your allies waling right into your line of fire or movement vector.

Target detection is the same strange MW5 Mercs way, in which you basically only detect enemies if you have a direct line of sight to them; it's a (somewhat) realistic depiction of radar system, but allies and enemies don't seem to act under the same rule, and at times you know where enemies are only after they shot you, and allies make short works of turrets and vehicles you never knew they were there. The radar, when you have contacts, doesn't show which one you have locked, and cycling through them is a bit useless...what gets under my crosshairs takes the PPCs to the face.
Hitboxes are still a bit hiffy, especially at close range (300 meters or less). For example, I was able to snipe an Atlas with two 4x PPCs salvos at long-range, but the closer you get, the more shots seem to scatter about, giving the impression your weapons have a mind of their own in terms of damage.

Piloting isn't as complex as other MechWarrior games; like MW4 onwards, a destroyed leg remains attached to the 'Mech as a stub, resulting in lower movement speed. This first happened when piloting an Adder, and the total decrease in speed was of 10km/h, basically no penality at all. Falling from heights doesn't seem to damage your legs too, whether it's a cliff or absuing jump jets. Walking in water doesn't slow you down either.

I don't like how OmniMechs are managed. They still follow MWO's way of having hardpoints of different type (energy, ballistic missiles) of different size and allowed number, so you might have three energy slots able to accept three single-crititcal lasers but not able to fit a two-critical weapon like a large pulse laser or a PPC. Generic critical are able to accept almost any equipment, but you can only mount AMS and ECM on 'Mechs with dedicated slots. To change slot layout you need to unlock different loadouts, but this is still a far cry from what OmniMechs should be like...I understand the limitations for an online game like MWO, but for a single player game like MW5, this whole system feels too restrictive, especially when you cannot fully exploit some of your starmates' abilities. For example, Naomi is good with missiles, but there is no dedicate missile boat among assault 'Mechs. Othe starmates like Yuichi and Ezra do have a wider niche as they both like ballistic and energy weapons.

As for the campaign, right now I'm living the year-long pause before the fifth wave of invasion, so I really hope I'll be able to play the invasion of Luthien and even Tukayyid.

[briareos_kerensky]

Campaign completed, at least one of the possible outcomes.

I'm also playing on my desktop now and performance is a bit better, I'm playing 4K with almost maxed out details and framerate is constant, though larger battles do tax the system. One thing I've noticed thanks to the larger monitor is that radar scope and weapon reload indicators update at half of the game's framerate. Not a big thing, but it's noticeable.
And it's also very noticeable how Unreal 5 streams textures, menus are particularly dire when visiting them for the first time during their first load. This doesn't happen during missions, but even swapping paintschemes makes textures pop up. There's no microstuttering due to shader compilation, or nothing noticeable, at the very least.
If you click the middle mouse button you bring up a command wheel to issue orders (if you don't want to use Fn keys) and activate night vision (probably useful in one mission throughout the game), only that in native 4K, it doesn't work. I can thankfully dismiss it, but I cannot issue anything with it.

I think the more I play, more little things pop up. For example MW4 had this very handy readout next to your crosshair showing which weapon groups were in range and loaded ready to fire, or how crosshairs turned red with a valid target under them in MW2...all things not available in MW5 Clans. Sometimes your starmates don't reply to your orders, making you wonder if you issued them in the first place. Their pathing is generally good though they do get stuck in walls if you order them to attack something past a bend in the road. In one of the final missions I had to micromanage them because they fell way behind and didn't respond to a group "form on me" order.
The AI is just dumb, and I've learnt how to play around with it. At the most basic level, it's the usual "first target in sight, I shoot", but then I discovered if you sprint past them , they disengage you for something else, opening their back to your weapons.

In the whole game I can point out to just one difficult mission (at least in normal difficulty), the rest are the usual string of battles with some walking and possibly a resupply point sprinkled in-between. Some missions will see you standing still and flexing your superior range, but overall mission structure could still be way more varied, though I think it's better than vanilla MW5 Mercs...at the very least you can properly order your pristine starmates to take point through a handy overhead view of the battlefield.

[briareos_kerensky]

The first expansion to MW5 Clans hit yesterday, and I was able to play a couple of missions.

Like MechWarrior 2 before, MW5's expansion is all about Clan Ghost Bear; the story picks up right after the death of ilKhan Leo Showers, and you don the cooling vest of a Bloodnamed MechWarrior in the Silverfoot Keshik, piloting a Mad Dog. As in MW5, the story is brought forward by in-game cutscenes with mocapped actors, which look great, though I suspect developers made the scenery too tasty, as actors are chewing on it like it's the best food in world.
Oh well, no MechWarrior game had decent acting, why start now?

The biggest addition of this expansion are Elementals, battle armour infantry. Not the first time they are in a MechWarrior game, but up till now they simply were tiny, hard to hit enemies. And in MW5 they are still only tiny hard to hit enemies. Well, there have been a couple of changes. First, Elementals are colour-coded for your convenience: blueish armour with azure jet exhaust for friendlies, black armour with red jets for enemies. Elementals can also jump around and attach to 'Mechs for some extra damage. The jump is managed terribly, as it's not really a jump but more like free flight, and instead of battle armours hopping around the battlefield, you have tiny jet-propelled supermen zipping around 6 meters above the ground. So far the only use Elementals have is to be an extra starmate of dubious usefulness, missions structure is a basic as it was in MW5 Mercs and MW5 Clans, so it's not like you can direct Elementals to keep enemies busy while your 'Mechs do something else, once more tasks involve reaching a checkpoint, destroy everything there, and move onto the next one until the mission is over.

The third mission does offer a peculiar setting: on top of a Warship in space, reminescent of some missions in MechWarrior 2's expansion. Unlike that however, being in space doesn't change how your 'Mech handles, and I don't think it even affects your heat dissipation capabilities. It's just another background with a peculiarly shaped terrain from which your starmates will fall from, forever falling until the mission is over. No really. If your 'Mech gets destroyed you can jump to a Starmate's, and when I did, my only surviving Starmate was nowhere near the Warship, the only thing visible was the skybox/starbox. And now that you mention it, why something will fall in space is a bit ludicrous...ah,let's just say we're near a planet's gravity well.

Other than that, this feels like more missions for MW5 Clans with no changes or big updates to its structure. The contextual wheel menu still doesn't work on my desktop (native 4K) but works on my laptop (1920x1080 with no upscaling), the AI's only strategy is to charge you, friendlies will still happily steal your kills, and SRMs still feel much more destructive than any other weapon.

I really doubt this will change my feelings towards MechWarrior 5 in general, but it's still good to be sitting in a 'Mech's cockpit.