Christmas itself has come and gone, and with it a small influx of cash to spend on the things I really love: video games (since all the other spending money was spent on the things I love most: my wife and kids)! And, feeling that ever present burn-out from Mechwarrior Online, I ventured into the internet to take advantage of some free-to-play games, looking for a similar experience.
It wasn’t long before I discovered that beyond the giant, stomping, customizeable Battlemechs, I actually wanted an experience that was about as far away from Mechwarrior Online as possible, and I just simply didn’t know it. Let me tell you why.
My adventures first drew me to the game that is most often cited as “I’m leaving MWO for this game”: Hawken. Or HAWKEN. Whichever. This was closely followed by Star Conflict, and shortly thereafter Warframe. And because of my experiences, I’m now regularly playing all three, happily spent some money on all three (Steam Sales HOOOOOOOOOO!), and have discovered these huge, glaring flaws in Mechwarrior Online that I think I convinced myself simply weren’t there. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the game, but it brings to light one thing: I’m pained that there’s so much untapped potential.
Game Types
People have been chanting and screaming from the highest mountain about the need for additional gametypes in Mechwarrior Online, and I had somewhat turned a blind eye to it. We had Assault, we had Conquest, what more could we need? And then Skirmish dropped, and you get this tiny, tantalizing taste of “oooo. Something new.”
I was willing to accept that initially, but let’s face it; it really isn’t anything new. At its very core, it’s Assault without bases, and I’m starting to share some players’ frustration; “it took them how long to release this?” Now, I can see some of the justification for it; with UI 2.0 coming, do we want to spend the time required to implement it into the current UI? Is the time required creating Skirmish versions of each map going to be worthwhile before UI 2.0 drops? And various other things, but it only works to an extent. With UI 2.0 being pushed back farther and farther, perhaps some concessions should have been made to introduce Skirmish and other game modes despite the UI 2.0 bottleneck, in order to help appease the community and somewhat ease the pain. That pain nowadays is pretty deep-seated, and I’m convinced now that it could have at least been mitigated slightly with a few different ways of handling things.
But I digress; I was pretty happy with the game modes themselves until I started dropping in HAWKEN, Star Conflict, and Warframe. Now, I must remind you: All three of these games are currently in Open Beta. Mechwarrior Online is, on the other hand, a fully released game. Let me give you a breakdown of their game modes.
HAWKEN
- Team Deathmatch
- Free-for-all Deathmatch
- Missile Assault (reskinned version of Capture Point/Conquest)
- Seige (difficult to compare, but essentially a resource-gathering tug-of-war)
- Co-op vs. waves of Bots
STAR CONFLICT
- 6+ PvE Scenarios (3-phase missions with both offense and defense objectives)
- Capture the Beacon (King of the Hill)
- Domination (Capture Point/Conquest)
- Combat Recon (protect your Team Captain while attacking their team captain)
- A large clan-vs-clan meta called “Sector Control”
WARFRAME – (NOTE: Almost all of these are Co-op PvE scenarios with differing objectives, but is meant to highlight the diversity that’s possible)
- Assassination (Kill a priority target)
- Capture (DON’T kill a priority target)
- Conclave (2v2 PvP)
- Deception (Infiltrate a location carrying hacking tools, then escape)
- Endless Defense (protect a key location against an endless number of enemy waves)
- Exterminate (Kill a specified number of enemies)
- Mobile Defense (Deception with multiple target locations)
- Rescue (Find and escort a priority target)
- Sabotage (locate and destroy a ship’s reactor)
- Spy (find and steal 4 data cores)
- Wave Defense (Not Endless Waves)
- Survival (Survive against endless enemies for 5 minutes, losing life support, then extract)
- Invasion (Team up with what are normally enemies against infected targets that will infect an entire sector of missions if not cleared up).
Now, compare all of those options to Assault, Conquest, and Assault-without-bases. As has been said, variety is the spice of life, and MWO can start to taste a little bland.
MechWarrior Credits
This particular realization came both from the positives and negatives of the other Free-to-play games, but it amounts to “Mechwarrior Credits don’t go very far”. Mechs themselves are expensive, especially Hero Mechs. The oft-talked-about Boar’s Head is the king of expensive at 7500 MC, which can be around $30-40 depending on which MC pack that you buy. Couple the cost of paint jobs, customization options for your cockpit, even colors, and you start to see that MC doesn’t really stretch.
Mech purchases in MWO should be a sort of “pay-to-not-grind” option, which makes sense. If people don’t have hours upon hours to dedicate to this game, then affording a battlemech and all its upgrades via C-bill is a long and tedious process, and should be given some way to circumvent that, at a reasonable cost.
To give you some kind of indication, I’ll average about 180,000 C-bills for a half-way decent victory with a Premium Bonus and Hero mech. This is with a 50% and 30% Cbill bonus. My average C-bill earning over 2600 games is 135,068. The cost to buy a stock Locust, the cheapest Mech in the game, is 1,388,242 C-bills! That’s more than TEN games at my average, and that’s just the stock variant! This doesn’t take into account the XL190 engine, the Medium Pulse Laser, 2 additional Machine Guns, an extra ton of ammo, 3 Double Heatsinks, the Ferro-Fibrous, Endo-Steel, or Double Heatsink upgrade to even get the Mech able to run decently. The total? 6,469,325 C-bills. 48 matches at my average C-bill earning. And if you happen to be an assault pilot? God help you: My Atlas costs 15,638,748 C-bills. That’s more than 115 matches at my average.
115 matches. Now, you could circumvent some of that by buying the chassis with MC. However, because it’s a 100-ton assault Mech, you’ll be looking at spending 3870 MC just for the stock chassis, or right around $20. You’ll still have to grind out about the same amount of matches as the Locust just to purchase the rest of the equipment to kit it out.
By comparison, Golden Standards, the MC for Star Conflict, goes a ridiculously long way. “Golden Ships” are purchasable for a very reasonable cost and are your “pay-to-not-grind” option; they come with maxed out synergy (in MWO terms, this is having the chassis Mastered), and any synergy (xp) earned on the frame can be transferred for a very small Golden Standard fee to your Global Synergy pool, to be applied to whatever craft you want! They bring no special abilities, no super fancy equipment, and use the exact same weapons, armors, and skills as any other ship of its type in the same tier. Instead, they don’t need to be repaired, bring in 20% additional income, and a bonus to generated synergy. It’s pay-to-not-grind.
HAWKEN and Warframe’s real-money systems left me somewhat unimpressed, but they’re cautious to ensure it’s of the same pay-for-convenience factor, rather than pay to win, and do it well.
Now, in defense of MWO, they’re headed in the right direction with Champion Mechs, which are more reasonably priced and come with some very nice equipment pre-loaded. But without a small C-bill bonus, and the MC cost to transfer XP from a Mech to Global XP being as high as it is, they’re not worth picking up by any veteran, and barely so for a newcomer. The Champion Mechs could be improved.
Interface
… yeah, you know what? I’m just not going to cover this one. Needless to say, HAWKEN, Star Conflict, and Warframe have much better UIs, social systems, chat, and session selection systems than MWO does. It’ll be a more fair comparison when UI 2.0 drops.
Conclusion
In conclusion, my experience with these three games has really opened my eyes as to how complacent I’ve been with Mechwarrior Online, merely because there’s no real alternative for the Stomping-Mech-Builder enthusiast in me. But I’m going to jump on the bandwagon that many others have been mentioning; I’ve got some MC pocketed right now, but I won’t be refilling it any time soon, nor spending money on the Clans, until Mechwarrior Online starts showing some promise of improving, and bringing to us what should be staples of games by now. And from someone who has been as staunch a supporter as I, that should carry some weight.