"I think most of the problems with our community in the first year or two was not communicating enough and not setting communications well enough," Russ said to me. "We've gotten a lot better about that."
"That's us learning too," he added. "But also at times feeling like maybe our hands were tied."
Now that Piranha Games is solely responsible for the future of Mechwarrior Online, Russ couldn't be happier. He seemed genuinely excited to talk about just how much productivity has increased since those shaky first years, even going so far as to explain how liberating it can be having a marketing meeting in the middle of the week and putting those plans into action by week's end—a process that simply wasn't plausible with Infinite Games Publishing. "That's fast iteration that you need nowadays," he said. "It's a 2015 online game development, instant gratification world. There's a bazillion games launching on Steam every day. You've got to engage your player base—you can't react quick enough when you've got that other relationship in place. It's like, 'hey guys, we'd like to have this event this weekend...'" Russ then pantomimed a hilariously indifferent response from the imaginary publishers. "Aw fuck it, maybe we'll have one next month. That can't be the way it is in 2015 anymore."
"You can't run your game that way. You have to be a lot more agile."
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Looking forward, a third phase of Community Warfare will be arriving at some point this spring. It's a big update, one that Russ, during his presentation at the party, said would likely be as big as the first two phases combined. A big part of that update is adding in roles that players can define themselves by. "The most impactful part will be the further defining of the roleplaying roles," Russ said. "The most important thing to [players] is to roleplay, to feel like they are the Alpha Lance of the First Davion Guard. They want to be these guys and name their unit that and fight on that border. If they can do that in an effective way, that's so rewarding to them. The rest is just adding more depth on top of that."
If that sounds confusing, it's because it is. One of the biggest issues plaguing Mechwarrior Online for the longest time was the incredibly steep learning curve that players had to climb in order to succeed. Older versions of the game had little in the way of tutorials, giving Mechwarrior Online a very sink or swim feel—something that surely turned away a lot of would be players. As someone who had never played Mechwarrior Online but was now curious in trying it out, I wanted to know what Russ thought where the real value lay for new players.
"Right now it has to be because the game finally has a really great, robust tutorial system in it," he said. He explained what the system looked like before, and I have to say, it sounded terrible. "It'd just throw you to the wolves and they are just vicious."
The current system is apparently a much smoother ride as players are actually given a full tutorial that will walk them through many of the basics of piloting a mech. Furthermore, the main tutorial opens up into what is called Mechwarrior Academy, a place where fledgling pilots can take on various challenges to help refine their skills. "You can spend hours and hours and hours in there," Russ said. "That's why now's the time to finally take that plunge and learn how to pilot that mech."
These improvements and additions are just a fraction of the changes that Mechwarrior Online has undergone since its initial release. There's also a new Mechlab, a place for players to build and tweak their mechs (a process so involved that fans of EVE Online are sure to salivate), as well as improved queues for matches complete with a player skill rating system to better match you against opponents of your skill level. There's even a separate queue for solo and grouped players, meaning you're not going to be fighting a highly coordinated team as a bunch of random players.
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I could go on, but I think the point is clear: Mechwarrior Online is not the same game it was years ago—and that's both a blessing and a curse. While few could argue that the list of additions and changes haven't vastly improved the experience, it also leaves Piranha Games in the awkward position of communicating that message to audiences both new and old. For me, it's a sobering reminder of how divergent the way we critique games and the way they are developed is becoming.
There was a time when game design felt more static and finalized, when a game was shipped as-is without the benefit (or detriment, in the case of massive day one patches and broken launches that are "fixed" later) of being able to easily tweak and balance it through patches delivered over the internet. But now, development has become such a fluid process—so rapidly changing and iterating from one month to the next—that it's a shame how genuinely improved games can be held to the fire of their first impressions.
Launching on Steam so late into its life might seem like a weird decision, but I reckon that Mechwarrior Online has never been in a healthier place to open its doors to a whole new group of players. If you love the idea of a slower paced, more strategic first person shooter, Mechwarrior Online is worth checking out. Though its first few years might be marred with troubled relationships with a publisher and various growing pains, it's hard not to look around the party at the Piranha Games studio, talking with the developers and with Russ, and get the impression that, for them, Mechwarrior Online has a bright future. Whether that bright future comes to fruition still remains to be seen. All I know is Mechwarrior Online just finished installing and I'm excited to play.
