MechWarrior Online

Available on: PC

Mechwarrior Online announced, will be F2P and PC-exclusive

Giant mechs can't be contained by consoles

Words: Tom_Goulter on November 1, 2011

9 Comments

The next title in the Mechwarrior series will be a free-to-play team-based multiplayer BattleMech sim exclusively for the PC, the game's developers announced this week. The plainly-titled Mechwarrior Online will launch in Summer of 2012, and developers Piranha/Smith & Tinker have already started work on building the game's community.

The next title in the Mechwarrior series will be a free-to-play MMO for PC only, the game's developers announced this week. The admirably plainly-titled Mechwarrior Online will launch in Summer of 2012, and developers Piranha/Smith & Tinker have already started work on building the game's community.

Above: The MWO team's first offering is this sexily bare-bones pre-vis footage.

Due to legal intricacies which are (1) pretty damn boring and (2) the sort of thing best sorted out with a hail of shoulder-mounted Vulcan fire, the title's not going to be making its way to consoles for the foreseeable future. However, the good news is that the game's dev team includes Bellevue, WA studio Smith & Tinker, best known as the company founded by Mechwarrior creator Jordan Weisman. So while the game will be tossing about 2011 concepts like “team-based online multiplayer” and “free-to-play,” it'll be doing so with input from the franchise's pen-and-paper granddaddy.

Mechwarrior Online's official site is online now. For the moment, the site's big function is the ability to reserve your pilot name ahead of next year's launch; but there's also a dev diary, which is posted below, and a fast-growing forum community for you to annoy with questions about whether Metal Gear Solid could beat Mechwarrior in a fight. Have at you!

Platforms:

Topics:

F2P, mechwarrior

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ThisIsMyFuckingThirdAccount - November 22, 2011 6:15 a.m.

FUCK THIS. FUCK THIS TO HELL. No way in hell would I ever play a Mechwarrior game for multiplayer. Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance and Black Knight are two of my favorite PC games ever.
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FoxdenRacing - November 2, 2011 11:38 a.m.

This is going to end up being the heartbreak of my year. I suppose there is a silver lining...the money I was going to pour into making a full-blown mech pod at home can now get poured into a racing rig. What started with an amazing premise...take the earlier MW games, build the same no-compromises mech 'sim on modern tech, set a story sometime other than the same 15-year-period MW and MW-related games have beaten to death since 1995...ends up as just another multiplayer-focused FPS in a sea of heavily multiplayer focused FPSes. And as a double-whammy, it's doing it on the back of the scamerrific F2P "Why charge $60 once when we can charge $2 100+ times?" model. Next they're going to tell me they dumbed down everything that makes Mechwarrior Mechwarrior, turning a brilliant sorta-sim series into another CoD clone. I'm an enormous mech fan; have been since I discovered it, using my grandmother's 1950s-tastic typewriter to ask the now-defunct FASA for a catalog after renting the Genesis game, delving into the board game, the pen and paper RPG, the PC games, the console games (16-bit and Mechassault), the RTS games, countless hours reading books and fluff pieces...and to see it gutted like this, it honestly makes me want to cry.
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Spybreak8 - November 2, 2011 9:51 a.m.

Yes I wanna see all the iconic Mechs; the vulture, the shadow hawk, the locust, the atlas and some new ones baby!
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mockraven - November 2, 2011 4:55 a.m.

I love Mechwarrior! It's where my name came from, actually. The Raven was one of my favourite mechs to pilot. I'm looking forward to this just because I've been pining for a new Mechwarrior game for years now.
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TheZigMan - November 1, 2011 7:54 p.m.

MADCAT!!
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bigbubba - November 1, 2011 6 p.m.

That trailer looks familiar... OH WAIT! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orhOvbfyyJw
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Spacecraft - November 1, 2011 7:50 p.m.

I noticed that too.. Pretty disappointing.
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tareq - November 1, 2011 5:32 p.m.

This and Hawken make me happy
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