Trivia / MechWarrior

• Creator Killer: Infinite Games Publishing first two games, was both Piranha Games Inc (PGI) Online and the now defunct or dead in development Tactics, through a licensing agreement with PGI. As PGI began making several big changes as soon as they broke off from Infinite Games and regained complete control of Online, including communicating with the player base of Online more and coming out with several major in game deals and updates, as well as Infinite Games completely Fracking Up Beyond All Repair trust with consumers over their disastrous handling of Tactics (see Development Hell and Vapor Ware below), it's become quite popular to blame them for PGI's disastrous early run. The problems with Tactics has led to IGP closing its doors quietly in November 2014.
• Development Hell:
  • Mech Warrior Tactics is most definitely this. It's been in development for well over 2 years now. Two end of year promises in both 2012 and 2013 for the game to be out in open beta have come and gone, and the original developers were let go because of that. As of late August of 2014, its still in closed Beta, requiring those interested to either hope they get picked as part of the Beta Key lottery, or pay for a founder package, with little to no word from the current developers on its status.
    • At the end of August, the entire Tactics website down, with a message to check back in 72 hours for updates, citing that there was a major hardware update. However, at the same time, someone from third development team, Blue Lizard games, posted this response to a question asking what was going on when the maintenance went past the posted time frame. Needless to say, fans finding out that the dev team had been quietly removed 8 months ago, has fueled speculation that the game has been cancelled. Those who bought Founders packages, have begun expressing their outrage at Infinite Games Publishing for hiding this fact.
    • After 3 weeks of Mechwarrior fans asking questions and beginning to threaten legal and financial actions against IGP, they FINALLY updated the MW Tactics website to.....tell the truth that fans had already found out from Blue Lizard, and to now admit they had no servers to run the game now, and are still looking for a new dev team 10 months after getting rid of Blue Lizard games. Yet they insist the game is somehow still in development and the MW tactics website claiming it will remain down for a "While longer". With Online being handed completely off to Piranha Games Inc, and news and evidence of staff being let go, fired, or jumping ship pointing to the publisher shutting down, the game is now looking like VaporWare.
    • The publisher has entered bankrupcy on October 1st. Since their outstanding liabilities amount to 24 million Canadian dollars (about 20 million USD), the chances of any founders obtaining refunds - unless they already did - are effectively nil. Mechwarrior Tactics is being auctioned off as part of the bankrupcy proceedings, making any chance of it seeing the light of day rather questionable
  • Within Living Legends, the official Urban Warfare map got stuck in development hell. Titled "Coldsteel", it was visible in some early previews prior to the game's first release. However, it was repeatedly pushed to the backburner due the difficultly of acquiring enough environmental assets to make a city that didn't have the same 4 buildings copy-pasted; almost every artist was making new gameplay assets (mechs, tanks, etc) instead. The community eventually got a unofficial urban maps in the form of "Urban Jungle" and "Seaport", which used a purchased building package and copy-pasted buildings in different configurations, respectively.
• Dueling Games: With the Starsiege series. Ironic, since the developer for those games were the same for the first Mechwarrior game. Mech 3 was the last game which competed with Starsiege, as later games in the Starsiege universe are fast paced first person shooters with jetpacks - Tribes
• Dummied Out: The two transport VTOLs — the Karnov and Anhur — exist in-game but cannot be bought normally, due to their massive size and unfinished (and very buggy) state. They have independently controlled turrets for battlearmor players, allowing it to function like a gunship, multiple battlearmor can ride in the back, and it was originally intended to be able to airlift vehicles in the back. The only way to get the Karnov or Anhur is to load up a map with either of the transports pre-placed.
• Executive Meddling: Despite the Mechwarrior franchise having been plagued with copyright issues since the beggining, this has not stopped Piranha Games - the Mechwarrior Online developers - from trying to kill off their competition. Through "mutual agreement with the project leads", they killed off Mechwarrior Living Legends development. They have legally threatened the MekTek team, the guys who re-released Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries for free and who were developing several Mechwarrior/Battletech games - Solaris Arena and Assault Tech 1: Battletech. Rumor is that the developers of Mechwarrior Tactics, the free-to-play game based on BattleTech will try to shut down further development of MegaMek, a free and open-source BattleTech game for the PC.
  • Also, now the free version of Mechwarrior 4 is no longer available due to "legal issues"
  • Interestingly enough, it would seem Piranha Games itself was also subjected to this via Infinite Game's Publishing. Since Piranha bought all rights to MWO out from Infinite Games Publishing, they've subtly hinted that they were not happy with the way Infinite Games was running things. The improvements to MWO in recent months lend some more weight to that as well.
  • How Mechwarrior 3 was created. FASA Interactive, the developers of the two Mechcommander games, began work on Mechwarrior 3 but development on the game engine had badly delayed the game. When Microprose, the original publishers, got bought up by Hasbro Interactive (and FASA Interactive ended up purchased by Microsoft), Hasbro handed the project off to Zipper Interactive which essentially created the game from scratch with their in-house game engine. FASA's game would ultimately become Mechwarrior 4. This is why Mechwarrior 3 has an unusually large number of companies credited in its intro.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Due to legal issues with Harmony Gold and the "Unseen", it's unlikely that the first two MechWarrior games will ever seen a rerelease.
• Promoted Fanboy: The original Mechwarrior Living Legends project heads were hired by Crytek to help develop the new CryEngine. In Living Legends itself, several popular map designers were hired onto the team and had their maps made official.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Mechwarrior Living Legends essentially had their MechWarrior licensed yanked with the release of MechWarrior Online as PGI didn't want to "double up their efforts" to compete with Living Legends. The Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries freeware re-release by MekTek suffered a similar fate when Smith & Tinker, its sponsor owner of the IP went bust (transferring the IP back to Microsoft), but ended up far worse as it was based on a pre-existing commercial game, so they had to cease distribution of the game and kill its master servers. MekTek completely divested itself from the franchise and moved to working on a Heavy Gear title - but that turned into Vapor Ware under some extremely shady circumstances.
• Troubled Production: Mechwarrior 2 had a troubling development stemming from trying to do a bit too much on a tight schedule and budget, along with behind-the-scenes disagreements about release dates and IP licensing (that may or may have not led to Activision going with Heavy Gear instead in the future) that led to it missing its original '93 target and getting the entire dev team replaced, and finally being released in '95.
• What Could Have Been: Before the release of Mechwarrior 2, its early alpha and beta stages were more like the original Mechwarrior game in visuals and also had a couple of clan mechs that didn't see use in the final Mechwarrior 2 release.
  • FASA Studio began some pre-production work on Mechwarrior 5 soon after completing Mercenaries. However Microsoft canceled the game in favor of focusing on MechAssault. Based on the hint at the end of Mercenaries, the story was going to focus on fighting the Word of Blake.
  • What eventually became Mechwarrior Online was supposed to have a single-player campaign, and it looked freakin' awesome. The single player campaign will finally be released as Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, currently scheduled for December 2019.
  • Living Legends 1.0.0 (the "final" product rather than the "beta" everyone was playing) and post-"release" content updates were planned to finally feature the Mechlab, Mobile Point Bases, more battlearmor types, three new gamemodes (including Capture The Flag), internal damage, a unique HUD for aerospace fighters, the battlearmor claw, unique ambient sounds for each mech, and a dozen new tank/mech/aerospace assets such as the Kodiak, Annihilator, Alacorn, and Men Shen. Details more details. Unfortunately, a certain other mech game and legal issues caused by said game forced development to come to a stop at 0.7.1.