Remember that MechWarrior game Piranha Games was once developing, only to let it vanish off the earth without a trace while they finished work on Duke Nukem Forever, followed by teasing us with images through Twitter? Free-to-play MMO. Yep.
The team-based MechWarrior Online is scheduled for the second half of 2012. It’s a full-on PC game, so expect it to be more MechWarrior 4 than Mech Assault with first-person views, a possibility for joystick support and all that jazz. You’ll be able to do MMO things like forming the equivalents of guilds and 4-player parties (lances), yadda yadda, and there’s no singleplayer campaign.
PC Gamer has the exclusive on why we’re supposed to care about the MechWarrior franchise being turned into a F2P MMO, as well as an interview with Piranha Games. There’s some talk about the reasons why the game has gone dark for so long, like the economic downturn and the problem of trying to sell a publisher on a game centered around an IP that won’t be owned by said publisher.
However, I didn’t see any mention of an “epic narratively driven campaign involving Clan Jade Falcon, Clan Wolf and the Inner Sphere” and subsequently went to my hermit shack, brooding over the lack of a new TIE Fighter or Freespace 3 and lighting a candle for the MechWarrior single-player games.
I guess this could be an interesting game if you like F2P MMOs, though!
Meet MechWarrior Online, Piranha’s free-to-play tactical Mech sim [PC Gamer]
