July 7, 2009 - Earlier today, boards around the Web caught on fire with the reveal of a teaser trailer that implied a new MechWarrior game was in the making. While the speculation about the next chapter in the franchise has been flying around, we actually know what this mystery game is, what the footage entails, and how it will rock your computer.

This Thursday at 12:01 AM PDT, we'll have an interview with Jordan Weisman of Smith and Tinker and Russ Bullock, president of Piranha Games, to address the rumors and explain just what the future holds. We'll even have a few extras to keep you talking for months to come.

The rumors started earlier today when a short, nine second trailer that shows off a city street and a number of slick looking sports cars. The street starts to vibrate as a stomping sound can be overheard, and shortly thereafter, what looks like a mech leg crunches into view. The video then ends as debris is propelled from the ground due to the impact.

With FASA Interactive officially dead, the rights to the MechWarrior franchise were acquired by Smith and Tinker, which was founded by FASA founder Weisman.

*UPDATE* A second and third teaser trailer have just been released. The second is taken from inside a parking garage and shows a large bipedal mech stomping down a street with the wreckage of buildings burning in the background. Two cannons are visible on the body of the mech, and as it swivels, the trailer ends.

The third teaser trailer shows what appears to be a Jenner mech leaping atop a building.

July 8, 2009 - MechWarrior fans have been hoping, praying and anticipating a new game in the famed franchise ever since the last expansion pack for MechWarrior 4 was released in 2002. Now, seven years later, their prayers have been answered. IGN has the very first details about MechWarrior reboot that is currently in production at Smith and Tinker and Piranha games. Yes, that's right, reboot. Instead of this game becoming MechWarrior 5, the developers have decided to completely re-launch the entire franchise, calling this new title MechWarrior.

We spoke to the two main players involved with MechWarrior. First there's Jordan Weisman, co-founder of Smith and Tinker and co-founder of FASA, the company that created the BattleTech universe that MechWarrior is based upon. Second is Russ Bullock, president of Piranha Games. (For an in-depth discussion of the reboot and how it fits in the franchise, check out our exclusive interview.)

You may remember the MechWarrior games published by Activision, MicroProse, and Microsoft. The latter actually acquired FASA Interactive in the 1990s only to shutter the studio in 2007. However, the software giant retained the rights to the MechWarrior franchise. After leaving Microsoft, Weisman engaged in various pursuits before founding Smith and Tinker in 2007. That same year, Smith and Tinker acquired the rights to many FASA properties from Microsoft, including MechWarrior.

This new MechWarrior is set on the planet Deshler in the year 3015, and places players in the role of Adrian Khol, a wayward nobleman who prefers partying and shirking responsibility over his training and studies. However, when House Kurita launches a massive invasion to conquer Deshler, resulting in the death of his entire family, Khol discovers a purpose to fight for.

There are ambitious plans for this new MechWarrior. The original MechWarrior games were limited by technology; now with modern computing power, the developers are hoping to really capture the sense that you're piloting a giant, walking war machine in the middle of an incredibly dynamic battlefield. While the two companies are still talking to potential publishers that could determine the final production budget, Weisman and Bullock explained that they plan to have a full single-player campaign, as well as support for a four-player co-op campaign, and a full multiplayer suite.

One of the key features is a sense of information warfare, using everything from unmanned drones surveying the battlefield from above to light scout mechs relaying information to teammates. Weisman and Bullock both explained how they want every class of mech to really matter in this game; it's not just a race to the heaviest, most powerful mechs. The designers want to reward you for picking a mech and sticking with it -- you will gain experience and become better at piloting your chosen mech, and that will translate into better accuracy and damage with weapon systems. This way, a player could specialize in a light mech throughout the entire game if they choose. It also means there are multiple playthroughs with different mechs. The developers also said the game will change based on your chosen mech class.

While the developers didn't go into how many mechs will make the game, based on the video trailer and the discussions, we know of at least four. There's the Jenner (light class), both the Warhammer and the Rifleman(heavy class), and an Atlas Prime, a feared assault-class mech.

The game is being developed for the PC and the Xbox 360, though there isn't any idea of a release date yet, since the game is still in the middle of development and the companies are still talking to publishers. For more information, read the interview with Weisman and Bullock. We also dissect the trailer in a Rewind Theater. Check out the gallery for the very first screens of the game anywhere. Finally, keep checking back with us as we keep a very close eye on this exciting new project.

July 9, 2009 - In the past few days, teaser trailers have appeared online that have gotten fans excited about the possible announcement of a new MechWarrior game. Well, we can confirm that the title is in development. Forget what you've played before; say hello to MechWarrior. That's its full title, there's no 5 or V after its name; this is a complete reboot for the famous franchise. To learn more, we have an exclusive interview with Smith and Tinker co-founder Jordan Weisman and Russ Bullock, president of Piranha Games. Weisman was also the co-founder of FASA and a co-creator of the BattleTech universe that MechWarrior is based upon.

If you're looking for a quick summary of the interview, check out our revealing news story. Below, you'll find information about the new storyline, the planned multiplayer and co-op features, and even details about the console transition for the game. You'll also be able to check out the first full trailer of MechWarrior, as well as our Rewind Theater analysis of that video. Finally, make sure you leave your comments – both Weisman and Bullock are interested in finding out what fans think about the new direction that they want to take the acclaimed MechWarrior franchise.

Jordan Weisman: I'll kick off everything; this came about through a series of turns. After I left Microsoft some years ago, Microsoft let the properties lay idle – they hadn't really done much with them. So about two years ago, I was able to negotiate the license that gave me the opportunity to try to do something with those properties because they're all close to my heart, and I hate seeing great universes lay fallow. Of course, in the way of how the world works, as soon as I put that deal together, Smith and Tinker materialized around me in a strange confluence of events and I got swept up in doing Nanovor, which is our big release product this fall. So I wasn't able to spend a lot of time on the FASA properties as I wanted, but I spent a bunch of time thinking about what I wanted to do with them.

Russ, who is a longtime fan, and I'll let him tell his story, got a hold of me. We started talking and developed a prototype project on a different subject as a kind of "get to know you," and during that process spent a lot of time talking about our shared passion for reinventing MechWarrior. We've been working on this vision for MechWarrior, of which the video is a component of our thoughts about what the game should be, for the last five months now. The goal was partially a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the property, and mostly as a way of trying to present to the public and to publishers a vision of what a next-generation MechWarrior could be, was to roll this thing out next week.

Russ Bullock: It very much happened like that. I grew up playing the pen-and-paper game; I can thank my brother for that as he dragged his little brother with him to play all the latest role-playing games he could get his hands on. Some of them really spoke to me – a lot of the FASA properties, and especially one that really did was MechWarrior – the BattleTech brand. So when I formed Piranha Games (and Piranha Games will be ten years old this January), it put me in a situation where things like that, when I thought of them, put me in a unique situation to attempt to try to work on some of those passions.

Over the years, there was a very miniscule chance that the brands were being used; they were at Microsoft and various companies. It still didn't prevent me from researching what was going on with the properties and, were they available, could I do something? Every year or two throughout ten years, and then, to my surprise, the latest time I went looking around, I found out that Jordan had licensed them back and Smith and Tinker have those rights. That was about October last year and we just started to form that relationship and I got very excited. We continued to strengthen our relationship until we got to where we are today.

IGN: Awesome. So how long has MechWarrior fully been in development? Has it been since last October?

Russ Bullock: Yeah, October we started to discuss and talk about things. We started off with paper; we started off with a PowerPoint presentation and we came down and presented it to Jordan and we fine tuned it. We talked about what MechWarrior should be today, and that process took a couple of months. It just so happens--and it's interesting how these things work in life--that we were doing that much, everything we could to work with Jordan on the license, and we were busy at the time finishing off Transformers 2 with Activision. We worked directly with their internal studio LuxoFlux to create the 360 and PS3 SKUs of Transformers 2.

So, I found it somewhat interesting and ironic that we were creating another large robot-based type game. That was giving us a lot of experience and knowledge and scale and all of the things that you can imagine would be shared attributes of the two. Although different, there are a lot of shared attributes. So, we were busy working on that, and when we finished working on it in the early spring or late winter, March timeframe, that's when it really started to ramp up having a team full time on the MechWarrior franchise. Not in the full development scenario, of course, but in a "let's create this prototype," something that we can demonstrate what we think MechWarrior can be in a reborn situation.

IGN: Okay, so let's dive into some other questions. The trailer that we were shown starts during 3015, which is still within the Third Succession War. That would actually place it before the first MechWarrior game in the established franchise history. Is this a full reboot of the series, or is this trailer a highlight that sets the action and then starts the gameplay later in the established history?

Jordan Weisman: It's definitely a re-launch. I mean, twenty five years of any soap opera, especially space opera, can become pretty difficult for new players to become involved in. We wanted to take the opportunity to re-launch, or as Russ phrased it, redact the universe. Introduce it at the kind of accessible level it was when we first introduced the universe twenty five years ago. This is not unlike what we've seen most recently with Star Trek, Iron Man, Spider-Man…All franchises which, as they reach out to a new audience, need to create an accessible origin story for their beginnings. So that's where we wanted to go to, it's right at the beginning. Actually, the story starts just as Hanse Davion comes to power, so it is just, as you said, at the end of the Third, right at the beginning of what will become the Fourth Succession War.

IGN: Cool, that's definitely something that, as a fan, I was definitely wondering about. Just to build on that: There's a twenty five year history of BattleTech, the franchise that MechWarrior was based on. Will there be specific factions that fans can expect, like the Ghost Bear, Jade Falcon, or Wolf's Dragoons? Also, are there particular states from the Houses of the Inner Sphere that we can expect to run into? Kurita was mentioned in the trailer, but will we see House Liao or House Steiner – the constant Inner Sphere clashes that helped define the franchise?

Jordan Weisman: Well, certainly we'll give you our impressions. Of course, ultimately, some of this will come into discussion with the publisher. We hope to find the right publisher for this project, but obviously, some things are in direct relationship to the budget. For instance, like how many of the different factions we can involve. The core storyline, as we're seeing it and the way we're viewing it for the single-player game, is to keep the story intense and contained. So it is a story of a planet called Deshler which is a Davion planet on the Kurita frontier, which, like many planets on the frontier, have changed hands back and forth. Kurita is making a play all along the frontier, reclaiming a bunch of territory, and our planet is one of those.

Again, we wanted to create an accessible entry point for the property, so our point-of-view character in the single-player game that you play is the fourth son of the noble house that rules this little planet for House Davion. It's kind of a classic tale – There's the heir, the spare, and then you go two further down – by then, you're at the, "What the hell are you doing here?" level. So the kid is a kind of a classic, party-going screw-up kid. All of a sudden when the whole family is wiped out in the opening salvos of this war, he's got to put the beer down and pick up the responsibility. So we wanted to keep the story kind of smaller scale so we could make it very intense, and then in the multiplayer we'd open it up into more factions.

But even within that small, intense story, there's an opportunity for some of the cooler merc units like Wolf's Dragoons or certainly the colorful House Kurita units to get involved. And we've got a couple secrets up our sleeves as to how the single-player story could unfold in interesting ways.

IGN: So just as a quick question related to the planet, the attacks within the single-player game are just like the strikes from House Kurita against House Davion during the first Succession Wars?

Jordan Weisman: Exactly. This planet was a Kurita planet a hundred years ago.

IGN: Okay, so considering that this guy is basically fourth in line on Deshler, will he control a lance? Is he flying solo? Did he just manage to get into a mech as everything was blowing up around him?

Jordan Weisman: I'll answer from a story standpoint, and Russ can answer more from a gameplay standpoint. Our hero's name is Adrian Khol, and he's been trained as a MechWarrior as an obligation of his position. But he never took it seriously, and in fact the reason why he's out of the palace when this all happens is he's taking yet again another makeup test for having blown off previous obligations. So he's out with his instructor trying to pass certification for the umpteenth time. He's got a natural touch, but he's got no sense of responsibility or duty until this point. We do see the game scaling in terms of his firepower over the course of the game, but one of the things that's really important for us – Russ and I have spent a lot of time talking about how this is not your father's MechWarrior, even though technically I am probably old enough to be any of the players' fathers. I don't want to even think about that!

But we have some great history that travels to us from the previous versions of MechWarrior, but there are also some things that were artifacts of the era and technology that was available at the time to build those games which are things that we think we really have to avoid. One of those, for instance, in terms of dealing with the types of mechs, is to make sure that each class of mech really has its own unique role on the battlefield. So a light [mech] is not just something you pilot on your way towards a medium, a heavy, and eventually an assault; that a light [mech] has a really different play dynamic, and a reason why in any larger scale game that people are going to want to take lights; the same for mediums and all the way up the scale through the four classes. So we definitely see this, especially when you get into multiplayer, but even in the single-player and co-op, which we hope to incorporate into the campaign, that it really is all based on lance dynamics. Russ, do you want to pick up on that?

Russ Bullock: Yeah, for sure. After we get through talking, you'll probably watch the video and almost see it in a different light. As much as we wanted it to look really great, that became a secondary goal for us. We knew we were going to make it look really good and enticing to players, but everything we did inside the video was to prove something. Like we said, our big goal is to find the right partner here to support us and to make a really great MechWarrior game because we feel like the window of opportunity there and the technology today--we just really feel like it's time and it's going to be such a great game. We want to, even though we could go striking off and create the whole game on our own, we wanted to create this video. Everything in there is really displaying a main feature of the game going forward.

As Jordan said, "Not your father's MechWarrior." We had a lot of fun with that, talking about it. Even though we're big fans of MechWarrior, myself included--I just really liked all of them, and even though I have my favorites, but I liked every MechWarrior game. I remember MechWarrior; it was great. We used to run around each other in circles and try to shoot each other's legs off. That brought a smile to our faces because we adored the MechWarrior games, but it was true: there were some limitations based on the technology that made the gameplay somewhat repetitive in some ways. So first thing you'll notice is that we've gone to an urban combat environment, which now the technology is there where we can do that.

That's one of the main things we wanted to prove in the video, that you could see how it would look and how it would feel. You see the small Jenner landing on top of the roof showing how you could use that, but also how that weight class of mech was just at the limit of what that building might support. As you see the windows pop out and it doesn't take a lot of damage before the building crumbles. But just before that, there's all the different aspects. You can't just hit the "find nearest target" key and cycle through enemies in the nearby vicinity; you've got to find that information first. So we just demonstrated one method of many that the player will need to find out where those enemy targets are, and one way might be with a remote drone. Or, like Jordan said, another way might be a great use of all the different classes of mechs.

So, in your lance, you're going to want a light scout mech, and he'll go out there and find out where they are and tag them. With the buildings, you can take cover and if you lose your enemies in the buildings, they'll lose you as a target. All those things that you couldn't do before – once you were a target in the past, you could never really escape; they could keep that red box around you no matter how many hills you ran behind. You can just see how now, between the buildings, getting on top of them, hiding, finding the information – we're going to make every class valuable again. So you have your scout mechs, have your medium class mechs, and then you want to have your assault class mechs when everything's all primed for the trap [to] take things out. That's going to really play into the single-player campaign, and it's hard to go into a lot of details because we don't know what might change through some discussions with the publisher.

But there's some great dynamics there for single-player there that we've discussed, and we've also talked about how great that would fall in line with co-op. Co-op campaigns are so popular nowadays, and some games have really great ones. We can't imagine hardly a better property for it: when you think of a lance as four mechs, we have an opportunity here to have a four-player lance, all with player controlled mechs and utilizing all four classes of the mechs in the universe from light, medium, heavy, and assault. So, it really does play out really well for the universe to, for the first time, take advantage of some of these big features like co-op, etc. Then again, for multiplayer, too – it's hard to imagine a better environment to create a progressive experience based system of multiplayer that really lasts and prolongs the playtime for the game.

Jordan Weisman: Just picking up on what Russ said there, nothing is ever as satisfying as unleashing the kind of firepower that only a mech contains and watching it ravage your target. We do want to make the information warfare a close second in terms of its dynamics and the tension it can create, the tools at your disposal and a weaponized way of dealing with information that makes it more dynamic and interesting. In any kind of assault on a planet, the first thing that goes are the satellites, so all of the normal GPS and global positioning information that we're used to having instantly goes away, and you're down to very temporary crude things, comparatively. That's what we think we can take advantage of to add a lot of tension to the game, in that regard.

IGN: That's all very cool. To follow up on that, mechs have always been the star of the game, and for good reason. How many mechs within each class will be included within the game? Additionally, since you've mentioned that Adrian is a partier, he'd probably have a lot of friends as well as people that he'd pick up during the campaign. How many MechWarriors do you expect to be able to recruit over the course of the single-player campaign?

Russ Bullock: Maybe Jordan can comment on that; I'm not sure if we fully know how many different types of mechs or MechWarriors will be in the game. One thing that you did say that I really want to touch on, because I think you hit it there, is that the mechs are the stars. That's another one of those really positive aspects of going back to the timeline we're going back to. Jordan and I have talked at length about how we want to get back to a time where the mechs were so important and so valuable. For instance, the mechs may be so scarce on this planet for House Davion that the house may have the family mech, and that's been passed down for generations almost like a suit of armor.

So you remember having that sense from the early days of MechWarrior. We want to establish that again. The mechs are so valuable and so important: they're more important than the guy you've got in the cockpit. You can find another guy, but the mechs are so valuable. Salvage will take on more of a real meaning in the game, right down to a rudimentary level of "keep getting enough parts to keep fighting" rather than "I have another six chassis in my inventory to just throw on the market." So we really want to get that feeling again. Along with that comes the personality: those enemy mechs, you'll recognize that one Atlas with the horns or something because you'll know who that is--it's that main enemy commander. It won't be like fodder; you'll see him throughout the game. Stuff like that really gives the personality and the importance back to the mechs.

Jordan Weisman: It used to be that when we started the franchise, the whole premise was that one lance could take a whole planet. You had that kind of earthshaking power, and we want to try to get back to those days. I think one of the things that Russ touched on is another one of those "Not your father's MechWarrior" touchdowns that we want to do is really emphasize the connection between man and machine. Not only are mechs scarce and [it's] incredibly important to preserve and salvage what you can to maintain them, but like a fighter pilot in a plane or a racecar driver in a car, the more experience you have in that particular vehicle, the better you get at it.

We have some really cool ideas about how to reward players for specializing not only in classes of mechs [but] in specific mechs, so that they build up that relationship and also a reason, potentially, to develop totally different characters in the on-running multiplayer campaign. As you develop different characters that have different expertise in different mechs, much like you would develop a warrior and a wizard because you want to have two different play styles in a fantasy game. That relationship is something which the fiction has always really dealt with but the games never really had the capabilities to do so, and we think that we've got some ideas on how to apply that and make that come to life.

IGN: Russ, considering that you also mentioned co-op, have you figured out a specific total number of players that you're looking at trying to implement for that, or is it one of those things that's still on the drawing board?

Russ Bullock: For co-op, we're really aiming for four player co-op. I really want to see the possibility for anywhere between one and four. Again, these are just initial thoughts, but similar to how in Gears of War, you can go through the entire campaign with someone or not. We'd like to have that – I'd love to see you going through that. We've talked to Jordan about this too and he's touched a bit on this about the classes. We'd love to have a lot of replayability – have a really intense single-player storyline and have the player have a reason to go through that single-player storyline four different times because they might want to experience it from a scout mech because the play style is so rewarding and unique on its own, to the medium, heavy, or an assault. They could go through it four times and then, that would open up co-op where you and three of your buddies could go through taking turns playing the different classes with the dynamics and strategies that would bring to your lance as you take turns playing with different roles with different classes of mechs, finding success by using all the different classes of mechs. I think that we're aiming to have the ability to have the full lance be player controlled.

IGN: Sweet! Now, since the mechs themselves were always known for having incredibly powerful weaponry, are we still going to see the same kinds of weapons that fans know, like autocannons, PPCs and LRMs, or will there be new weapons that haven't been seen before in the MechWarrior universe?

Russ Bullock: We haven't talked a lot about providing new weaponry beyond what would be available possibly at that 3015 timeframe in the universe, but I think we're very open, as you've seen from the video, to creating new tools or devices in the form of temporary satellite drones that the Warhammer sends up to find targets. That plays into the information warfare for that dynamic pacing that we were talking about – you've got to find where those targets are, and keep that information. Once you have it, you can relay it to your lancemates.

I think what we're going to see are some things like that, that might be new, because you've never really heard of something like that before in MechWarrior, but maybe it's something that isn't so much new as the ability to, for the first time, utilize some of the things that have always been discussed in the pen-and-paper games but never been realized in the games. Things like the tagging beacons or the jamming radars – there've always been quite a few items in the pen-and-paper version for enhancing the information warfare but really haven't been utilized fully in a game before, so I think playing off of that, you'll see some of those things actually working in the game for the first time. You'll also see other, newer items that will help us achieve that information warfare aspect.

Jordan Weisman: The only thing that I would add to that is while we don't have any plans right now to introduce brand new types of weapons, I think we're going to bring those weapons to life in a fidelity, both graphically and from a game system way, that is much greater than they've ever been before. So the differentiation and the understanding of the different uses of them will be very fresh. I don't know if we'll just hone the classes of weapons, but I think we'll have an enormous diversity by just using the palettes that are there but breathing new life and depth into each of the pieces that already exist.

IGN: Okay, and will the damage indicators remain as clear as they were shown within the trailer with flashing indicators to highlight damage, or will those changed based on severity of damage?

Jordan Weisman: Absolutely, the HUD stuff that's there is very kind of first pass – it isn't meant to be fully reflective of how the game system would totally report data. But as you can see the damage to the environment and the damage to the mechs in the video, we really want the fidelity of the damage to play out. One of the other things that we're exploring is a way that the player, within a particular scenario, has some measure of repair capability. One of the challenges that MechWarriors have faced in the past is that it's been purely an ablative experience within a single mission; your most powerful point is at the first minute and after that, it just goes downhill or how quickly you go downhill.

Something that we've discussed is maybe there's an opportunity to do something along the lines of the R2 moment within the Death Star trench run, where Luke says, "Patch up what you can, R2!" There's an opportunity to try to look for small automated repair techniques that we can employ, but we want to do it in a resource management kind of system, because that's what the MechWarrior/BattleTech system has always been about. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's not just health lying around on the ground for you to pick it up. Just as many first-person shooters have moved away from that kind of style and have kind of tried to embrace a reality where health comes from slowing down and taking a break, we think there are opportunities to balance use of power, use of coolant, or removing yourself from the engagement for a moment that would allow you to do some measure of repair in-mission.

IGN: Right, just like the amount of heat sinks that you have that allows you to maximize your refresh rate on your weapons fire.

Jordan Weisman: Absolutely! Heat sinks are the core concept of resource management. The idea that you do have to measure yourself and you're always playing that risk/reward relationship between how much do I unleash and what kind of a feeble position will that leave me in next.

Russ Bullock: I think that's a point that I'd like to touch on there. I'm not sure if it's in the video in the moment – what you've seen is not a finished reel. We're getting relatively close, obviously we're almost to the finish line, but the end result is that there's a lot of things in that video that also shows things happening inside the cockpit, whether it's actually seeing the hand pressing the button to deploy the drone or hitting the eject, and other aspects, like the sparks or other damage that's going on. When it comes to the risk/reward relationship, we'd like to enhance that. In the past, you'd always hear a voice telling you that you were going to overheat, and if you overdid it, then you'd shut down. But most of the time, you'd generally ignore it and you'd just kind of ride that hairy line; you want to ride that hairy line, but we feel like now, with the technology today, we can introduce further small penalties for doing that.

In the video, it may not be there yet, but when the PPCs are fired off inside the Warhammer, we've got a pixel shader of an actual heat shimmer inside the cockpit. Whenever you've read about those weapons in the books, it's always been described as a heat wave that hits that cockpit when those weapons are fired and all the heat starts to build up in the mechs. We're at a point now where we can introduce some of that visually, so maybe there is a small impediment to your vision as the heat is rising in your cockpit so not only are you running really hot, but it might be just a little harder to target or shoot the other mechs.

The end statement that I've been running with is that I really like the sound of is that we don't want the player to feel like they're the mech; we want the player to feel like the driver inside the mech. So everything is about the player experience, you're actually inside that cockpit and driving it, so we'd like to do that better than any of the past games.

IGN: That actually brings me to my next question. As far as PC gamers were concerned, part of the appeal of controlling your mech in the MechWarrior franchise was feeling like you were in control of your mech, having access to multiple cockpit commands at one time with your keyboard and your mouse. How are you planning to keep this classic control scheme feel, and will you be adding any new elements for your mechs, especially now that you want to create this full cockpit experience?

Russ Bullock: First and foremost, in this day and age and this time, we've all played the PC games in the past and absolutely loved them. But certainly going forward, just out of necessity and because we think we can, we're definitely very focused also on the Xbox 360. So we're very focused on the console standpoint moving forward. Now, we still need to work out a lot with our chosen publishing partner, so some of these questions will become answered, but I think that Jordan and I are in agreement that we want to make a MechWarrior game.

The MechAssault games were interesting in the role they played inside the universe for the consoles at the time, but we feel the technology is there that we can make a true MechWarrior game, a MechWarrior experience on both the Xbox 360 and the PC and not lose anything from that true MechWarrior feeling. We feel confident obviously in the PC and its control scheme that can be realized because it's been done before. But for the Xbox 360, we've spent a lot of thought and a lot of time in playing around with the controller and finding ways to give the same level of control in the way that you throttle, in the way that you turn and move, use your jump jets, and everything that gives you that MechWarrior experience that doesn't turn it into a power-up pickup sort of arcade style game. So that is something that we're spending a lot of time on – all the answers aren't there yet, but we want to make a MechWarrior experience and we feel like we can do it both on the 360 and the PC.

Jordan Weisman: Yeah, if you look at the 360 controller, I think that if we empower the player to assign functionality to what is frankly an intimidating number of buttons on that controller, there's a lot of options that we can offer the player in terms of how to chain weapons, assign coolant or other components of the information warrior part to different parts on the controller as well as making the controller modal if we need to. I think the key thing is having a ramp where a more casual player isn't overwhelmed with the control surfaces and unable to have a great time playing this thing. It's really got to go from arcade level controls to simulation level controls in an elegant unfolding of functionality. When people start, they need an entry point to be successful and have a great time without needing to have memorized lots of different controls, but you need to have it unfold for advanced players who want to micromanage.

IGN: Right, so there was definitely no discussion to having a more arcade-like feel for the console? There was always a decision to keep it as a balance of action and simulation for both platforms?

Jordan Weisman: Yeah, I think that MechWarrior was kind of the PC's first big action title, and even if you go back to MechWarrior 2, it certainly had sim aspects, but the sim component wasn't so overwhelming that it became inaccessible. We want to walk that line as well, that it's an action sim as you said, not a sim with action.

IGN: Okay, that's good to know in for people that might have been afraid of a Steel Battalion-like controller that they have to find a large coffee table to place the entire thing upon.

Jordan Weisman: No, I already did that – it was called the BattleTech centers. They were cool, but I don't need to do that again! (Laughs)

IGN: Considering the visuals of the trailer itself, which were particularly impressive, have you found any issues or limitations in transferring the same visual fidelity from the PC to the 360?

Russ Bullock: No, it's not mentioned in the video – the video mentions 'in-game footage' – but everything at the moment is being developed with the Unreal 3 engine. As you know, it's a very good engine that's been responsible for some very big hits on both the 360 and the PC, some of our own personal favorites, like BioShock. It works very well on both the 360 and the PC, so we've been really happy with it. We have used Unreal engine quite a bit in the past, and we know how to use it very well, so it's a very logical choice. Now, we really like the engine and we feel like we can make a great product with the engine, but we still have to discuss that with our chosen publishing partner and I have hope that that will be the way things end up. There's other ways to get to the finish line as well, but at the moment, to answer your question, it runs really great on both the 360 and PC as well.

IGN: The discussion of the engine brings up another question: MechWarrior 4 featured mix of full motion video and CG to help tell the story and provide additional communication. Are you planning on keeping the mix of FMV and CG video for this game, or will this be replaced by some different storytelling device? Also, will you feature branching plot lines with your mission structure and multiple endings?

Jordan Weisman: In all honesty, it all comes down to the publishing partner and the budget. Certainly over the years, I've done a lot of live action video for my games and enjoyed doing that and telling those stories. I've also done a lot of animation and pure voice over work. I think, ultimately, you can be successful with any storytelling mechanism you choose as long as you really do it with a depth of respect and with planning on how to use the medium to its best advantage. It's also fun to find a little twist on it, which we try to do. But I think it'll come down more to the publisher and the budget. Certainly our hope would be to be able to have the live action because the graphics are now at that photo real fidelity and you'd love to have the human component of the story told at that same fidelity.

Russ Bullock: I would agree. I think the only thing I would add is that obviously with the engine like the one we're using and where the graphics are today, for showing the actual mechs and the cinematic sequences of events as you plan a story element, those elements now are reaching a point where I don't think it's necessary to go to a pre-rendered mech movie because I think you're basically there with the in-game footage. Everything you saw in the video is in-game footage. But, maybe the human element, as Jordan mentioned: it's not something that I've thought a lot about yet, but that might be a good point, that maybe the human element could be live action to match the same fidelity.

Jordan Weisman: I certainly don't think that it'd be required, but it'd certainly be fun to do it that way. To answer your other question on branching, what Russ and I have talked about is not having it so much for this first one. We weren't really envisioning a branching storyline, but as he mentioned it earlier, a storyline that plays out differently in terms of your role in the story based upon the class of mechs that you're piloting. So the replayability doesn't come from branching but from experiencing that same battle with very different objectives and thus having a very different experience.

Russ Bullock: To add to that, basically what Jordan is saying is that we've both agreed as we've talked about it, and that you've seen, that big, successful games like Call of Duty 4, which was a great game that did things in a fashion where they had massive replayability in their multiplayer, but their single-player campaign was more focused but exceptional. So we feel like we're going to re-launch this brand with great graphics and great gameplay mechanics, get all the old MechWarrior fans back and introduce the game to a whole new round of MechWarrior fans as well. Give them a very concise, superb single-player experience that's really focused, and the replayability would come from the possibility of replaying the single-player campaign four different times as the different classes of mechs.

Then you bring in co-op, and you might play through the game a few times with your buddies. Then you bring in the growth experience based multiplayer and how you get better at the mechs. Anyway, there's a lot there, and we feel like we're better served to give players a really focused single-player campaign from a story standpoint and let all of the replayability come out in those other aspects.

IGN: I want to get into the multiplayer aspects that you've brought up in a second, but something that's been mentioned a couple of times so far is the publishing partner which hasn't been determined. Is this one of those things that you'll be able to mention sometime soon?

Jordan Weisman: Well, we are in the beginnings of discussions with different partners, and the idea of releasing this to the public is partly a celebration of Battletech's 25th, and partly as a mechanism to attract and close with the right publisher for the project. So we don't have a publisher selected yet.

Russ Bullock: Essentially, we've talked to almost all of them, and they're very slightly aware of what we're doing, and they're anxious to hear more. We've talked to them about coming down, but we ultimately chose to go this route, and we're grateful for IGN to take the interview and we thought we'd release this video along with this interview. That would be our big introduction – we could have gone a different route with this, but we really felt excited to get out there to all the MechWarrior fans and give them something like this with the video and the interview to drum up a lot of excitement and get all those fans excited about MechWarrior again.

IGN: That's cool, especially as a fan. What multiplayer modes will you be including within the game? Will you be including a Conquest-style mode like Multiplayer BattleTech 3025?

Jordan Weisman: Our goal for multiplayer, and again, with the caveat of what the eventual budget is, but our goal is a Conquest-style mode. It's not an MMO by any means, but it is multiplayer with continuity and an arrow through time so we can release new updates into the multiplayer game as the timeline of the universe advances and that there are longer term goals for both players and for factions within the multiplayer setting. Again, it's not an MMO, but it is a kind of larger context to multiplayer. We started to touch on that direction with the second MechCommander game, and I think that didn't get as fully realized as we would have liked, but that's directionally the depth and continuity that what we'd like to be able offer in multiplayer.

Russ Bullock: I think that the persistence level that we'd like to have, on just simple terms, is if you look at Call of Duty 4 and just how immensely popular the multiplayer is with that experience based persistent aspect of your character. It's one of those things that the bells go off in your head and you say, "MechWarrior is just absolutely perfect for something like that." We talked a lot about how we would do that, whether it would be starting with the small mechs and building your way up and that idea had some traction, but that got changed as we thought well, "Some people might want to start in a heavier mech." You don't want to make them go all the way up there. So that's how we got to what Jordan mentioned earlier, where we want the player to become very specialized in the mech of their choice.

So, someone might get into a sixty-ton Rifleman and play that mech and continue to get experience and get all of the autocannons and lasers up to their maximum potential and even say twenty percent beyond maximum potential because they're so good at the Rifleman. We're giving them that reward to get really great at a mech or at a certain class of mechs. So you might have those guys in those light mechs that have been playing it for so long and are so good at it that they are a legitimate force on the battlefield inside that urban combat setting. So there's a lot there, and I think that there we can only give you brief details at this point.

There's a lot to discuss as we continue on, but you can kind of put together a mental picture together of that persistence and that personality of seeing that one guy with the annoying tagname that's just so good with that certain class of mech that it creates a lot of personality that way.

IGN: The last FASA Interactive title, Shadowrun, featured multiplayer support across the 360 and PC. Will you be looking to do the same within MechWarrior?

Russ Bullock: Absolutely. I mean, we don't have a lot of details at this point, but we've talked about it; we've talked about it very lightly. I don't see any reason at this point why that wouldn't be possible. So it would definitely be a large goal of ours to make that work for both co-op and multiplayer. That would be great. It'd be fabulous.

IGN: So, here's a quick curve ball: with the announcement of MechWarrior returning, Jordan, might you be announcing the return of other FASA properties, like Shadowrun, sometime soon? Might you announce this with Piranha Games as well if MechWarrior works out?

Jordan Weisman: Well, we'd love to – that's another property that we both share passions for, and in long sessions on MechWarrior, all of a sudden we'll find ourselves talking about a cool idea for Shadowrun. But we want to tackle one at a time. So I think this is one where it's a shared passion, and I think there's a resurgence of interest in this type of vehicle and this type of game. This is the granddaddy property for the giant robot on Western shores, so it seemed like the right one to start with. It's the one that we want to bring to life first, and we'll see what comes down the road next.

IGN: MechWarrior is well known for downloadable content and expansion packs, like clan mech packs. Is this something you've considered post launch, or would this be something for a sequel for either the PC or 360?

Jordan Weisman: Certainly from our perspective, and this will have to be discussed with the publisher, but from our perspective, in the world in which we live, that content should be continuous and available via Xbox Live and downloadable on the PC. So we would prefer not to chunk it up into separate products but to keep it as an ongoing stream of content and there's different ways that we can accomplish that, but we also think there are fun ways to weave the fiction and the ongoing story into that continued distribution of new content.

IGN: Very cool! Now to close out the interview, is there anything in particular that you'd want to let MechWarrior fans know about the project as well as what you're envisioning about the franchise for the future?

Jordan Weisman: I think that the key thing for existing fans, whenever you go back and tell the origin story again, there's always a little bit of trepidation about that from existing fans. I think hopefully this vision that we've laid out will be compelling enough to go on that journey with us, and re-launch in the same successful ways that we've seen other franchises re-launched – with quality of product. I think that's the key thing: at the end of the day, it comes down to the clarity of vision and the quality of execution, and we believe we've got a team here assembled that can live up to both of those. We're looking for a publishing partner to join us in that venture and bring something to the party.

Lastly, I'd say from my perspective as I marvel at the fact that it's twenty five years, it's an enormous amount of awe and thanks to the fans that continue to not only remember but continue to enjoy this universe that I've had fun playing in for so long.

Russ Bullock: I'd just like to add that Piranha Games has had a great time working on this brand; it's been a real realization of a dream for us and we really hope to create an amazing ending of the story to get a great product into the hands of all the MechWarrior fans sometime in the near future. As the video comes out, I'm just really excited to release it and let everyone watch it and focus on the twenty five years, as Jordan has mentioned, and really think about MechWarrior again and how fun it has been for all of us to play over all these years. I'd love to hear what people think, just about MechWarrior in general, so once the video is released, we can hopefully get a lot of people out there that have been fans over the years to comment on the boards and drum up excitement again about twenty five years of Battletech and MechWarrior and the possibility of a new MechWarrior game coming out. Let's make it a kind of reunion and get everyone talking and see how much excitement we can get going.

IGN: Thank you both for your time.

OK, Bull comes slow but impressive again ^^

Another Update: ign regarding mechwarrior is currently unavailable, we seem to have killed the site ^^

Yeah, you're right.
But I was lazy and did not want to klick through and copy pasta 5 pages of interview and find video links ^^
As for deleting my post: i would not have argued about that, but my title is way cooler than yours ^^

I seriously hope they do PC first and then downgrade a port to X-Box360° and not the other way around <.<

Hmm, i worry about consolitis...

Thing is, i loved the flight sim like aspect of mechwarrior 2 back in the day (yes the graphics was insanely basic but who cares as long as one can tell enemy from background), while i found that the later games moved more towards a FPS of sorts...

No Highlander either i think.
Highlander was StarLeague MechTech.

Basically, you are going to see the OLD Mechs.
The Unseen. The FIRST Battle-Mechs ever.
The more or less exactly Macross/Dougram-Models.

Nope, no Madcat. This is set in the 3rd Succession War. Clans came LATER.
No Highlander either i think.
Highlander was StarLeague MechTech.
Los-Tech. Until GDL found the DataCore on Helm.
And Comstar opened up their facilities.
And NAIW made some rediscoveries.
I COULD be wrong on the Highlander.
Basically, you are going to see the OLD Mechs.
The Unseen. The FIRST Battle-Mechs ever.
The more or less exactly Macross/Dougram-Models.

It's UNREAL3 ENGINE. Look at Bioshock or . . Was that Mirrors Edge?

Basically, you are going to see the OLD Mechs.
The Unseen. The FIRST Battle-Mechs ever.

Note to Self: Do not buy the starter box just because of nostalgia. Find interested players in the area first.

ACTUALLY they just announced the Return of the older Models.
The Unseen are back. They got official License to use the MAcross and Dougram Designs.

I saw that, just before Origins. I'm giddy.

-paws

Nope, none of this newfangled stuff i hope ^^

It's as close to a clan mech as possible <.<

UPDATE:
MekTek got the official GO to Release a COMPLETE MW4 WITH ALL ADDONS ON Battletech.com !

Since a lot of you don;t venture into Gen Gaming, but I know you'll be interested in this news, I'm posting this here as a heads up smile.gif Sith & Tinker along with partner Pirahna Games has announced they're working on a new Mechwarrior game.

Details and videos can be found over in this discussion thread: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=27166

Bull

However, when House Kurita launches a massive invasion to conquer Deshler, resulting in the death of his entire family, Khol discovers a purpose to fight for.

dear god is that cliche, can't they hire a decent writer?

By the way:
BULL!

Tell me you are shitting us please . . SITH & Tinker ? *snickers* ^^