Mechwarrior: Living Legends

Crying mechs
What’s likely to generate the bulk of the interest around Mechwarrior: Living Legends however, is the engine of choice – the monster of FPS technology, CryENGINE 2. That’s right, not only will we have an updated Mech universe to trample, but we’ll be able to do it inside an engine that represents the cream of the crop when it comes to cutting edge tech. CryENGINE 2 has a number of features that appealed to the team beyond simply its pretty visuals.

Powerful instrumentation allows them to analyse engine performance in real time, create detailed memory usage reports and run automated walkthroughs of each level to get consistent results from build to build. The modular C++ design of CE2 gives the team access to logically separated DLLs that they can use or modify as needed without affecting the overall engine framework. While there were plenty of other options, none were as technically capable of presenting the level or art or scale that CE2 could. Even with the incredible power of CE2 behind them, the team has had to make adjustments to suit the specifics of Mechwarrior: Living Legends,

“It would not be possible to use CE2 ‘as is’ and have the game work as designed. First off, the nanosuit is gone. While you’re faster and stronger than Nomad or Psycho, you’re wearing powered armor. It does still heal you over time, it does provide some protection, you also have jump jets to help you leap tall Mechs in a single bound and a claw to latch onto them. Having said this, I should note that this game is really about the vehicles. Getting them true to Battletech in feel resulted in them outclassing regular infantry and because of this we made the hard decision of removing it. The battle armor is our way of giving players that want a challenge a reasonable shot at infantry style combat. While the armor is effective, it also takes a skilled player to be able to fight in it.

Other things we’ve added include replacing most of the vehicle movements, and heat management as a game dynamic. Of course there are custom effects and sounds. We’ve heavily modified the serialisation and network system to allow us to run larger maps, 8km on a side in fact, and quite a few other things have been added or removed. We are not making another episode of Crysis, after all, but rather trying to create a whole new game, with new rules and behaviours.”

The biggest Mech of all...
The fact that Mechwarrior is a commercial and very much bought-and-paid-for IP (by Microsoft no less) meant that Wandering Samurai Studios had to do the right thing and contact the software giant to establish legitimate access to the resources of the IP.

Microsoft was contacted very early on in the project as it was imperative to the team’s success that they not face any legal hiccups during development. Particularly as legal hiccups with Microsoft usually result in the perpetrator disappearing without a trace amid a flurry of men in black suits. Through correspondence and phone conversations with the licensing and legal department at Microsoft Corporation legal and corporate affairs offices, the team received “non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use and display Game Content and to create derivative works based upon Game Content included in the ‘MechWarrior’ Intellectual Property, strictly for non-commercial use”.
MechWarrior: Living Legends is being created under Microsoft’s ‘Game Content Usage Rules’ using assets from the MechWarrior Intellectual Property, so the entire project has an official seal of approval from Microsoft and access to just about anything required from the IP. This is great news for fans because there won’t be any need to step around easily recognisable or ‘trademark’ aspects of the Battletech universe, freeing the mod team to create something that can tap the almost limitless IP for all it’s worth.