Mechwarrior: Living Legends

While all the work done thus far points to an amazing end result, getting the Mechwarrior universe back onto the screens of PC owners hasn’t been an easy road, with Sean Tracy the teams Technical Director/Producer drawing parallels between the struggles of Wandering Samurai Studios and full commercial outfits.

“A commercial studio has specific tasks that are expected to be accomplished. They need their assets such as sound effects, particles, models, animations, textures etc. While it may be reasonable to have an animator provide input to the programming team on game physics, they generally don’t do much texturing or modelling. To that end, studios have a budget they spend to hire modellers, and animators, programmers, and sound technicians. These highly skilled individuals are difficult to find and even more difficult to have work for free. The team we work with is amazingly skilled, but it’s all on a volunteer basis. The work they do has to fit into their lives, between spending time at work, school, with family and friends. We also have the challenges of difference in geographical location; our team is truly global. To synchronise a team of that size requires resources and specialised software, in addition to many late nights. It’s difficult for mod teams in the current climate to gain credibility as so many teams fail and get left to the wayside. We find ourselves spending a lot of valuable development time on media that proves our worth and credibility as developers. This is unfortunately a requirement now for any mod team, whereas a commercial studio is only faced with proving something to their publisher.”

Regardless of the hurdles, everything we’ve seen and heard points toward a game mod that’s being crafted with love, attention and enough firepower to level a densely populated central business district and still have energy left to scramble a mean clutch of eggs.

We’ve been told the release date is late winter 2008, which for Australian folk puts it somewhere around December 08 to January 09. If you’ve got a copy of Crysis and any kind of appreciation for Mech-based combat, do yourself a favour and keep tabs on the progress of Mechwarrior: Living Legends between now and the end of the year. See you on the battlefield.