It's official - new Mechwarrior game in development

Essential linkage: Mechwarrior to get full refresh and reboot, plus great news for Mechwarrior 4 fans.

Ah, is there anything in life sweeter than stomping around downtown in your tuned up Catapult heavy mech, with the LRMs swapped out for AC20s - creating the nastiest streetfighting Battlemech in the universe? Nothing quite compares to it in gaming, but it's been years since we last had the chance to cause some destruction in a Mechwarrior game. Thankfully, the long giant robot spell may soon be over.

Teaser trailers of giant mechs started showing up online yesterday, and this morning we've discovered it's official. Smith and Tinker, a studio co-founded by FASA alumni Jordan Weissman, and Piranha Games are working on a complete reboot of the series. No V or 5, this game's just straight Mechwarrior. The two devs are in talks with publishers at the moment, but we can't imagine anyone turning down this classic franchise.

There's a mess of information to be had courtesy of gaming site IGN, who got a chance to sit down with Weissman and Piranha's Russ Bullock to talk at length about the new game. Over six long pages the pair talk about their vision of the BattleTech universe, their experiences with the pen and paper game, and just what we can expect from the reboot.

Just skimming the piece has given us a giant mech woody.

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.

Where the frack do we sign up?! The pair's very excited about producing a game when modern hardware is so graphically powerful, and the screens and videos show a Battletech universe more detailed and destructive than ever before. What's more, the game will feature full multiplayer and a four-player co-op mode.

There's no release date set for the Mechwarrior, but we can say it's going to be released on PC and Xbox 360.

While the wait may seem interminable, we do have some good news to tide jonesing mech-jockeys over. Smith and Tinker has announced that, to celebrate BattleTech's 25^th anniversary (and don't I feel old now...), they're giving the rights to distribute an free version of Mechwarrior 4 to mod and content site MekTek. MekTek's been supporting the MW4 community for ten years, and recently spun off its own MekTek Studios.

It's really great to see such a rich franchise come back to life in hands of obviously passionate developers. Roll on release day!