Interview: MechWarrior Living Legends Team

By: Illusion | Posted On: Friday 25 January 2008

With the debut of MechWarrior in 1989 by Activision, the Living Legends mod team is bringing them back to life, in a never before seen way. With the CryEngine2 pushing the graphics, you will be able to see these Mech’s like never before. Imagine having a 15 story Giant Mech Warrior at your fingertips, annihilation is only a push of the button away.

Welcome to another special feature. This week we sit down the MechWarrior Living Legends dev team.

Let’s go ahead and get things started here. I would like to thank the mod team for sitting down with us to share some of their inside information.

TheCrysisHQ: Before we really dive into some questions, can you provide us with a brief back-story to MechWarrior?

MechWarrior Living Legends Team: It would be my pleasure! A little disclaimer though the Battletech/Mechwarrior universe is absolutely massive and goes VERY deep so basically my synopsis is just scratching the surface.
By the 31st century, humanity has spread to thousands of worlds, while a handful of powerful empires wage continual war for the right to rule the stars. Foremost among the weapons used in that struggle are BattleMechs. Loaded with auto-cannons, missile launchers, lasers, and charged-particle beam weapons, these fusion-powered war machines of articulated armor stand upward of ten meters high. Piloting them are MechWarriors, the best, most intensively trained men and women available. Like the armored knights of an earlier age, MechWarriors are popular heroes, and their exploits are the stuff of legends.

The Inner Sphere is comprised of hundreds of worlds and overseen by five Great Houses, the Inner Sphere has virtually nothing but conflict and division since the collapse of the original unified Star League centuries ago. It was long believed that nothing could again unify the Inner Sphere, except the eventual victory of one of the Great Houses - but no one foretold the coming of the Clans:

The Clans are the idealistic wanderers who left the Inner Sphere looking for a society of peace instead fractured into dozens of rival "clans", each named for various fierce animals and beasts either found on the new worlds they inhabited or imported from the Inner Sphere. For centuries, the Clans Wolf, Diamond Shark, Jade Falcon, Ghost Bear, Nova Cat, Smoke Jaguar and others struggled against and with themselves in preparation for the day when they would return to the Inner Sphere and reclaim it as their birthright.

TCHQ: Can you give us a brief history of your mod team? Is this your first project? How many members are involved?

MWLLT: The Team was formed by myself Sean (Criminal) Tracy and Daniel (Kamikaze) Tracy two brothers from Canada who have always been involved in game development. The project was incepted in December of 2006 and has since grown to incorporate over 40 members from various game development backgrounds! We are also partnered with numerous software developers, art groups and game service providers. Some of these include:
Creator of GeoControl: http://www.cajomi.de/GeoControl/geocontrol_gallery_cajomi.htm
Engine Audio design: http://www.engineaudio.com/
MeshFolk: http://www.meshfolk.com/
MyInternetServices: http://www.myinternetservices.com/
ClanWarz: http://www.clanwarz.com/
Our team is growing every day as more and more talented people come to the table with ideas and abilities that are far too great to pass up! The team is truly an international team that is very well organized. We have members from Canada, U.S, South America, New Zealand, Germany, Australia, UK and even Malaysia.

TCHQ: What was the inspiration to recreate MechWarrior for Crysis?

MWLLT: The main reason for making this modification is that there has not been an updated "MechWarrior" game for at least 6 years and there is a huge MechWarrior fan base out there just waiting for a quality title to be released! We’re also very tired of being disappointed time and time again when a few modders say they will be making a MechWarrior mod, so it finally got to the point that we said we’ll just do it ourselves. An estimated twenty-five million people have played a Battletech or MechWarrior RPG or read a Battletech or MechWarrior novel, and at least ten million people have played the Battletech-based computer games. More than eleven million copies of MechWarrior PC games and a similar number of MechWarrior: Dark Age Collectable Miniatures Game figures have been sold to date. Over three hundred and fifty different Battletech/MechWarrior game and toy products have been produced to date; several products, such as the Technical Readout series, the core rulebook and base box set, have been in continuous print (in one form or another) since publication. More than five thousand World Wide Web pages have been created to date by the online Battletech community. Very obviously the player base for a mod such as this is astronomical.


TCHQ: With such a rich back-story, how do you plan to continue this storyline? Where does it pickup?

MWLLT: In all reality we are not trying to recreate the previous MechWarrior games, nor are we trying to carry on the story. Basically what we are creating is a mixed arms title that takes part in the historical battles of Battletech and Mechwarrior, obviously we are centering around the Clan Invasion of the Inner Sphere since it is the easiest for new players to understand as some of the lines between friend and foe can be a bit grey in the Battletech Story.

TCHQ: I noticed that one of your features is unique factions and weapons unique to each faction with different advantages and disadvantages; can you explain a little bit more about this?

MWLLT: You take control of a single soldier on a vast battlefield. This soldier will be a part of one of two factions, Clan or Inner Sphere. The player will then customize his soldier to suit the ever changing needs on a completely dynamic battlefield. Armed with futuristic yet believable weaponry, players can take control of any of the game’s 30+ vehicles to engage in major conflicts with 32 players in some of the largest online battles available.

The soldiers will be represented by different “Houses” for the Inner Sphere and different Clans for the Clans. Since Battletech has nearly 20 houses and clans, the first and most obvious change for the soldier is simply the colors on his combat suit’s shoulder, based on the house or clan he picked. Where the real customization occurs is when vehicles, battle suits, ‘Mechs and weapons are purchased.

Inner Sphere technology following the fall of the Star League degraded to near twenty-first century levels, and many colonies requiring advanced water recycling technology ceased to exist, leading many planets within the Periphery and Inner Sphere to wither away at the expense of rulers’ light-years away. This has been shown in the quality of 'Mechs as they are usually in a state of disrepair before even entering combat, indicative of the lack of equipment to maintain the machines of war and skilled labor across the Inner Sphere. Because of this the unique weapons and vehicles will be quite different between the two factions.

TCHQ: From the images we have seen how were you able to generate such lifelike models?

MWLLT: With Crytek’s support we have been able to use Polybump™ 2. Polybump™ 2 can be used either as a standalone utility, or fully integrated with other tools such as 3DS Max™. This tool creates a high quality surface description that allows quick extraction of surface features like normal maps (tangent-space or object-space), displacement maps, un-occluded area direction, accessibility and other properties. The extracted information can be used to render Low poly models with surface detail almost making them look like the high-poly models but it will render much faster. The data is stored in a intermediate file format so it can be exported in different ways without doing the computation again. Very high polygon counts (e.g. 10 million triangles) are processed quite quickly.

TCHQ: How many new maps can we expect?

MWLLT: Currently we have approximately 8 maps in varying degrees of completion. Our goal upon release is for 10-15 maps total.

TCHQ: Can you explain to us a little bit about the factions, and what we can expect in game play?

MWLLT: Essentially it breaks down to choosing between Clan and Inner Sphere. The main difference between the two is the technologies they use. The Clan’s have far superior technology and are genetically bread to be superior soldiers; however, the Inner Sphere is no easy conquest as the “free borns” are free thinkers and persistent people.

In Terms of Gameplay we are currently working with 2 unique game modes. One is called Trial of Annihilation and the other is called Solaris Arenas. Each has unique variables with it and more details will be provided as we come closer to beta.


TCHQ: Will there be a class system for different kind of Mechs?

MWLLT: There will NOT be a class system for different Mechs. Each mech is purchasable by the player using C-bills acquired in battle. The bigger the mech, the bigger the price tags. Having said that, players are able to share c-bills with each other to which adds to the teamwork dynamic required to dominate the battlefield.

TCHQ: I noticed that you guys are creating all new types of weapons and vehicles. What kind of research goes into creating so many unique models?

MWLLT: I could talk for hours about this. So much research goes into the creation of each of our models. Not only do we try to improve the old assets and designs set forth in Battletech source books but as well. We also have some very talented artist that re-draws a lot of the concept images from the source books for our 3d artists to bring to life.


TCHQ: Can we expect all new sounds for the mod?

MWLLT: We have recently partnered up with the team from Engine Audio design http://www.engineaudio.com and they have since merged with our existing sound team and is working daily on creating new and improved sounds in MWLL. The process they use the create sounds vary greatly depending on what they are trying to accomplish. A good example is recently we had some voice over competitions in our community and choose some of the best voices from our fans for our in game mech voices.

TCHQ: Can we expect anything in the future for single player story-based missions?

MWLLT: Currently I cannot talk about this; there are some big dreams and discussions going on behind the scenes with various parties regarding something of this nature.

TCHQ: Can you provide us with a project release date?

MWLLT: Our projected goal for release is November 2008; however, we reserve the right to change that if we think we can get a better product out to the fans because they truly deserve it.

With the debut of MechWarrior in 1989 by Activision, the dev team is bringing them back to life, in a never before seen way. With the CryEngine2 pushing the graphics, you will be able to see these Mech’s like never before. We will be keeping a close eye on the development of this mod, as it’s sure to be one of the top mods for Crysis for a long time.

Thanks to the dev team for taking time out of their very busy schedule to sit down and have a chat with us, be sure and check out the links below for more information on the mod!

Official Mod Page | Media Downloads | Discuss Mod |