MechWarrior 5: Clans Review (Lobo)
This is.....fine.
Do you have the mental picture of the meme dog, drinking coffee, sitting at the table surrounded by flames? Yes? Good. Let's continue.
I have over 1400 hours in MW5:Mercs and 900 in HBS Battletech, and my evaluation of Clans is heavily influenced by those games existence. If Mercs and HBS:B did not exist, I would probably give Clans a thumbs-up. However, they do exist. And you should play them instead.
Piranha tried something different for Clans, and there's nothing wrong with that. Unlike Mercs (which is a mech combat sandbox with some story bolted on later), Clans is a linear story-driven campaign. Those of us who have been Battletech lore nerds for a while will recognize it as a faithful telling of Op:Revival's Smoke Jaguar campaign. There's nothing here that would make an editor at Sarna spit out his/her soda. So far so good. The problem is the exact same head-scratching issue we saw with Ubisoft and Skull & Bones. Ubisoft ALREADY had an excellent pirate game (AC4 Black Flag), and they used those years of experience to make...a much worse pirate game. Same thing here.
MW5:Mercs at launch was...rough. Good foundation, but rough. Over time, between DLCs and outstanding mods from the community, it has become excellent. Piranha, for reasons known only to them, has chosen to ignore essentially all of that experience and data to make a worse version of Mercs.
Yes, the story cutscenes are very well done. And if you're looking to play Mechwarrior:The Movie...stop reading now, purchase Clans, and go have a good time. On the other hand, if you're looking for an actual Mech combat experience....this ain't it.
(1) AI. MW5:Mercs combat AI is notoriously garbage. Star Wars:Outlaws-level garbage. HOWEVER....Oraeon's TableTop Rulz AI mod has existed now for years, currently on version 9.3. It's a foundation mod for PC, everybody and their brother uses it. TTRUlzAI fixes the stock Mercs AI and replaces it with a very, VERY sophisticated model that will unalive you rapidly for doing dumb things. In most cases it is smarter than my friends when playing co-op. Piranha could have either at least tried to emulate the lessons learned from TTRUlz or, better yet, spent a little bit of their cutscene budget to offer Oraeon some money to code Clans AI for them. Community would have loved that. Instead....PGI has ignored it entirely and shipped an AI with Clans which is just as dumb as the five years old Mercs AI, but now also actively walks into you. Well done, gentlemen. Well done.
(2) Graphics and Optimization. I run a 4090 and a Ryzen 9 series CPU, with 64 gigs RAM behind it. I should not see any stutter, in any current game, ever. For reference, I am running The First Descendant (known GPU hog) in 4k, Ultra settings, DLSS Quality mode, at 80 frames or better. Yet, MW:5 Clans occasionally stutters. This is simply not acceptable, and indicates staggeringly poor optimization. Now, Mercs was also not well optimized at launch, lot of extra polygons and draw calls that just didn't need to be there. Fortunately, the modder Xeno fixed all the assets in game and optimized them properly, although I'm sure it cost some sanity. XenoPax Optimize 4 is the current version. And yet, AGAIN, PGI ignored this experience and shipped a game that is even more poorly optimized than Mercs. It also doesn't look much better. In fact, if you add stuff like Ultimate Visuals and Weather 3 and the HD normals and texture upgrades to Mercs.....Clans looks worse.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Piranha looked at the five years of experience, DLC, and community modding and patching behind Mercs that has turned it into a tremendous game and....ignored all of it. Such a missed opportunity. If you want a great first person Mech experience, get MW5:Mercs (and the DLCs, they are actually very good) and mod it with the basics. If you want the premier turn-based tabletop-style Mech experience, get Harebrained Scheme's Battletech. Skip this.