A while back I had the chance to speak with Mitch Gitelman and Tom Dowd about the Mech Commander Expansion Pack and find out what’s on the burner for MC fans.

With the success of Mech Commander not limited to just the Battletech fanbase, some people were wishing to see more things implemented in the next release. Fans of the game have sent me e-mails asking me some pointed questions which I in turn posed to FI about the expansion, and here’s some of what we have in store for us with the expansion pack. 

While the development team at FI is very happy with the reception MC has received they are striving to find ways in which to improve the next as well as follow on releases in the series. Right now they are staying very focused on the Expansion Pack but they are still doing some preliminary planning for MC2.

The biggest point for a lot of people in regards to the expansion pack has been: will there be a mission editor? Yes, it will be a full blown mission editor. In fact, its the same one the development team uses in creating missions! This will give longer legs to the game overall as well as creating limitless multiplayer scenarios.  

There will be 6 new mechs, as of yet they are unnamed to the public. All 6 mechs will come in the 3 variations we have seen in MC already, with a Weapons, Armor and Jump variant.

Many people have asked me why we can’t just have a mech editor, and I’ve pondered the same question. When I posed this to Tom and Mitch they both explained that the creation of one mech takes approximately 1 man-month of effort.

Incredibly, every mech is comprised of around 100,000 frames of animation, each with characteristics unique to that specific mech. For this reason it would be a daunting task for a gamer to create their own mech. Sure some people may have the hardware and knowledge to do it. But to come up with a mech generator would be a Herculean task at this time and would just take away from development of more MC releases. 

The expansion pack will take place on a different planet than the last one we saw in MC, but you will still be with Zulu Company 1st Davion Guards. Going along with the present Battletech storyline, you will still be acting as a small part of the overall Operation Serpent big picture. Missions in the expansion pack will consist of both stand-alone and multiplayer scenarios, with more that can be added due to the addition of the mission editor. 

Consistency in the AI is something the developers are working on right now as well. Although the AI is pretty solid they still wish to tweak and improve it to be even better.

Aimed firing is another question that many players have written about, and when I asked Mitch and Tom about this they were quick to point out that the aimed shot attempts are “direct extrapolations from the Hit Location Tables” within the Battletech boardgame.

If you’ve ever played Battletech you’ll know it’s not the easiest thing to hit a called shot, but it is something they are looking at improving to be a bit more on the gamers side. Honestly, I hope they either leave it as is or they only improve it slightly. The reason for this is if they were to give an Elite pilot a hit 6 out of 10 times, it would kill multiplayer action. Everyone would then be using only Elite pilots to take headshots at each other, the game would lose its tactical edge and would become just another click fest game.  

I also asked about the chance that we could have the ability to choose from both IS or Clan tech while in multiplayer and the problem with being able to do that is mainly a RAM requirement. Loading these mechs into memory takes up space, adding even more mechs would take that much more up. Possibly we could see that in the future, who knows?

Another question I asked was about the chance to play single player missions in a co-op fashion. That is not planned for the expansion pack, but we may see it for Mech Commander 2! 

The chat screen is another sticking point I have had with this game in multiplayer, it gets to be very awkward when playing to attempt to click on the chat button and then type into that little space. (Or to open up the chat window using the hot key and then reading a message and losing your tactical map!) This may be fixed later but isn’t high on the list of priorities right now, but I did learn an easier way to access the chat screen. Just hit Enter and you will be in the chat window and can type your message and send it. It’s not a perfect way to chat but it is better than clicking that little button and then the chat space to start typing. 
Click to continue . . . 

The biggest point of contention with a lot of players was the Fog of War and how it was done in MC. Some felt it was done poorly, others thought it was ok. After speaking with these guys about it I can see why they chose to do a FOW as a blacked out map.

While the game was under development, FOW was looked at very closely and was even done in one of the original builds. It was done very much the way everyone who has complained has said it should have been done.

When playing using the FOW the development team found the game to be very unplayable as you couldn’t get a clear picture on the screen and there were constant ghost images and screen flickers from contacts that kept appearing and disappearing. The way it was explained to me gave me the image of those annoying strobe lights in clubs, my head started to ache with that thought.  

The reason for this is something I think a lot of people may have overlooked and that is the constant torso traversing of the mechs. Your Mechwarriors piloting the mechs are constantly traversing their torso’s scanning for enemies, and what the map reveals is what they see. So if you had a lance of mechs moving up a road, they would all be doing their own torso twisting individually each having his own field of view at any given time. So as they were twisting and scanning if they were to ‘see’ an enemy mech during a torso twist, once they twisted away the enemy mech would disappear again.

Now think if each individual mech was scanning and this mech kept popping up and disappearing within each individual mechs line of sight, you can see how it gets to be rather annoying. Seeing that this didn’t work, FI chose to go with the blackened out map for this release. We could possibly see a better FOW in a future release, but for now this works the best. 

I’ve also got an in game multiplayer example to show about how FOW could become annoying if it was done in any other way than the way it is now.  Several weeks ago I was playing a multiplayer game on Mplayer and we were playing on the ‘Blood Makes The Grass Grow’ map. My other two teammates and I chose to go with a mix of medium and light mechs (big mistake!) we pretty much got whittled down to nothing very quickly. After about 7 minutes I had one Commando left and my two teammates were completely wiped out. But the other team had just 1 lance dead and thought they had it won.

I quickly hauled the mail outta town and parked myself up top at a container stack and commenced an air support/arty campaign that rivaled some of the same in WWII. As the other team ran around uncovering the map and trying to find me I continually harassed them with arty strikes, slowly wearing them down and taking them out one by one. By the time they finally found me and took my remaining mech out I had destroyed 6 mechs, left 1 completely combat ineffective and had done about 40% damage to the mech that destroyed me.  

If there was a true FOW system in place I would never have been able to do that, which some people would agree is more realistic. But then again, the scenario I just explained to you took over 1 hour and 10 minutes to complete! If there was a true FOW that game could still be going on as we constantly kept looking for one another.

Between my own personal experiences with the blacked out map and the explanations from FI, I really do feel they made the best choice and at this time any other FOW would make the game harder to play. I do however hope they CAN incorporate a true FOW system in the future as I would like to see how it would work out personally. For now though I’m very satisfied with the game as is. 

The expansion pack should be do out by years end and as I find out more info, I’ll be sure to share it with you the reader.