The MechWarrior Online team hosted an IRC Chat with Thomas Dziegielewski last night. Â The transcript has been posted over on the official forums here.
Here’s a couple of the questions I liked the best:
- IGP_Mike:Â [DHB]Voss asks: Are all weapons being tracked across the board to pinpoint which ones are possibly too effective as well as those that may be lacking?
- Thomas Dziegielewski:Â We are receiving telemetry data from all the games being played. It is a great asset to the designer and is information they’ll use to address any issues plaguing the game.
- IGP_Mike:Â Amechwarrior asks: Have they considered expanding upon weapon effects to embrace the background flavor while differentiating between weapon types? For example, the PPC disrupting electronic or targeting systems, various autocannons having differing fire rates and impact effects.
- Thomas Dziegielewski: I’ve built the system to allow for all this. Our effects artists Ryan Van Vliet has done an awesome job thus far. It is just bandwidth he doesn’t have right now to iterate upon the effects you describe. I’m also pushing for different effects in different temperatures but design has to agree first  :P
That second one is really interesting.. because all the novels do refer to repeated strikes from PPCs (for example) causing EMP type effects on the target ‘Mech, and disrupting systems.. it’d be interesting to be hauling butt across a map, get blasted from the side, and lose your visual sensors for a couple of seconds while that system reboots..