Highlights
- MechWarrior 5: Clans offers a narrative-driven campaign, Clan omnimechs, and an engine upgrade for players to enjoy.
- Developers have prioritized accessibility for the modding community, ensuring that there is potential for mods altering progression, currencies, visuals, and weaponry.
- As a result, players can expect plenty of fan-created campaign mods in MechWarrior 5: Clans, opening avenues for original storytelling possibilities.
MechWarrior 5: Clans may share the MechWarrior 5 name with its predecessor, Mercenaries, but its story-driven campaign, Clan omnimechs, and engine upgrade make for a distinct title from the perspective of both players and mod makers. With a departure from the galaxy-spanning sandbox of Mercenaries in favor of a more robust narrative delivery, the game's modding community may have the potential to create some truly unique content thanks to the features and tools that make it all possible.
Following up after our first look preview of MechWarrior 5: Clans gameplay, Game ZXC had the chance to speak with Piranha Games CEO Russ Bullock about some of the game's features. Understanding that the MechWarrior series has a long-lived and thriving modding community, we asked Bullock how modding was factored into this title's development and what sorts of mods he hopes to see arise from MechWarrior 5: Clans.
Piranha Games Reveals First Look at MechWarrior 5: Clans Gameplay
Piranha Games gives an early look at Mechwarrior 5: Clans, Piranha Games' upcoming narrative-driven campaign with all-new features and Clan mechs.
MechWarrior Games Have A Strong Modding Community
The first bit of good news is that Piranha Games is the kind of developer that actively considers its modding community, as Bullock mentioned the team does its best to make the game's inner workings accessible for modders. Their efforts have been fruitful, as MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries has hundreds of mods that alter virtually every aspect of the game, many of which like the Yet Another Mechlab mod boast hundreds of thousands of downloads.
I'm always blown away by the creativity of the modding community. A lot of times we don't even anticipate the types of things they can do. From our side, we just try our best to expose as much of the game's code and systems as we can, and then people have always surprised us with what they could do in Mercenaries.
As far as the difference between Mercenaries and Clans and what could be modded, I think one is the nature of the front-end experience and the way that you progress and the currencies that you earn.
One of the first things that came to Bullock's mind as a potential target for modders will be the game's progression and currency systems since these likely involve relatively simpler numerical changes that may significantly impact the game's feel without requiring fiddling around with entirely new assets. Just as with MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries' mods, we expect plenty of mods that enhance or alter visuals or add new weapons.
MechWarrior 5: Clans May See Player-Made Campaigns
As a story-driven campaign, Bullock believes the most exciting possibility for modders is the potential to create all-new campaign modules. MechWarrior has its roots in tabletop gaming with Battletech, where it's common for players to come up with their own D&D-style campaigns. It sounds like MechWarrior 5: Clans may pave the way for a similar form of fan-driven original storytelling if sufficiently ambitious modders take interest.
I hope that the big difference would be that people will put together more story modules. I think that is probably the thing I'd anticipate the most, which is really cool because Mercenaries with its open-ended star map had many mods that modified that sandbox experience to make it even richer, but we didn't see very much if any sort of story campaigns like we've done in our DLCs. As a procedural type game, the nature of it is relatively light on narration, even if it is sort of a story campaign.
But with Clans, I would hope and expect that because of the way that the comm system works and the narration system works, we could see really cool modules of story missions. Maybe someone makes six story missions and they put their own narration and narrative script together and create their own storyline and use our tools to put it together. That's what I anticipate, but we'll see where the mod community goes.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries has an official modding toolkit that lets modders work with Unreal Engine 4, so hopefully MechWarrior 5: Clans will release a similar set of tools with its shift to the new Unreal Engine 5, and it'll be interesting to see how modders may take advantage of the newer engines' capabilities.
MechWarrior 5: Clans is set to release in 2024 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
