Despite many setbacks and obstacles in its way, fan-made game “MechWarrior: Living Legends” still fights on. Many gamers grew up with the MechWarrior franchise. Sometime late in 2006 the idea for “Mechwarrior: Living Legends” was born. The lack of recent commercial releases led Microsoft to grant a non-profit BattleTech license to the development team. MechWarrior Living Legends made its debut in December 2009.

The game saw steady development and made releases with new content every few months. The mod brought a unique combined arms approach to the Battletech universe. This continued until January 2013 when the MWLL website announced the end of development. Anything new for the game would now have to come from the community of players.

MWLL always saw an increase in players when new content was released. Things would level off until the next patch. The challenge now is to keep interest in the game despite the end of development. There can be no changes or modifying of the game, so it is up to the community to keep things interesting.

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The near-defunct Crysis mod, a completely fan-made game, is back! Apparently it had never left; merely content while high-end PC players moved on to MechWarrior: Online. But MechWarrior: Living Legends appears to be back with a vengeance with a Forever Legends tournament beginning sometime in February.

Started originally in 2009 using the Quake Wars game engine, MW:LL has since been remade using CryEngine 2, where most of the lovely visuals for screen captures and videos were made. MW:LL was distributed through Bittorrent and can usually be found on their website.

For those with Crysis Wars installed, you can install the MWLL mod directly. Alternatively, you can install MWLL along with the Crysis Wars Demo.

With everything going on with torrents lately I’m not about to check if anyone is seeding the game.

The game is entirely shown from the first person, and like MechAssault 2 the default mode for the player is on foot while wearing an Elemental suit for Clan players and a Longinus for Inner Sphere denizens. And just like the Elemental and Longinus suits you have an arm weapon, back-mounted missiles and other weapons. And of course jumpjets.

Besides several ‘Mech designs- (I’m not sure how many but at least two dozen that I’ve seen in videos) you also have a plethora of conventional vehicles and aerospace fighters to use. The aircraft in particular look great and seem to move with acceptably realistic physics.

What game looks better, MW:LL or MW:O?

A thread on their forum outlines the details of how they’re planning the tournament and what the rules will be. If you have it installed, stay tuned to their website to see when the actual dates and times are.

Well bargained, and done.