I have to admit I have not played MechWarrior Online yet, as I don’t have a good enough computer for it. But from the videos I have seen, I have been taken aback and happily surprised at what has been called The Thinking Man’s Shooter. I whet my online gaming whistle in the Team Fortress / Quake age in the early 2000s. My roommate and I shared the expense of a DSL in those days, and had an edge that people didn’t have back then: small unit tactics. It consisted of us yelling back and forth between rooms on what we were doing and requests, something you wouldn’t really see until the advent of Skype, Teamspeak, ect years later. Yes ‘Tom Servo’ and ‘Crow’ were quite the mischief makers on the old 2Fort map.
It was a free-for all, with no way to coordinate tactics and learn technique, games consisted of Spawn-Kill-Die-Repeat and got old quickly. Despite dedicated voice features in modern online shooter games, it has still been mainly a free for all from what I’ve seen and heard. (My ex-wife does well for herself on a dedicated Battlefield team on X-Box 360.
M60 Phoenix MBT with Reactive Armor Panels
Then came MechWarrior Online. I don’t think it comes down to age, per se. Sarah Parries playing alongside her father Jon shows that even young kids can play MWO. But there is something going on. Most of the videos, by several different users, even some that don’t even speak English in the case of the 17th Recon, show players that are using team tactics in game to use their ‘Mechs effectively. It really makes me wish MWO had more than just a glorified Capture the Flag as an objective.
