MechWarrior 5 Clans - Storytelling Upgraded 

id like to add, for people who do not know about just how brutal the clans are.. all the scars and the milky eye of that trainer, that was totally treatable by clan science. he could have had perfect skin and a regrown eye, if not a bleeding edge cybernetic one. but hes old and obsolete. old and obsolete people in clan society do not get such paltry cosmetic fixes. his scars are both a point of pride for that man and a brand he bears by a society that values his experience but despises his inability to die in honorable combat.

Everyone should read some of the Battletech books. I suggest the Legend of the Jade Phoenix. Starting with Way of the Clans. It'll give you the background needed to understand the understand the settings and terminology. The books are available with Amazon, including digital format for those who don't want to read a good old fashioned paper book. The storyline looks to be good, the cinematic effects look outstanding. But a completely different form than any previous version. There is one apparent disconnect possibly in the video shown. Yes, members of a sibko are from the same mixture of genetics. The problem I see is that each sibko will deal with the same Warriors right up to testing out. This appears at first blush to be a new Warrior. Which would be unusual. And the testing would be combat but combat Clan internal. Each member would face 5 other Clan Warriors in their testing. Looking forward to the release. Now I'm going to go find the release on the RU-vid channel and watch it first run.

thank fucking god we have a actual story

"They're moving away from mech-combat!" -- People that don't know there's novels, or the related TTRPG "MechWarrior". A hybrid CRPG with dialogue trees, and 3d stompy combat would be interesting. Especially playing an Elemental.

By the way, I noticed in 14:39 that the Kit Commander and the cadet looked eerily similar. Maybe this is why commander dude is so pissed off.

I hope they bring in Zellbrigen at least somewhat, while we are not talking the most honorable Clanners here but still... give better points in mission if you adhered to it vs not. Or something, finally time to have it in...

Story is great, for exactly ONE playthrough. You know what keeps me replaying a game? Gameplay. No matter how cool a story is, you're going to want a skip option for all the drama on your third playthrough ;)

cool, but for diversities sake, they forgot that a sibko is group of clones derived from 2 gene parents - as described in the books, those within a sibko all look alike, as they are all effectively siblings. i dont see why they couldnt make the gene parents of your sibko customizable so everyone can have whatever they want. opps you revealed you dont understand the clan genetics system

I am hoping it will be good. It does look good. Thanks for your breakdown.

I wouldn't get too excited mate. The gameplay definitely needs polish.

Do we have any confirmation of clan battlemechs? I really hope we get the entire clan mech line up from Mechwarrior Online. If the characters we play are are true borns, I know there will be an omnimech focus. However I really hope we have the choice between omnimechs and battlemechs.

Good story, characters that you care and big stompy robots - Yes please!

Use of Stravag? Lack of Contractions, Quiaff? Aff, that's a Clanner. :p

I wonder how likely it is that we can pick which of the Star we play as 🤔 that could be cool, but feels maybe improbable given they're all voiced & have their own personalities.

8:58 Commander Sheperd?

I'm just hoping we get to participate in major battles such as the battle of luthien and the battle of tukayyid. Not expecting this but would be pretty cool if it ended off with something like halo reach at the battle of tukayyid fighting impossible odds with the only objective to survive or something like that

Can we please have named nav points, so that they can be distinguished at one glance? I'm ok with having no "autopilot" or route - but ffs give those positions names!

Wow this looks so much better than MW5 Mercs. A real story. BTW were is the pre-order. Were can I throw my money out of the window

I want an achievement for adhering to zellbrigen the entire campaign. Seyla!

Let's hope the infection over at Catalyst doesn't spread to Piranha before they get this game out the door.

Let me start off by saying that aesthetically, this game looks amazing! I do have so issues with inconsistency, though. 1- An ‘Omni mounting any gauss/AC/PPC in the arm must remove the hand and lower arm to mount such weapons. 2- Lore issue. The battle depicted in the video is a hell of an early mission, considering all of the Smoke Jaguar forces died…

Gameplay-wise I feel MW5 is by far the most fun to actually play, so marrying a proper story to that is a complete win for me.

That is wtf I'm talking about!!! Finally!!!!

If you want just Mech on Mech combat, go play Mechwarrior Online. We need a story based game now. The last good Mechwarrior game was Mechwarrior 4. MW5 was really lacking to me.

I don't think they are clones, they are just vat grown and genetically modified.

Watch this video and take a shot every time he says fidelity... lol

The only thing that has inpoved is more diversety.... im sure about that^^

The gameplay AI still looks pretty brain dead. Look at the air vehicle just sit their and get shot. Animations still clunky and graphics still seem to be low res textures. I doubt this will feel like the battles in the books. The question I am asking is if it will feel real? Will I feel anything for the characters? Will I feel like I am in a well qualified and trained unit or in some unit that has no idea or care for the lore other than reading lines in a wooden fashion then going home? The ride will be a good one. But I really am going to miss not having a huge campaign map set during the invasion.

That character cinematic is CGI and not in-game, Phil.

But where's the DEI?! /SARC

I will always support mechwarrior games always ❤love them to death there is one thing I wish they changed though get ride of money making and waisting gas lol talking too I mechwarrior 5 mercenaries I suck at the game I hate the fact u lose money fast if u make mistakes wish it was easy to play I am not a elite player trying too though 😢so please mechwarrior 5 clans no money making please I want to enjoy the story without restarting all over again 😢

MechWarrior's was fine but very repetitive and their NPC boring. A story with good writing could pull me back in.

Forget the story, just make the game play a mech sim and not a pew pew whack a mole arcade shooter.

The genetics are strong. They all share the Kit Commander's scowl. Love the breakdown behind their culture.

I have VERY high hopes for this, but I am cautiously optimistic right now! I have been ALL IN on this franchise since its inception! I got the Battletech board game in Jan. 1985 for my birthday, got suspended from school for installing the original Mechwarrior game on the Library PC and selling the passwords for people to use at lunchtime...lol. Hey, they shouldn't have left the password out!!! We had a club of 8 of us that got a room my senior year in HS and set up campaigns with homemade terrain! I went into the Navy straight out of HS, and what did they have in the mall right there in Chicago....a Battletech Center!!! Good GOD did i spend WAY too much money in there! The point is, I LOVE this franchise and have been ALL IN on just about every itteration they have put out, and I LOVE where we are right now. Think about it in general, we have the board game that is still going strong, we have the PC version of the board game, we have MWO which I was a founder an own literally hundreds of mechs in, and now we have Mechwarrior 5, which has had its ups and downs but the modding community has been absolutely fantastic. So yes, I want this to be good, I want this to make me feel like I did in highschool when I read the novels, and for me The Legend of the Jade Phoenix Trilogy was my favorite, I just LOVED what Aidan Pryde did to get his bloodname. Let's hope this lives up to the hype!!!

As a big book fan and a lover of Clan shit I am so hype. And I'm kind of glad they didn't just glomp onto Clan Wolf and retell the Blood of Kerensky series (even though that would have been good and the easy way out). Two things I'd love to see are a Trial of Bloodname, we literally could get a tournament arc. Also, maybe not in this game but some day I want an Elemental game so bad. Your point or star of Elementals just swarming a mech like it's Shadow of Colossus in the 31st century.

The Dropship class is called Broadsword. It's the clan equivalent of the Leopard. It carries a whole Star of mechs. Standard variants of omnimechs is totally conforming to lore - be it source books or novels. The difference between omnimechs and battlemechs is that changing the loadout of the first ones is easy and takes a few hours, without having to remodel the mech. Changing the loadouts of the latter takes days, weeks and the mech has to be altered internally a lot, like for example the energy distribution, cabling, etc. So you usually need different variants of battlemmechs, which can me customized a bit if you've got the time, and it took some time to even develop those variants, but you have standard variants of omnimechs as different bases for easy customization, which can be changed from mission to mission.

I've been waiting 20 years for this.

Take a shot every time he says fidelity

the BETTER question is will we see the differences between EACH clan... i mean whats good for Clan Wolf is not always the same for Clan Smoke Jaguar or Clan Jade Falcon...

Don't let PGI write/ruin Smoke Jaguar.

I feel like this is a bit "hoorahoptimistic" take. Lets not praise it before its out. Lets not say that "it will add level of writing never seen before" before we can measure it. Personally, i doubt that it will be a very good story and im afraid that we will be given a cliche "you switch sides because clans bad" story, but i will be happy to see otherwise. Then again, lets not be overly enthusiastic before the release.

Sorry, man. Love the content, but no, the alphanumeric designations were not just for tabletop. They were designators used in MANY of the 100+ books. This is the lore. The military uses standard configurations on fighters even today (double bubble, ugly, alert package...) so the technicians can quickly understand intent and perform required maintenance. To just dismiss the novels, the supplemental books, and other supporting materials and just assume that the pilots or technicians just coincidentally arrived at the same configuration that very often included a bizarre weapons mix is a serious leap of logic. Later, famous pilots had their configurations "lettered" (i.e.- Summoner M), but the default packages were standardized across all of Clan space. Omnimechs are modular, but they have well-established variants for numerous reasons.

I just hope the character I play isn't named. I don't want it to be another Commander Mason where I have to live some other idiot's story. Biggest complaint with MW5 Mercs' story was even doing a career mode I was stuck getting all the flavor text of playing this idiot that lost his dad and is only motivated by vengeance against an enemy merc company that I personally could give a damn about. After the initial campaign, I started over in career mode because I wanted to be a disgraced Kuritan that was given a severance commission and had to make his own way...but... no. I was still commander Mason with all his damn daddy issue baggage, just stuck on the edges of the periphery this time instead of near the center of the sphere inside Davion Space. I also didn't like being the Company Commander, but someone else drew out the operation zones. Think of what MechWarrior could be with an MGS:V operation map style, with a couple extra features. Pick your LZ from cleared points. If none exist on the planet, you're given the location of op points and then you get to draw out a 2-5 km^2 area a few clicks away from the op-zone, and run a hot-drop Beachead mission. Once that's complete, you own the LZ and can run your ops from there and create an operation zone on the map that covers the objective points for the mission... then run the mission to your design. I guess what I really want is a game that is both strategic as well as tactical, where all the MechWarrior games so far are only Tactical.

So this is a totally new game and not a DLC?

What I'm interesting of will we get to watch the whole clan of smoke Jaguar fall like in Mechwarrior 3 just as a different perspective

Take a shot every time he says fidelity. Or do you refuse my batchall?

Mad Dog or riot.

We haven't had anything close to characters since the Mech Commander games. Excited for this and hopeful this will be the direction future games take as well.

I would love to follow the path of Trent and go all the way from Huntress to Tukayd and back

Maybe you can interview the art and/or cinematic director? I liked your previous interviews with the MW5 music and technical engineering leads.

Do the class refer to their own weapons as being "Clan" weapons? When I see things like "C-ER M LASER" or "C-GUASS" I think that is wrong. Pretty sure it's just a normal "ER M LASER" from their perspective and that's how their mech screens or readouts would refer to it.

Mechwarrior 2 was awesome for the world-building - it really showed the dystopian hell which Battletech really is. I am definitely looking forward to the story potential of this game. I just hope that they don't rush it out like they did with Mechwarrior 5.

While I am excited to dive more into the world of Battletech, I am not a fan of the Clanners. I hope that there will be a Comstar dlc some time in the future ^.^

"We'll make clan haters into clan lovers" -Clanner agenda- detected

We haven't had a good Mechwarrior story in a videogame since MW4. BT/MW5:Mercs had very loose stories. I can NOT wait for MW5: Clans!

As Prof. Tex once said, OmniTech is Robots with Legos.

I wanna see a mechwarrior RPG with fullimmersion

I want Mech5/Clans to get our own OG style multiplayer. I quit MWO years ago and refuse to go back to that fomo f2p bullshit.

All the games since MW3 had specific characters you interacted with outside of MW4 Mercs and MW5, so I'm not quite sure where you're coming from when you say this game is going to be a first in that regard. Even MW4 Mercs had a selection of specific pilots with specific personalities you could get attached to. This only seems to bring back an aspect of MW that was largely removed by MW5 and its procedurally-generated bland guys. You were usually playing a character with a name and character too. You'd have pre-misson banter with your lancemates and / or your logistics people, or between mission dialogues. Some games even featured your character(s) in cinematics. That's again something MW5 largely removed that is only being brought back. I don't even necessarily think having a blank slate player character and randomized generic lancemates is a bad thing, just different. More a build-your-own-experience than a curated story. I definitely prefer a story and crafted scenarios, as evidenced by multiple playthroughs of almost every MW game prior to MW5. So I'm glad to see Clans maybe returning to more of that. But it is a return for sure, not some groundbreaking new achievement in the MW series.

I'm thrilled that we're finally getting to see the Clans as people

They NEED to allow us to bring our own mechs into co-op. I want to be able to use my setup and my friends to be able to use theirs. It is fun to show each other what you run.

Hmmm. Well I have already shown them Clans what a real true Mechwarrior years ago. I still do hope That They can add a clan DLC for Mechwarrior 5 mercenaries. Which that is good enough for me. It be nice to have there clan weapons on your favorite mechs.

Interesting trailer. Hopefully, they pull it off with a compelling story, but I'm going to keep very low expectations. I had high expectations for MW5:Mercs but the dialogue and story telling is terrible. Then you have enemy mech AI which needs a vast improvement. I have a sneaking suspicion that the AI will be the same, but they might make missions more dynamic, which could negate the terrible AI. Beyond that if they pull off an amazing story and the player has direct, plus, multiple ways to effect an outcome in the end this will be probably the best Mechwarrior game ever made. Can they do it? We'll have to see, but I'll keep my expectations low. The trailer did not wow me, but there are hopes for great content.

Thanks for the more infepth initial review. As someone that fell in love with BattleTech through MW2 back in '95 this is looking like much more of what I've been wanting & expecting for decades. I got into tabletop & really the lore just over a year ago so would love to see richer storytelling and especially as we are introduced to the Clans. I hope they keep surprising us in a good way as I would be happy w/ MW5 Clans with what I've seen already (richer storytelling, improved commands, clan tech). I hope they continue to improve the AI, & hope the do the Omni pods right as the fixed hard points & not having more customization has been a bit of a dissapointment though I do understand with mechs the difference between say a field refit, & a full on custom mech. Regardless while just seeing the initial teaser trailer with the Timberwolf & the references in it to MW2 was all I needed to be stoked about this title the info you have provided has me & my son's even more excited!

No storyline in mechwarrior ever? Tell me you never played mw3 oe even 4 without telling me you never played mw3 or even 4.

Im excited to play this. I liked MW5:Mercs but I feel like I would love a little more of a linear and story driven campaign. There's so much freedom in Mercs but it feels very repetitive and there's a lack of story and motivation (for me anyways) with reading tons of lore and information which I believe a Batttletech lore fan appreciates more than myself. But I would love to see a more scripted/ cinematic style of campaign.

When will they bring elementals into the game? Or have they and I just haven't noticed?

Honestly, I'm VERY much looking forward to MW5 Clans! I've been reading through the Clan Invasion Era of the books since about two years ago, and I will admit, the books use the BattleMechs as a backdrop rather than making it like what we experience in the games. Honestly, this game makes me extremely excited to witness it beyond the Blood of Kerensky Trilogy portrays!

Good video but I have two questions. Is this game’s story supposed to run parallel to Mercs? And my other is do we think that other clans will be added as DLC? I would love a DLC set for Clan Sea Fox (even if at that point they were Diamond Shark)

I think the combat looks good. Hopefully, the AI is better than in MW5: Mercs. Also, defeating your mech opponents needs to feel satisfying. It is somewhat satisfying in MW5: Mercs where the mechs seem to pop and collapse in a smoking heap. However, I think that the mechs should at least burst into flames upon being defeated and should burn for a little while like in MW3. Also would be cool if they would blow apart sometimes like they did in MW2. I would just like different types of "mech deaths" so to speak to give the combat a feeling of more variety.

MW4 Mercs had great voice acting and voiced narrative. The banter between each of your pilots was unique, and your choices had tangible impact each with very well done voice acting. That being said I consider MW4 a gold standard for mechwarrior games, and I look forward to seeing how they deliver

Finally man it looks like an actual good game. I mean PGI lost all confidence ive had in them with MW5, but what ive seen from the direction and gameplay, this project gives me confidence. We have narration, and i hope it is not rudimentary, a proper dialogues and choises and being lore accurate as well. And i hope they fixed the AI problems because that was one of the things that made MW5 unplayable. AI was so terrible that game felt pointless, they just damaged you over time. No tactics or nothing. Enemy gave you no reason to maneuver defensively. That still worries me. Other than that, mech and environment models look far better, weapon effects look much better, better animations, UI is miles better, and since missions are hand-designed instead of auto-generated trash, we might expect to have good maps to fight in. Hope they are much larger than this one though.

Point of order: Trueborn aren't clones since cloning would be simply creating 1:1 copies of a preceding individual and doing so would fly in the face of clan ideals of efficiency and continual improvement. It would be more accurate to describe them as mass batch IVF with the womb in this case beiing metal as opposed to organic.

Hope they will not have CBills.

I guess all I need is a fully loaded Mad Cat with a pair of best C-ER PPCs, then I shall wipe off all Inner Sphere scums I see, all the way to Terra. That is just a wild idea, hehe.

One lore based issue that sticks out to me is that they seem to imply that the members of the new star are members of the blood house. This is in fact incorrect as you dont even get THE CHANCE to be Bloodnamed till you have proven yourself as a warrior.

Any word on what bloodname they carry or is that a major spoiler? I’m the happiest nerd in the galaxy about this. Thanks bud. ❤

They ARE NOT CLONES

I'm cautiously optimistic. This has the *potential* to be awesome, especially if they dive deep into story telling and characters.

I’m kinda glad they are having us play as the clans here because playing as the innersphere is just gonna be miserable as the innersphere unless we start off with some SLDF weapons and tech to make it less one sided

the guy would be in a solhama unit... old clan worriors hate being alive. sibkotrainers would be way younger

TAKE MY MONEY!!!!

Which is more valuable? fully trained but unblooded pilots, or mechs?

Mark my words, it'll be upgraded with DEI crap.

pretty surprising that we went from mw5 where you could see the literal polygons on fahad's forehead to this

I wonder if they are going to have a "bidding" system for loadouts?

Playing with one sibko sounds fun but what about the casualties mechanic?

But I already get bullied by clan command in MWO...

Where are the elementals.. Innersphere thought they where aliens hehehe. looks good

Is this a dlc for mech warrior 5 merc or a standalone?

I thought the story and narration in HBS Battletech was superb - if this at least meets that level, I'll be thrilled.

Who is that voice actor? He sounds so familiar

Been busy IRL, had not had much time to watch the streams. What's with the portrait instead of the cam these days?

Any rumours on release date I can't wait

That dudes head will give me nightmares

Wait! What's enhanced imaging!?

Wow, pretty

Speaking of the CSJ, I do not mind being a bad guy, I just want to play the game.

I suspect they will have something like if your star is under weight you get better equipment on your success or upgrade points for the likes of cantinas. As for narrating being the best compared to past mech games thats not hard really since past MW games have been kinda sucky with it, while MW5 was getting better with it in the way of the DLC's the main story was kinda bland.