Piranha Games revealed MechWarrior 5: Clans today, a new stand alone MechWarrior game coming to PC, Xbox and PlayStation consoles next year. MechWarrior 5: Clans, while retaining the MechWarrior 5 designation, represents a transformative step forward in the MechWarrior 5 franchise. MechWarrior 5: Clans linear campaign will be an evolution of gameplay and storytelling in the MechWarrior series, experienced from the perspective of Clan Smoke Jaguar in the pivotal conflict known as the Clan Invasion starting in the year 3050.
It was bound to happen, given how the timeline advancement worked in MW5:Mercs. The story covered the Third and Fourth Succession Wars (2866-3025 and 3028-3030), the typical starting point for Battletech before the lore, politics, and tech get too complicated. The Clan Invasion (3049-3052) is the most iconic part of the timeline, I think.
I live to talk about Battletech, so hmu if you’ve got questions!
Sarna.net is the very good wiki for the BT universe.
Those Inner Sphere bastards have sat on their laurels for far too long!
Clan Wolf, let’s awoo!
Awoooooooooo! in yellow lasers
(Furries are canon in BattleTech, you’re welcome)
They are indeed, to a degree, though it basically never comes up. There is an illustration of a Pleasure Circus in the A Time of War RPG companion book with a catgirl. I screenshotted my copy of the PDF here.
The mods are described on page 53, “functional tail and mobile ears”.
Who’s the battletech lore channel on YouTube to follow? The only one really on my radar right now is black pants legion
You know, I don’t watch much fan video, sorry.
So, how’s the storyline like after the FedCom civil war? I haven’t been following on BattleTech since.
Oh man, that’s when I cut out too, early 2000s. I came back in the last few years and saw that Catalyst had really restored the franchise.
3067 Word of Blake (boo, hiss) takes over Terra and starts the Jihad. COMStar fails to take Terra back.
WoB attacked Luthien, Tharkad, New Avalon. Outreach gets nuked. Pretty much everyone takes advantage to attack their old rivals.
Clan Ghost Bear evacuates the whole clan, Touman and workers, to their Inner Sphere holdings in the FRR.
Tons of the characters you know get killed.
3080s Devlin Stone shows up Deus ex Machina and kicks out the Wobbies. He founds the Republic of the Sphere.
Maps change, some clans change names or merge with the IS. (Nova Cats, Ghost Bears, Snow Ravens, Sea Fox (neé Diamond Shark))
Peace!
3132 Devlin Stone retires, and then still-unknown forces break the HPG network across the Sphere, and things fall apart. This is where the old Dark Age books and Clickey-tech minis come in when WizKids took over the license from FASA and did a time jump. Since then, Catalyst took over and is still filling in the gaps.
War starts again. The Draconis Combine invades FedSuns. Wolves and Jade Falcons attack Tharkad. Alaric Ward becomes Khan of Wolf. And somehow, Devlin Stone Returned.
The Republic of the Sphere has a still-unexplained bullshit technology called The Wall that blocks jump ships from entering their space.
3151 Wolves under Alaric Ward and Falcons under Malvina Hazen figure out how to get last The Wall and race towards Terra to defeat the remnants of Republic of the Sphere. An ilClan is declared, fulfilling the goal of the original Clan Invasion.
That’s where we are.
Your main sourcebooks are Era Report:3145, then Shattered Fortress, and lastly IlClan.
Nice! I’m loving Armored Core 6, even though I prefer the stompy Battletech mechs, and the Timberwolf is particularly iconic from MW2 (so I’m looking forward to driving that puppy around again).
Never been a better time to like big robots.
I miss the early AC games where skating cost energy so mechs’ walking speeds actually mattered. Then you had a much deeper and more profound difference between a huge tanky mech compared to a fast sprinter. The motion models between quads, tanks, and bipeds were deeper too.
Imagine if FromSoft fired back with Chromehounds 2… realrobots rise up!
Hopefully it’s more fleshed out than Mercenaries. I can dream, right?
MW5 was kinda underbaked right? I remember not-so-great reviews. Did you play it? How was it compared to say, MW3, which probably was my favourite in the series?
It got pretty good now with the 4 DLCs and some minor mods.
My understanding is that the first expansion fixed many of the launch issues; I played it a ton in between the second and third expansions, and while it wasn’t a AAA game, it was still a very enjoyable sandbox. Watching the IS map evolve over time was great, and eventually the whole thing turned into 'mech Pokemon, which I got sucked into but could be very dry. It was pretty far from MW3’s crafted campaign, but the first expansion did add a number of short and sometimes memorable mission chains all over the map you could run into, giving a bit of that campaign story experience. The second expansion added another campaign you could choose to pick up, but I never did so I can’t comment.
Damn, their writing isn’t very good, but now, their post release support for their own game is easily becoming better than what HBS did!
