Content Complete, or The Light at the End of the Tunnel
We are now in the lightning round, where all the points are doubled. MechAssault has gone Content Complete (or "Beta," if you prefer), which means that everything that was scheduled to go in the game is in, and from here on out it's a matter of constant refinement and tweaking.
Now that everything is there, we can really get down to finding things that are unclear or not fun and fix them. There's a certain point in most games' development cycles where the project suddenly goes from "This is sucky and broken, but there's some good stuff in there…" to "Wow, this is awesome, except for that one little thing!" Luckily, MechAssault has passed that point, and we're moving on to fixing the bugs and tweaking the balance.
There have been some really fun bugs that we've smashed lately, like bad designer math that made DFA attacks do ten times the damage we wanted.Stay in school, kids... math can kill.Speaking of which, yes, the classic Death From Above (jump-jetting and landing on your opponent's head) is alive and well in MechAssault, and it's just as satisfying as ever.SMASH!
…Which leads me to my next-favorite thing in the game, KICK! You see, there are vehicles inMechAssault. Puny, insignificant vehicles.Buses, trucks, passenger cars, things of that nature.No longer are you limited to destroying these nuisances with a mighty stomp of your 'Mech's foot—in MechAssault, you can send these pests flying as you charge through their base on your way to your objective.
Kicking trucks is cool (it helps if you shout "KICK!" every time you do it), but the real stars of this show are the 'Mechs.My favorite 'Mech is still the Kit Fox, and—since an earlier preview spilled the beans on this particular feature—I can tell you that it's all about the Null Signature system.NullSig allows the cunning MechWarrior to disappear off the battlefield and sneak up on his opponents undetected.It's not without its drawbacks, however, as excessive heat or damage will pretty much negate the effect, and it only works for a short period of time.(There's also the small problem of crossing rivers undetected—the splashing water is a dead giveaway.)
Anyway, I've got to get back to squashing bugs and smashing the rest of the development team in multiplayer.There's not much time before we're done, when we can share the joy ofKICK! and SMASH! with the rest of the world!(We just got CLANG! today, but that's another story.)
Hmmm… I wonder if I can make it through the entire campaign by DFAing all the enemies…?
