How MechWarrior 5: Clans is bringing a narrative focus and intricate, handcrafted missions back to the storied series

MechWarrior’s Clans are weird. If the Inner Sphere constitutes the rump remains of an interstellar Rome, then the Clans are the gene-splicing frontier techno- barbarians at the gate. Honour- bound and fanatical, the Clans have their own notion of how the Inner Sphere should be governed, and in August, 3049, they’re gonna make it everybody’s problem.

MechWarrior 5: Clans centres on a rookie ‘Star’ (a five-mech squad) from the Smoke Jaguar clan, seeing them from the end of their training to their participation in the Clan Invasion of 3049, a pivotal turning point in BattleTech tabletop lore. Like the Shadows of the Empire and Yuuzhan Vong in Star Wars or the Time of Troubles in the Forgotten Realms, it was one of those print-era multimedia events that pressed reset on an established fictional setting.

The BattleTech universe is supposed to be ‘shades of grey’, but nobody can tell me these Clan guys aren’t space orcs. That’s OK though, I love orcs, and the Clanners bring with them not only a “live fast, die young” ethos centred on their genetic mutations and warrior supremacy, but also the best mechs – sleeker, more customisable OmniMechs.

In contrast to the businesslike dogs of war in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Clans will focus on an almost alien warrior culture that’s held itself separate from the vast body of humanity remaining in the Inner Sphere. In a throwback to the paired games of MechWarrior’s past, Piranha Games is following up 2019’s Mercenaries with a partner game that approaches the battlefields of the far future in its own way.

Mercenaries delivered a galaxy full of battles to fight, with predominantly procedurally generated levels underpinning a theoretically endless private military management fantasy. “The backbone of Mercenaries was the procedural regeneration system,” Piranha CEO Russ Bullock explains. “And you can see the star map. The dream was ‘fly anywhere on that map, take missions, and fight there.’”

The developer now wants to deliver on a bespoke, handcrafted MechWarrior campaign, and make MechWarrior 5: Clans a companion to Mercenaries that doesn’t simply drop in a new roster of bipedal tanks. After visiting Piranha HQ in Vancouver and talking to some of the passionate developers there, nearly every one of whom cited a lifelong love of BattleTech and MechWarrior stretching back past PC classics like MechWarrior 2 and into the mists of the tabletop era, I’ve got a feeling those ‘freebirth scum’ in the Inner Sphere won’t know what hit them.

Tip of the spear

I played an early mission from Clans set on Santander, a pirate-controlled world on the edges of the Inner Sphere. In the BattleTech lore, it’s important as a point of ‘first contact’ (reintroduction, really) between the Clanners and the Inner Sphere. From the Inner Sphere perspective, it’s this brutal awakening to an outside threat that has returned from the edge of the galaxy. And for the Smoke Jaguar clan, it’s a triumphant first strike on a gaggle of bush league warlords.

Though the level was very much a work in progress, Clans’ new direction versus Mercenaries was evident. Myself and four other members of a Star had to assault a fortified canyon held by Santander’s ruling faction, tearing down strategic targets while fending off defenders.

The canyon is a long, open-ended level, with upper and lower paths, switchbacks, and opportunities for ambush – for both you and the enemy. My first time through, I was flanked by four developers from Piranha controlling the rest of my Star – Clans will support up to five-player co-op, increased from Mercenaries’ four. There’s even a lore explanation for that: Inner Sphere militaries organise their units into four-mech ‘Lances’, while the Clanners’ advanced tech and superior warrior instincts allow them to count up to five.

The core, modern MechWarrior combat remains intact here, with the layers of armour and substructure translating to long times-to-kill on most mechs and demanding careful engagement with the series’ location-based damage system. Management of your heat build-up is still front and centre, with powerful energy weapons generating more heat than good old-fashioned bullets and missiles. And as in most BattleTech games, different environments will contribute to how quickly you build up and dissipate heat – ballistics have an all new set of advantages dropping into a volcanic environment as opposed to a temperate grassland.

With the devs backing me up, I made it through the Santander trench run smoothly, and for my next attempt I went in as the sole human player, directing my Star with a surprisingly detailed list of squad commands. You get an assortment of tactical options for each individual member of your crew as well as the group as a whole, but just like with every RTS, my preferred strategy here was ‘select all and attack’.

This iteration of the assault on Santander was a much more fly-by-night affair, but by god, I still pulled it off, even after suffering two full dismemberments myself. The pirates shot off one of my arm cannons pretty early on, a severe firepower impediment, but the loss of one leg was way worse and entirely my fault. I was having a little too much fun with my mech’s jump jets, you see, and this is a game with fall damage.

After landing my 75-ton Timberwolf on my bum leg a few too many times, the old girl gave up the ghost. Switching to a third-person view, my ride wasn’t looking so hot. CEO Bullock is very proud of how Piranha has been able to represent the progressive destruction of both mechs and environments, and both were on full display as I limped through Santander. Hobbling on, my poor Timberwolf was also missing an arm. Meanwhile, bulldozing through the pirates’ flimsy little buildings let me peek through to their structures and interiors as their rooftops crumbled away at waist height. Destruction feels good in this game.

The graphical commitment to my miserable lemon of a mech, as well as the sheer difficulty increase as I lost functionality, made successfully completing my mission the second time all the sweeter. As I just barely cleared the final enemy mechs and gently feathered my jump jets to descend to an evac point down in the canyon, I felt like one of those characters in Wacky Races skidding across the finish line on their bum while holding a detached steering wheel. Hey, a win’s a win, and I can worry about mech repair when I’m playing Clans on my home PC.

Alien vistas

Santander already looks good, with red rocky cliffs contrasting against
a clear blue sky like something out of the American Southwest. The pirates’ harsh industrial installations and gleaming white satellite dishes seal the deal of selling this utilitarian, militarised place, but it’s still distinctly Earth-like at the moment. That’s subject to change, according to Piranha art director Dennis de Koning.

De Koning wants the final version of Santander to be defined by veins of opalescent blue crystal running through the rock faces of the world, using subsurface scattering tech to sell this vision of dreamlike, multicoloured alien canyons hijacked for petty frontier warfare. That notion of spiking the familiar (a rocky canyon) with the bizarre (opalescent veins of alien crystal) is de Koning’s go-to for selling the otherworldly vistas of the Inner Sphere. “The first thing I try to do is to ground [these environments] in reality,” he tells me, adding that “the best lie is laced with truth”. The artist mentioned, only half joking, that he has “a reference file of weird rock formations” to draw on for inspiration, hoping to avoid overused touchstones (badum tish) like the popular columnar basalt formation (see: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Skyrim, Final Fantasy XV).

In Mercenaries, Piranha focused on travelling anywhere in the Inner Sphere with the fantasy supported by procedural generation tools for both environments and missions. Clans’ more authored experience will have a limited number of worlds, but you’ll go a bit deeper on each of them: planets will have multiple story missions associated with them, all with a new level of focus and polish in their design. That’s a big part of why de Koning and his team have to nail the look of these planets: the veined, opalescent rocks and massive desert geoglyphs of Santander will have to unify several missions under the same aesthetic and really sell the alternate reality of this world.

I was particularly taken with de Koning and his team’s concepts for Luthien, the capital world of Clans’ antagonist faction, the Draconis Combine. The faction
has drawn on Imperial Japanese influences since the tabletop days, and Piranha is crafting towering megacities reminiscent of Akira for us to do battle in. De Koning described one level on Luthien as being set among the sprawling acreage of the faction leaders’ royal gardens, with colossal torii gates towering over the mechs doing battle in the once-pristine green space.

On the opposite side of the conflict, de Koning was particularly keen to show off the Smoke Jaguar homeworld of Huntress. MechWarrior 5: Clans will be leaning into lore descriptions of the planet having a number of jungle and tropical biomes, with missions taking place under dense tree canopies or even in a great swamp. Although de Koning pointed to the floating islands and other more fantastical elements of Avatar as what he’s hoping to avoid with MechWarrior’s environments, I couldn’t help but notice a distinct Pandora twang to all this megaflora cut by cascading waterfalls and the sleek, advanced military hardware crashing through.

Hand crafted

In conversation with Piranha design director Paul Inouye, I learn how these alien worlds will play host to some of the most intricate mission design Piranha has done to date, with a focus on surprising, handcrafted content. This isn’t entirely new territory for Piranha, with the studio already having moved in this direction with MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries’ various DLC expansions.

Inouye seems thrilled at the level design possibilities on offer with a game that isn’t shooting for the sheer number of planets as Mercenaries. He describes haggling with the project’s programmers and engineers, wanting to have the tools to craft the most minute story beats and NPC interactions in-mission. “It’s about bringing that control back into the level designers hands,” Inouye tells me. “Being able to tell stories with intent, to be able to focus down on what you want the player to experience.”

While the devs I talk to acknowledged there are advantages to procedural generation for making certain kinds of games, they all seem excited about returning to something more bespoke. Inouye is especially keen on being able to have, as ordinary as it may sound, “actual visual storytelling in a level now”. Mercenaries’ proc gen system largely precluded Inouye’s team being able to do things like crafted sight lines, vistas, showing players a specific shot at a specific time (think the Reaper taking off in Mass Effect’s opening mission, or your first view of the Citadel in Half-Life 2). Inouye even recalls “working on Mercs, and just saying, ‘Hey, can we move this rock over here to change the sight line?’ The answer was ‘no’ because if you do that the rock will move in all these other procedural generation tiles.”

One of the most exciting things I hear on the entire trip, though, was Inouye’s description of a later-game mission, and the sort of non- standard levels he wants to put in Clans. “There are ships that are trying to leave this airbase, and you’re only there to monitor them for any sort of contraband, basically you’re a border cop now.”

In the proposed mission, players have to scan departing ships for contraband, allowing cleared vehicles to pass unmolested but opening fire at the first sign of smugglers. It doesn’t end there either, with Inouye telling me that players then have to investigate the crash site they created and secure the contraband.

To me, this sounds like the kind of small gameplay moment that might make Clans feel more than a non-stop slugfest between mechs. My mind went to Metal Gear Solid V and that one simultaneously beautiful and awful mission where you have to intercept tank convoys rolling in from all across the map. Tranq darting and crouch walking gets replaced with frantic horseback riding, trap setting, and Fulton Recovery System antics, and Inouye’s out-there proposed mission has me excited to get that same sense of panicked, delightful surprise out of Clans. This is a different kind of mission, your comfortable strategies don’t work here, figure it out.

Industrial design

The mechs themselves remain as core to the experience as ever, and the process of creating them begins with Piranha concept artist Alex Iglesias. Iglesias’ more grounded, industrial takes on classic BattleTech designs have won praise from the community, and even come full-circle to influence the modern tabletop game. Revisiting the Clan mechs, though, is a major undertaking – these models have decades of history to live up to, a fraught history of copyright issues with series like Robotech to avoid (but that’s another story), and some notable differences from the chassis we saw in Mercenaries.

According to Iglesias, “Clan and Inner Sphere have different tech bases, with the Clanners usually being the climax – typically higher performance, higher tech, more advanced. Their stuff is usually lighter, it shoots faster.” For a real-world touchstone, Iglesias points to the contrast between the rugged, old-fashioned, higher-calibre materiel of the Soviet Union and the sleeker, more elegant designs adopted by NATO during the Cold War.

The Clan mechs also possess fundamental mechanical differences that have proven challenging to Piranha from both an artistic and design perspective. The Clans’ OmniMechs are inherently more modular than their Inner Sphere counterparts, letting players swap out their limbs and associated ‘hardpoints’ or weapon mounting locations. While a typical mech might be limited to a large energy weapon mounting point on a limb, a Clan mech could swap that limb out for one that supports a large ballistic weapon, or maybe two smaller energy weapons.

Don’t the Clan mechs just kinda seem... better than their Inner Sphere counterparts? The fact that their loadouts and roles can be changed up so easily has proven difficult enough to balance, especially in a multiplayer game like Piranha’s MechWarrior Online, but it’s also a huge aesthetic challenge for Iglesias and Piranha’s other artists, 2D and 3D.

The mechs always have to look the part, and the same weapon – Iglesias and de Koning used a missile battery as an example – might have to be remodelled any number of times to look just right on each individual mech. Luckily, Iglesias comes to the process with a lifelong love of BattleTech and takes no end of joy in reinterpreting the original FASA Corporation tabletop designs.

Sound off

Piranha principal audio designer Sean Kolton is in charge of a crucial piece of the MechWarrior 5: Clans puzzle: the unique sci-fi soundscape of the battlefield of the future. “Mechs are funny,” Kolton tells me, “because you don’t have any in the real world to [base the sound on].”

We’ve got tanks and excavators and all manner of horrific war machines, but these real-world analogues are still far from the bipedal war-fighting platform of the 31st century, so Kolton and his team have to get creative. “It’s a mixture of the two, synthesisers and real-world sounds and a lot of processing on those real-world sounds. Even metal impacts, there aren’t a lot of real, deep, heavy metal impacts.”

When I asked him about favourite real-world samples for mech sounds, he told me about the one that got away: “I was at the beach with my son. There was a massive accident [everyone was OK!], and it was the loudest explosion sound I’ve ever actually heard. And the first thing I thought was, ‘Wow, that’s a great crack for like, an [autocannon] sound.”

That almost obsessive dedication has resulted in a soundscape that’s uniquely MechWarrior. There’s not quite anything else in gaming like the muted thud of your footsteps as you stomp across a battlefield, the sound dulled ever-so-believably by your insulated cockpit and the hum of all the machinery underneath you. With Clans, Kolton hopes to maintain this kind of fidelity while also differentiating the Clan mechs from their grungier, less refined Inner Sphere counterparts.

“For Clans, I wanted to do something completely distinct at the same time. To me, the cast of the Clans and the universe is grittier, starker,” Kolton explained. “I keep on going back to those old Terminator scenes: Terminator
one and two where they do the flashback, or I guess flash forward to the future of those massive battles.”

The Clan mechs are going to have a starker, cleaner sound to them to match their technology profile, and Kolton wants fans to “play the two games [Mercenaries and Clans] and have completely different audio experiences”.

That drive extends to the soundtrack as well, Kolton’s main focus this go-around. Mercenaries’ OST is a fan favourite, with Kolton bringing his own passion as a metalhead to guitar-heavy tracks that are firmly music you can lift weights to. With Clans, it’s going to be more of a synths and ambient dread kind of vibe. The music on the Santander level reminded me of driving the Mako across uncharted worlds in the original Mass Effect, and Kolton cited the likes of John Carpenter and Nine Inch Nails as influences on where he’s taking Clans’ soundtrack.

Forging ahead

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries was the first numbered instalment of the series in almost 20 years, a key part of a wave of new-school mech sim hits breathing new life into what was once practically a pillar of PC gaming. “Mechs might have been one of the biggest genres in gaming,” CEO Bullock muses when I ask him about the second wind the scene has found in recent years. “It hasn’t been for a while, but it’s gaining steam. I think even with what we’ve done with MechWarrior, we’ve seen the brand slowly get revitalised.

“We’ve seen what Catalyst is doing with the pen and paper stuff. Now for the first time in decades, you’re seeing [BattleTech] in Target. They’re making a big resurgence. And I think that the work we’ve done over the last 10-12 years has played a big part in that resurgence.”

Clans looks set to continue that resurgence, then, bringing more refined, authored level design and storytelling, hopefully matching Mercenaries’ sheer breadth of content with a newfound depth. I, for one, am excited to load up with a Hellbringer and aim for the legs when MechWarrior 5: Clans launches sometime in 2024.