As far as MWO is concerned, I've never played it. Thought about it, though, but my only major MW experience was Vengeance, and while I loved that game, as an online game I'm less willing to try it out.
Having played MW2, MW3, MW4, and the pod/cockpit-based Virtual World in both 3.x and Tesla/Tesla II pods, I have to say that it's far better against human opponents. MWO is quite different from any of those though, so basing your opinion of MWO of your experience with Vengeance is almost like basing your opinion of Hawken on the BattleTech tabletop game. Trust me, give it a try, if for no reason other than to broaden your knowledge. Educating yourself is never a bad thing!
Front Mission Evolved was more similar to Hawken than MWO, and had localized damage. Combat boiled down to shooting the enemies legs so they couldn't move (which was easy) thus making your targets sitting ducks. Don't get me wrong, it was fun to gimp people and watch them struggle, but... It made gameplay kinda dumb at the same time. Why make a faster paced mech game if you can just slow it down by shooting out the legs.
My buddy is just a whiner. The limb damage idea, well, I think Hawken moves TOO fast for that to be a particularly relevant concept, although it COULD be a fun game dynamic to frustrate players, perhaps an additional difficulty level.
Just to test his "complaints" out, I downloaded and installed MechWarrior Online, a game that has both of these ideas. Well, just started to get into it really. What hit me the hardest is, what a WAY different animal MWO is, compared to Hawken. I'm not gonna knock MWO, just because it's different, and I haven't played it much, but it feels like your piloting a slow moving bulldozer or grader, versus the Porsche or Lamborghini dynamics of Class A mechs, even B's and C's feel edgy and fast compared to MWO.
Just thought I'd throw it out there, get some feedback.
Let me hit these both in one swing. Front Mission Evolved is a weird beast. I watched some video of it, and the movement was... wonky. The pacing is weird, they handle distance/speed in ways that make Escher prints seem sensible, and they barely move their overly thick legs; they skate and slide around more than they walk/run. That makes the legs easy targets compared to Hawken or MWO.
Another thing is that both legs are one hit location in FME while MWO has the mechs legs independent of each other; gimp one leg in MWO and the mech is still mobile, albeit at reduced speed. Well, assuming you live that long. See, the legs are tough enough that they take a bit of shooting to disable, and by that time, you may lose a few weapons (or your entire torso, ending your battle) as they decide to shoot you somewhere less heavily armored than the legs. Each arm is also a separate location, and weapons can also be mounted in both sides of the torso. Shooting legs in MWO is thus less viable than in FME simply because they do so many things differently, and Hawken does things differently from either of them.
Unlike Hawken or FME, the speed disparity between Lights and Assaults in MWO is a bit more extreme. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but FME seems pretty homogenized as far as speed goes, aside from the massive speed difference between skating and walking. In Hawken, the average C-class can boost/run faster than the average A-class can walk, so there is a bit of overlap in speed profiles. That isn't even close to true in MWO though. Imagine a Scout with the Raider's Blitz ability permanently on, or the difference between a skating Wanzer and a walking one in FME and you start to get in the ballpark.
Of course, the armor disparity is similar. While a Hawken C-class has about double the total HP of an A-class, the average Assault mech in MWO has more armor on one leg than most Lights can mount on their entire chassis. But Assaults turn so slowly that a Light can literally run circles around them; Assaults rely on either killing Lights at long range, or having teammates around to scrape off the bogies because, pilot skills being equal, they cannot defend themselves against a Light that makes it to 50m range. At least in Hawken, a skilled pilot in a C-class has a chance against a Scout, but in MWO, speed kills.
All that said, let us rise above the details and look at the meta-meta. They do so many things differently from one another that I feel it a bit of a stretch to even put them in the same genre, though if Nickelback can be considered "Heavy Metal", I suppose it's possible. MWO is more about tactics and strategy than about reflexes, Hawken is a visceral speedfest, and Front Line Evolved was an RPG company trying to make a mech-shooter. In many ways, MWO and Hawken are polar opposites with FME in between.
So, do hit locations have a place in Hawken? Well, I think it's a bit more complex than a simple visceral response and deserves a more detailed responsethan a pithy one-liner. Besides, Benny asked for feedback, so I may as well deliver!
I personally say no for a couple of reasons;
1) The fast pace is what sets Hawken apart from it's peers, and adding too much complexity to the battlefield would detract from that. If you want to add complexity to Hawken, do it in the garage by adding mech and pilot options, but keep the actual gameplay the simple zoom-zoom-pewpewpewBLAM!!! that has drawn people in thus far.
2) It'd be such a fundamental shift that it'd be a real time-drain to code; time that could be spent doing any of the other things on the dev's already-long to-do list. I don't think keeping things the way they are is bad enough to fix what isn't broken.
But that's just my opinion.
Edited by Jerv, 11 April 2015 - 10:55 AM.
Still recovering from a neurological incident, spent a couple months learning how to walk without a cane,
figured I'd try a fast-paced game to see if I could get my reflexes back to where they were.
Garage:
A - Infiltrator, Reaper, Technician, Scout
B - Assault (x2), Predator, Raider
C - Brawler, Vanguard, Incinerator
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