MechWarrior 4 Free Release Now Available

Mr. Sketch writes with news that the free release of MechWarrior 4 has finally arrived. We've discussed the game in the past when it was announced, and later when its release was held up by Microsoft. Quoting the announcement: "One of the greatest features of MekPak3.1 and of MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries in general, is the ability to customize. MechWarrior always has been about the Mechlab, especially multiplayer. The Mechlab truly distinguishes MW4 from a long list of shooters that have come out in the past 10 years. The ability to create literally thousands of configurations allows the game to continue in popularity over its lengthy life span. Since the Free Release not only comes with the original mechs and weapons of Mercenaries, but also with the Clan and IS Mech Packs and all the Mektek mechs and weapons, here is what you are getting ... for free."

Comments

Re:Not-so-great game now free not-so-great game

[Anonymous Coward]

The older Mechwarriors used as directly as possible the game system that the universe is based on, Battletech. In this system, you can put machine guns in your feet, and jump jets in your head.

Re:Microsoft missing an opportunity

[i.r.id10t]

I have the original Loki port of one of the mechwarrior games. It played very well on modest hardware with no issues for me.

Re:not impressed

[deniable]

Better yet, the guy who built his kids a Madcat tree-house.

Re:Earthsiege 2Another Oldie but Goodie

[Lehk228]

mechwarrior 3 had you scrounging parts from fallen enemies, and what parts dropped depended on how you killed them, so the best way to kill was to blow off the legs since you probably already have enough heat sinks and jump jets anyways, the weapons and electronics kits were more valuable.

Re:BAD SLASHDOT!

[Mascot]

That rhymes pretty well with my experience as well.

Though, for me it started going wrong even earlier. During the installation of MTX itself, you're asked for the default directory to install games to. I changed the default to my games directory and hit save. And hit save. And hit save. It just wouldn't close the window. Eventually I X'ed it out. Then I discover some 15 MTX icons in systray, and an equal amount of processes.

After killing off all of those, and starting MTX fresh, I ended up in the cycle you describe. Though I wasn't as patient. After waiting a minute with a skeleton window "not responding", I killed it, uninstalled, and forgot about MW4 for the time being.

Spectacular failure is a good summary indeed. Hopefully their tweaks to the game itself are of a stratospherically higher quality.

Re:Yes, but

[TheRaven64]

Not relevant. All of the issues people report there are due to copy protection in the original, so the question is whether the free version has equivalent copy protection. If it works under WINE, I'd like to try it - someone borrowed my MW3 disk a few years back and never returned it.

Re:First

[X0563511]

It's not locking up, it's just poorly programmed. It's hanging on the connection attempts, since the MTX servers exploded.

Disconnect your internet when you start it. You'll then have to grab the game's .mtx files elsewhere and manually install in MTX while it is in offline mode.

See here:
http://www.mektek.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=156383

http://www.mektek.net/mw4free/torrents/files/mechwarrior4mercenaries.all.to.51.03.01.0017.mtx.torrent
http://www.mektek.net/mw4free/torrents/files/mechwarrior4mercenaries.51.03.01.0017.to.51.03.01.0018.mtx.torrent
http://www.mektek.net/mw4free/torrents/files/mechwarrior4mercenaries.51.03.01.0018.to.51.03.01.0020.mtx.torrent