Interview - VO

MW : LL | Criminal : Good day everyone! I'd like to introduce myself and the team from MechWarrior: Living Legends, a total conversion mod in development for Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. My name is Sean Tracy aka: Criminal and I am the lead developer for MechWarrior: Living Legends or MWLL. So far the team that has been assembled is an international team with people coming from as far as Germany, the majority of the team is Canadian and American.

Storyline: It is the 31st century and mankind has spread itself across the known universe. In 2108 humanity discovered faster-than-light travel and soon populated a large region more than 1000 light years wide they called this the Inner Sphere. With the spread of the human race came the inevitable conflicts between warring houses. In 2571 the Star league was formed, this new governing body brough in a golden age peace and prosperity to humanity. The peace did not last...

 

In 2767 a bloody coup ensued, as the star league fractured each member of the ruling Star League declared themsevles the « rightfull » ruler of the Inner Sphere, this became what is now known as the Succession Wars.

At the time of the collapse the Inner Sphere was dominated by five interstellar empires, each ruled by a House, these Houses were powerfull dynasites that wielded vast economic and military might. Though they each thought themselves rulers of the Inner Sphere none could dominate the other by sheer force, not for lack of trying.

After the fall of the Star League the commander of the Star League Defense Forces, Aleksandr Kerensky was fed up with disputes between the various houses composing the Star League. Each House declaring its own Star Lord. Kerensky took 80% of the Star League Defense Forces (SLDF) (composed of the best Battlemechs in the galaxy). He led the SLDF on an Exodus out into the Deep Periphery, far out of the reach of any of the scouts of the Inner Sphere, to keep the five Great Houses from using them to their own ends. It was his dream of someday returning to conquer the Inner Sphere and reunite it under one rulership. Upon his death, his son, Nicholas Kerensky created The Clans in a second exodus. The descendants of the SLDF would become the Clans.

In 3050, the Clans returned to the Inner Sphere, wielding advanced weaponry and far superior miltiary skill. The clans attacked without mercy striking terror into the hearts of everyone in the InnerSphere.

In 3058 faced with the Clan Invasion the great houses of the Inner Sphere had no choice but to join forces and created the Star League Consitituion, their only goal to stave of the invasion of the clans.

MW : LL | Criminal : There are a few reason why we chose Quake Wars. Initially we started creating this particular mod for battlefield 2142, however, due to the extreme lack of support and dwindling interest in the franchise we chose a new engine and platform on which to develop the mod.

The team at Splash Damage has already been in contact with the team regarding some techincal aspects and we've been assured that there will be a vast support network for modding teams which is truly a breath of fresh air since Dice and EA really left most teams out in the cold so to speak. In addition there were some key components of the Quake Wars title that got us quite excited the first being the campaign style gamemode, this will essentially allow us to tell a story rather than having teams fight eachother meaninglessly. Since the Battletech in so rich in storyline we really wanted to tell some of the major stories from the battltech universe and allow players to take part in these huge battles. It also allows us to incorporate different technologies for each team according to the timeline. For example during the succesion wars it was essentially Inner Sphere against Inner Sphere there were no battlesuits and the technology was relatively low, however many years later during the Clan Invasion the Inner Sphere managed to create battlesuits and modify their weapons so as to have a chance versus the more advanced clan.

MW : LL | Criminal : There are people in the team that have worked on the Doom 3 engine quite extensively, however, the majority of the team have come from the BF2 modding community.

MW : LL | Criminal : Megatexture technology is truly one of the most exciting additions to gaming tech in recent years. The ability to render out a full detail texture map on a single sheet opens up huge opportunites for detail as well as gameplay. The only fear, which comes from any new tech, will be the ability to generate these megatextures on our own without the full development studio that most game developers have. To render out a 6 gigabyte texture and only use 8 mb of space is an amazing feat and we cant wait to get a hold of it.

MW : LL | Criminal : Abosolutely, most modern games all have healthy modding communites. I also expect that Quake Wars will be an extremly popular game and will (we hope) not make the same mistakes that EA and DICE have made with the Battlefield Franchise. There have already been other mods announced for QW:ET and we have been in contact with each of the teams from these mods as well all feel to be succesfull we all need to stick together.