Almost 6 months ago now we mentioned one of the upcoming features we were working on was an Internal Damage system for our ‘Mechs and vehicles. Our first foray into this feature was to implement an internal HULL system for our tracked and hover assets. While we are still balancing the values and working on the consequence effects for this system we have also been working on the conceptual design for Internal Structure as it applies to the showcase assets for MechWarrior: Living Legends – the ‘Mechs.
We have been asked in the past what the teams position was on the tactic of legging ‘Mechs, and it has always been that shooting the legs was justified and expected; why would we make the legs capable of taking damage if they were not intended to be shot at? Such as it is, the legs on certain ‘Mechs can be quite easily disabled or destroyed and we have recognised this as an issue for a while. The problem was in determining the best solution that delivered a gameplay experience in which shooting at the legs or shooting at other ‘Mech components were both viable tactics.
Feature Evolution
We had initially considered increasing the allocated armour points for the legs to make them more difficult to destroy simply in terms of raw durability. While this certainly would have worked, it would have made other components of the ‘Mechs disproportionately fragile.
Another possible avenue we looked at was applying a fractional damage multiplier to the legs to make them take damage at a lesser rate. Unfortunately this would have resulted in a situation in which shooting the legs would have a reduced award (since rewards are tied to damage points) and would have resulted in the legs being valuable targets but difficult to actually convert on when fired at.
Finally, we looked at sub-dividing the legs into sub-components (ex. upper leg, lower leg) and requiring that they both be critically damaged or destroyed before invoking negative consequences. This was problematic in that the leg hitboxes cannot be easily sub-divided into upper/lower sections and maintain a consistent hitbox as they move in a multiplayer environment.
Feature Solution
What we have arrived at is a solution that uses the Internal Structure of the legs as a supplementary damage soak and yields a better gameplay experience.
The Internal Structure for each leg will be represented to the player as an integer percentage and shown on their status HUD and the enemy targeting information HUD as two additional values. Though not representative of the final version, this is how we will likely represent this information on our current ‘Mech HUD.
From a code side, the leg internal structure will be derived as a percentage of the external armour component durability points (ex. idComponentLeftLeg*0.70). We have not settled on the actual value as yet, and we actually have planned to have the actual multiplier value differ for each ‘Mech but it will be consistent across all variants of a ‘Mech regardless of variations in external armour. The value for internal structure for each leg will be equal (ex. one leg cannot have more starting value internal structure/armour points than the other).
What does this mean to the player? Well for a given ‘Mech weight category (let’s say 100 ton assault ‘Mechs) the internal structure values may differ between an Atlas and a Fafnir even if their external leg armour where to be exactly the same. This will give MWLL another facet to balance individual ‘Mechs with an will be particularly important in lighter weight classes as a selection criteria for players.
When the external armour component has been destroyed (reduced to 0 armour points) the corresponding leg is considered “disabled” and the ‘Mech will assume a limp animation behaviour. This is a change in the current behaviour wherein the limp animation is invoked prior to the leg being destroyed.
When the internal structure has been destroyed (reduced to 0 armour points) the leg is considered “destroyed” and the ‘Mech will topple over.
Internal component structure takes damage at the same rate (at least for the initial release) as the External damage components and the awards for damage to internal structure are the same as external armour points.
Internal structure cannot be repaired. If your vehicle sustains internal structure damage during the course of a battle and you manage to return to base for repairs, the internal structure will remain in a damaged state.
The Leg Internal Structure feature is one of many in-development features for MechWarrior: Living Legends that will be forthcoming in a future release.
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Author Note: Leg Internal Structure will not be present in MechWarrior: Living Legends 0.5.4 open beta
