By the 31st century, humanity has spread to thousands of worlds, while a handful of powerful empires wage continual war for the right to rule the stars. Foremost among the weapons used in that struggle are BattleMechs. Loaded with autocannons, missile launchers, lasers, and charged-particle beam weapons, these fusion-powered war machines of articulated armor stand upward of ten meters high. Piloting them are MechWarriors, the best, most intensively trained men and women available. Like the armored knights of an earlier age, MechWarriors are popular heroes, and their exploits are the stuff of legends.
Introducing MechWarrior: Living Legends - Community Edition!
In 2007, a talented team - Wandering Samurai Studios - began work on what would become an award-winning and much-beloved game: A total conversion bringing the BattleTech universe to Crysis Wars' Battlefield-inspired combined-arms experience. But this wasn't to last, as in early 2013, MWLL version 0.7.1 became the final official release by WSS.
Despite this, our community has stayed loyal, active and persistent in its efforts to keep the project alive and vibrant. Throughout the years following 0.7.1, we've had amazing events such as Chaos March, Planetary League and Open Merc Night.
In 2016, a new development team came together to pick up where WSS left off. We're members of the community, equipped with years of experience from public and league play, deliberations and requests from countless players, and sheer determination. We've overhauled and refined MWLL to create a balanced, player-friendly and fun experience. Naturally, this includes numerous fixes and loads of new toys!
We've worked on MechWarrior: Living Legends for many years now, and still plan to add more content and improvements as best as we can. You don't need to own Crysis Wars to play MWLL - our installer sets you up with a legal copy of everything you need to dive right into the action.
Join us, and let's mech some noise!
Epic multiplayer missions
MechWarrior: Living Legends brings elements of both FPS and simulation genres together, and features a novel combined-arms roster, to create an engaging and complex gameplay experience unlike any MechWarrior title currently out there!
Participate in endless wars to capture resources, factories, and bases across countless contested worlds, where you'll have to fight smart to defeat or drive back the competition. Set just after BattleTech's Civil War era, MWLL enters you into the constant conflict between the many factions of the Inner Sphere and the invading Clans. As you brave not just treacherous environments but volleys of missiles, barrages of lasers and cannon fire, and hurtling artillery shells - who will you fight for? Do you have what it takes to be a living legend through the chaos of the 31st century?
Immersive team-based gameplay
Teamwork is overpowered, and is the one tool in this game that can only ever get buffed! Choose from a multitude of roles to play as - from scout to fire support to juggernaut - and coordinate with your team to secure victory! Employ advanced electronic warfare equipment such as stealth armor, electronic countermeasures, and active probes to get an edge over the enemy. Use target acquisition lasers and beacons to reveal your target's position to allies, and share radar data with your team using the powerful C3 network.
A vast arsenal of war machines
Choose from over 70 air and ground units, each with at least six different configurations. Each variant itself sports a multitude of weapons and electronics systems, designed with a role in mind - be it a Battle Armor hunter, a swift scout, an urban brawler, or even a dedicated artillery platform. Of course, you'll need cash to buy your machine first. Though you start with access to the lighter assets, you can work your way up through the ranks to secure a bigger budget. The more you participate on the field the greater the payoff!
Fight for glory in the Solaris VII arenas
Want a break from the seriousness of the battlefield but still itching to fight? Enter Solaris VII, BattleTech's biggest game world where anything goes in the diverse, simulated environments of its many arenas. Be it a lush jungle, icy wastelands, or the ruins of ancient buildings! The fights, however, are very real: here you can expect the fiercest free-for-alls, mechs and vehicles alike tearing each other apart to the amusement of an audience of thousands. Nearly all arenas feature commentary by Solaris VII's legendary announcer Duncan Fisher, a veteran mech jock himself.
MechWarrior: Living Legends is a combined-arms multiplayer-only mod-turned-standalone mod for Crysis Wars. You do not need to own Crysis Wars to play this, as the CW demo - which has everything needed to run MWLL - is included with the installation. MWLL fuses Battlefield’s combined-arms FPS gameplay with BattleTech’s setting to bring you a challenging and engaging MechWarrior-esque experience. And then some!
Aside from being multiplayer-only and developed by a community, MWLL is a combined-arms game. This means you can expect player-controlled aircraft, tanks, hovercraft, infantry, and mechs on the battlefield. Additionally, MWLL puts you right into the action once you enter a match, skipping the mechlab but instead giving you a very diverse assortment of variants per chassis. Furthermore, there are no per-player persistent stats or stats tracking between matches; all stats are reset once the match is over. If you're coming from MWO, you may find this primer useful in adjusting to MWLL's gameplay and understanding some of the differences between the two games.
Make sure you have read through the troubleshooting guide on the wiki, as the most common issues have been pretty well documented there. If you’re still having trouble, feel free to ask in the #tech_support channel of our Discord server.
Nope. This project is not allowed to receive money in any way.
Most importantly, MWLL is a multiplayer game, and finding a way to implement a mechlab that doesn't lead to absurd boating or other forms of weapon hardpoint abuse (i.e. minmaxing) is not a simple task in the slightest - it is a balancing nightmare. While we understand that the mechlab has been an important aspect of past MechWarrior games, we also believe that it has no place in a multiplayer-only environment, let alone in one with pilotable aircraft and tanks. You wouldn't want dual Heavy Gauss Rifle aircraft consistently top-down one-shotting you, right? Allowing everyone to pilot the most optimized builds just isn't our definition of "fun" nor does it make for diverse gameplay. Virtually every variant for every asset in MWLL is designed with a discrete purpose in mind, and that's how we compensate for having no mechlab in our game.
Frankly, MWLL was never especially popular, and add on to that the introductions of BattleTech (the PC game) and MWO/5, you have very little room for exposure. Additionally, while MWLL does have a somewhat significant following, it is spread across multiple time zones, and not everyone in these time zones is able to enjoy steady access to the game servers due to factors often outside our control.
There are some ways to help get games going, though. Of course, spreading the word that MWLL exists is already a great first step. If you're already in our Discord server, you can sign up for and use the @PubGames role to ping other people in the community that signed up for such notifications.
You can, though beware it is a little tricky to set up. You can follow this guide on our wiki to get started. If you run into issues, feel free to ask away on the official MWLL Discord server for further assistance.
While a cool idea, it's not likely to happen as it's well outside the scope of development. MWLL is built off of Crysis Wars (which is the multiplayer component to Crysis), and as such doesn't have any real singleplayer components to work with. Furthermore, adding bots to this spaghetti monster of code is simply well beyond anything anyone in their right mind would want to dive into.
While moving to another game engine would be nice, it is not within our scope of development. There are a couple reasons for that, one of which concerns licensing complications: Though MWLL's creators have allowed us (the community) to continue working on it, we are allowed only to continue MWLL’s development - this cannot be stressed enough. Even if that wasn't the case, moving to another engine would require a complete recreation of the whole project from scratch. Only some of the art assets would remain the same, at best, and most likely even those would need to be replaced to fit a new art direction.
In 2022, an organized effort had set out to work on such an ambitious project. Living Legends 2: Armored Combat (the MechWarrior part had to be dropped for licensing reasons) was to be a re-imagined successor to MechWarrior: Living Legends on Unreal Engine 5. Despite the effort, LL2 has entered an indefinite hiatus.
Maybe someday. For now, if you really want to see it in your Steam library you can manually add MWLL to it as a non-Steam game, but be warned: this is known to cause the game to crash more frequently, especially when the overlay is enabled.
On the Discord server, DM either Leeko or Bird_Thing, and have ready a portfolio or some other way to show your work and/or capabilities. Any interviews will be conducted via Discord. We're always looking for Flash, Lua, and C++ coders; and more artists (3D and texture) are always welcome! You can check out our jobs posts on ModDB for details about the kind of work you'll be doing. We will not accept graphs or snippets of code as demonstration of your coding skills. If you want to help but feel you don’t have the skills, you can still help by simply spreading the word that this project exists!
Any asset to be considered for implementation must be evaluated by the following criteria: viability (can it be implemented in a balanced manner?) and uniqueness (will it add anything to the game that isn't already there?). Going off of that ruleset, Urbanmech is never happening. :P
Unless you can find someone willing to do some intensive headbanging in the realms of borderline undocumented Flash and Lua programming, this is very unlikely.
Unfortunately, given the nature of our development pipeline, it tends to be hard to predict what will go in or when. As such, we can’t make any promises nor give accurate plan breakdowns. It's hoped that new BA and a proper BA system can be added as well, but details are currently fuzzy and yet to be worked out. Ideally, the Nighthawk PA(L) will get to be a part of that new system, as the default spawn-in suit instead of the Longinus and Elemental. You may also see a few more new toys get released before any of these other things do (as the BA projects are more dependent on major code changes than new art)... but no promises.
