We all know that there ain't any new Mech Packs (last was Dervish). Also - I got rumours that MwO is in trouble, due to PGI having financial problems, their license expiring within the next year and so on (remember - these are rumours yet to be confirmed). So, what you would say about the nearest future of MwO?
They've skipped months on mech packs before. I'm not going to scream the sky is falling over that. I'm not sure about financial problems; they're literally releasing a new game. They might have been expecting more pre-orders though. I don't know. Do they have a lot of shared resources between teh two games and therefore if they're heavy on one they must, by necessity, be light on the other? I don't know. I've heard of the license expiring and not knowing all the details, an expired license could put them in one of three places: 1: Renewal. Nothing changes. This would probably be based on the outcome of MW5. I think they've hinted at plants for MW5 expansions though so they'd either need to sell those before the expiration or renew. 2: Expiration means no new mechs, game goes into full maintenance mode. 3: Immediate shutdown. Again though, I'm not screaming about the sky falling. I know the directions that MWO has gone in has frustrated some folks. I know some founders who played TT back in the day and hated when clans came out because it changed the game. When Clans hit MWO, they hated that because it changed the game. I know some folks love clans though. I know a lot of folks don't like the way the game has become so NASCAR heavy. Given the age of the game, it's actually impressive the game has as much momentum as it does have with its aged engine. Few games run so long. Do they need to reboot everything with MWO2? Do they need to update the engine and overhaul the backend? Do they need to make other adjustments? Hard to say. There's a lot of little QoL things that fixing them doesn't make money, but not fixing them aggravates and bleeds players slowly (UI, Matchmaking/Tier/ELO, Faction Play Frustrations, The rate sweeps occur, etc) Last I heard, they were neck deep in wanting to reviving, update and bring FP to the forefront. Does the resources spent on that mean that's why they can't do new mechs when MW5 is also in its final stages? I don't know. Since they have some major plans for one aspect of the game (no saying if they come to fruition) I can't say that I feel like PGI is abandoning the game. In light of certain other online games, people have an expectation of "Give me a special thing going on all the time! What do you mean there's no asteroid in the sky that's going to change the game in 3 months?" PGI has tried to do that with the barrage of events for the past 18 or so months when it has previously did 1 per month. PGI has tried to do that with the monthly mech, but the result of that has largely been to either produce a mech that peopel dont' want because it isn't better than other mechs or a mech that becomes the new standard and suddenly everyone needs it. We've got MW5 on the horizon and Battletech getting regular updates so mech games are in motion. MWO specifically is the oldest of them and at some point, it's either going to need a facelift or replacement. I don't know how plausible either of those are or how far off either of those are. The MXPX discord remains lively and pleasant though so, for now, I'm not going to worry.
MWO seems in pretty fair health to me, given it's age. I'm always seeing names I've never seen before, always noticing new people in chat asking questions. All the various buckets seem to just about tick over, which is fairly impressive considering the number of them now. Oh and PGI having a brand new much awaited single/co-op Mechwarror game about to drop is, at the very least, hopeful. Nothing lasts forever and MWO will change sooner or later (be that an overhaul, a follow up or the inevitable viscissitudes of a slow decline) and I would imagine which of those things it ends up being will be, at least in part, dependent on the success or failure of MW5. In a perfect world, MW5 is amazing and does very well. Lacking a PVP mode, the new playerbase take to MWO to get their kill on and PGI farm some of their earnings back into either overhauling MWO or making it's replacement with the MW5 engine. But the OP was about the "nearest future", so I will take that to mean the rest of 2019. I would have thought no vast change. Faction Play is about to get a fairly serious update, so whether that impresses, annoys, divides the playerbase or goes basically unnoticed remains to be seen. I would also expect some playerbase shifts around the release of MW5 and thereafter - once again, whether that's losing MWO players to MW5, gaining MW5 players who didn't play MWO or a mix of the two I have no idea.
