Re-Announcing: Living Legends 2 Standalone news

Greetings MechWarriors! As you can probably tell from the title, we have a huge announcement to make.

We’ve decided to abandon the MechWarrior 5 mod and publish Living Legends 2 independently under Microsoft’s Game Content Usage Rules! Other games published under the same framework include Wolves, a spiritual successor to MechAssault, and the Halo fan game Installation 01.

The journey to independence has been full of unexpected twists - more than we can possibly convey here, so we’ll leave the full story for a future historian. However, in the interest of transparency and avoiding controversy, we felt the need to provide some context. The main factor in the decision was our lack of access to MechWarrior 5’s source code. The timely early release of some new game development technology was also a large influence, but we’ll get into that more in a future article.

Those of you who were lucky enough to get your hands on the playable pre-alpha build - while it worked - may have noted that the ‘Mech behavior was unchanged from MechWarrior 5. This is one of many areas where we are unable to make changes to the underlying code. After initial playtesting, it quickly became clear that our design goals would require us to rebuild the core game systems from scratch. Lack of source access also means we are restricted to working in Blueprints, a node-based scripting language which allows developers to quickly iterate game systems. Blueprints are worse in terms of performance overhead compared to C++ code, which was sure to become an issue as the project scaled up.

Our original plan was to update the existing mod version with new vehicles and maps as they’re finished, while the code team worked on an ambitious total conversion. Dropping new content into the MW5 mod required very little effort, and it would give the fans something to play while we hunkered down for a long period of hard work with little to show. However, our plans changed yet again when a major update completely broke the mod. Considering the amount of work required to restore it, we made the difficult decision to abandon support for the mod and focus on building our standalone codebase.

Now that we have some context laid out, you’re probably dying to know what independence means for the future of this project! The decision came with three major implications, none of which affect the scope or nature of our designs. Firstly, MechWarrior 5 will not be a requirement moving forward. Secondly, we’ve shortened the title to simply “Living Legends 2” in compliance with the GCUR, as using the name MechWarrior may give the impression of an officially licensed product. Lastly, we have an unambiguous framework for publishing LL2 and eventually accepting donations to support development.

We’re still hard at work building the foundations of a whole new game, and we’re grateful for all the patience and interest you’ve shown despite the relative quiet since our initial announcement. Keep your eyes peeled for more news soon, and stay legendary!

Be sure to follow us on our new IndieDB page for further news.