MechWarrior 3

aka: MW3
Moby ID: 284
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/23 4:28 PM )

Description official descriptions

The Inner Sphere is launching a counterattack on the Clans, and the Smoke Jaguars is the first target! Operation Democles will attack the planet Tranquil. As Connor Sinclair, you're leading the Democles Commando team lance, part of the Eridani Light Horse, on the attack. The op went terribly wrong when one of the two drop ships was hit during descent, and your lancemates have been scattered to the four winds in the frenzied drop. You must attack through Clan territory, meet up with your lancemates, remove any resistance in your path, and try to find a way off the planet, while also accomplishing what you came to do: destroy the Smoke Jaguars!

MechWarrior 3 features detailed mechs (they limp when legs are hit, and destroyed limbs spark and trail wreckage) with slow and ponderous movements, as 100 ton mechs should. Firepower and precise application are the key in winning your engagements. Plenty of mechs are available. You start in a 55-ton Bushwhacker and work you way up to the really heavy stuff in a 20-mission campaign. Full multiplayer is supported with Internet play at Microsoft Zone. Your MFB has limited capacity so you'll need to decide what supplies to keep or dump for your salvage. You'll need to track ammo, weapons, equipment (like heatsinks), and the mechs. Keep the MFB safe or you'll have even less room! Redesign mechs to utilize newly captured weapons or adapt to the changing ammo situation.

Spellings

  • 机甲战士3 - Simplified Chinese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Videos

See any errors or missing info for this game?

You can submit a correction, contribute trivia, add to a game group, add a related site or alternate title.

Credits (Windows version)

163 People (131 developers, 32 thanks) · View all

Assistant Producer
Game Design
Executive Producer
Producer
Story Line
Script Writing
Additional Script Writing
Project Management
Art Director
Design Lead
Software
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 31 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 41 ratings with 10 reviews)

One of those games that's so good, who cares what its flaws are?

The Good
There are loads of games that drop you into the cockpit of giant warrior robots. The Mechwarrior series does it better than anyone else, and Mechwarrior 3 is arguably the best of the bunch.

Mechwarrior 3 definitely makes stomping around in a massive walking war machine a satisfying experience. This becomes apparent the moment the first campaign mission begins, when you find yourself standing in the water just offshore of a quaint-looking fishing village, which you may proceed to simply crash through, indiscriminately wading through boats and trampling huts as you pass.

That's what giant robots do, see? The primary goal here is to stomp/shoot things and blow stuff up. Targets come in all shapes and sizes, from stationary weapons turrets to tanks to other mechs. Tanks explode and buildings crumble, and the individual limbs of mechs become crippled or get blown off entirely. You can eliminate the threat of an enemy mech's weapons by severing the arms they're attached to, put them on the ground for good by taking off a leg, or just blow their heads off.

This all looks superb in action. The game makes Mechwarrior 2 look shameful, and is somehow graphically superior in many ways to Mechwarrior 4. Everything from the most massive mech to the tiny people scampering around down on the ground below (the latter of which may also be stomped) are well detailed and animated fluidly. Mechs are fully articulated, with legs, arms and torsos that move independently and realistically. Damaged mechs limp around, and after being knocked over by excessive shell impacts, laboriously pick themselves back up off the ground.

Taking care of business is all easy enough, despite the multitude of controls necessary to operate a mech. The basic movement functions alone are a handful: it requires not one (walking speed and direction), not two (torso pitch and yaw) but three (arm and weapon aiming) seperate sets of controls. Toss in weapons management and targetting systems and issuing orders to your AI team members ("lancemates") and suddenly you've got a lot to deal with in the middle of furball. Luckily the interfaces and HUD are streamlined and easy to read at a glance, and the controls can be remapped to your liking. A combination of keyboard/mouse/joystick is easier to manage than it might sound.

You'll need all of the controls available to react and adjust to changing situations. You can crouch and power down your mech to avoid detection by the enemy. When you do become engaged it often begins as a standoff affair with opponents launching volleys of missiles at one another, then switching to long range lasers or autocannons on approach, eventually utilizing short-range weaponry like machine guns and flamethrowers when things get up close and personal. Weapons can be linked together in groups and easily relinked on the fly to maximize your ammo and energy usage efficiency at different ranges. Do you use your ballistic weapons, which are running dry, or your energy weapons, even though the extra heat they're generating is threatening to overheat your mech? Just one alpha strike (a hotkey that fires all weapons simultaneously) would probably take out that guy's leg, but you'll overheat and shutdown for sure, and you're out of coolant...you risk damaging your mech if you manually override the automatic shutdown, but you can't usually afford to shutdown and leave yourself deaf, dumb and blind for too many tense seconds when you're surrounded. Maybe you ought to get your lancemates back here...These constantly evolving combat dynamics are what make Mechwarrior such an engrossing game.

There's a tutorial mode that efficiently lowers the learning curve. "Instant Action" is for those who just want to jump right into the mix, and the campaign mode starts you on a series of missions in a mediocre machine before you gradually gain access to better mechs, more weapons and equipment and your lancemates. A pretty stable multiplayer mode is also included, which is exactly the same as single-player except for the human opponents, and includes options that allow for distinctly different styles of head-to-head or team matches.

But before you set off on a rampage, you can stop by the "mech lab" and customize the configuration of your vehicle, as well as your lancemates'. There are several models of mechs ranging from hulking 100-ton behemoths to smaller, faster ones weighing in at "only" around 30-40 tons. After choosing a chassis, you've got a whopping selection of options to choose from in a variety of categories including, but not limited to engines, armor, "jump jets" (these things can fly--briefly), paint scheme--and weapons, weapons and more weapons. Mechs can be tailored to suit your preferred playing style, while a single decision made in the lab can sometimes unexpectedly get you out a tight spot or come back to haunt you at the worst possible moment (I knew I should've swapped that laser for extra AC ammo...). There's so much to do, you can easily spend as much time tweaking your mech to perfection as you do piloting it. Unfortunately, this is only partially due to there being so much room for experimentation...

The Bad
...because the pre-game interface is absolutely wretched. The arrangement of every menu is inconsistant with every other one and each is unintuitive in its own unique way. It all has an unpolished feel to it. The mech lab is a spectacular mess. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of components to choose from, but the game provides no data or descriptions at all. Newcomers to the Mechwarrior series are forced to discover the differences between a "(L) ER Laser" and a "(M) Laser (CLAN)" basically through trial and error. Moving many components off of or onto a mech is a painstaking, one-at-a-time process often involving scrolling up and down huge, unorganized parts lists. The same goes for the seperate "salvage" menu, where you must sort through the equipment found in the last mission and the parts you've got in stock--you can't just keep it all, as your stash of loot is limited by a weight cap. This is needlessly complicated by the fact that, while the mech lab lists each part's weight, the salvage yard does not. The list of frustrations here goes on and on. One last minor annoyance regarding the customization system is that, despite the outstanding mech models, each mech has only the one model, and that's it: the modifications made in the lab never alter a mech's appearance in-game. Say you've selected a mech that features a large missile launcher pod attached above one shoulder. That's simply what it looks like, regardless of whether you've equipped it with four launchers or none.

More troubles show up down the road. The game mechanics are hamstrung by holes in the AI that allow you to snipe away at enemies from long range until they're dead, without soliciting any reaction whatsoever. When you do get into a close-combat situation, the smallest mech can quickly incapacitate any larger mech by simply dashing up and launching a full salvo to blow off either of the bigger guy's legs. These issues don't severely impact battles with multiple targets, but in one-on-one or pre-emptive situations any sort of actual strategy goes down the pipes.

Physics can get quirky too, due sometimes to programming missteps and other times to questionable game design choices. There are occasional glitches that can bring gameplay to a grinding halt. Missile strikes, for example, leave craters in the ground. These craters are relatively tiny and small enough to be easily stepped in and out of, but once in a while they'll create some inexplicable sort of gravitational phenomenon that keeps "sucking" you back into the center of the hole even if you've made it several yards out. The only solutions are to either restart the mission or keep yanking the throttle back and forth until you've finally gained enough momentum to "break orbit" and step free of the crater. Bugs like these are infrequent enough to forgive, but there are more fundamental curiosities presented by the engine that seem to have been intentional. You can jack the throttle to maximum, get a running start and charge headlong into a building, cliff face, or another mech. That's fine. Oddly enough, this sort of thing doesn't incur the equal and opposite reaction you might expect, and off you go without a scratch. But I suppose in a world where hulking 75-ton machines can rocket up into the sky at a moment's notice and fly over a mountain, why not?

Did I say "mountain"? I probably meant "hill". There's only one planet in the game, and this planet doesn't sport much of a variety in the terrain department. It doesn't look bad, it just looks a lot alike, all the time. Sure, there are beaches, plateaus, winding cliff paths, rivers, caves and hills, but for the most part the landscape is rather bleak and brown and void of all vegetation save for a few dead trees. The individual mission boundaries are small enough and the action comes often enough that you won't have time to worry too much about it, though, and you won't encounter the endless expanses of barren, featureless desert that are prevalent in, say, the very similar Earthsiege series.

The lack of variety in the terrain is about on par with the uninspired mission design. Hearing your onboard computer warn "mech powerup detected" as you come around a corner is about as much of a surprise as you'll ever get. The campaign mode is a string of "go here, kill this, then go here and kill this" or "kill this before it kills this" sort of excercises. The missions are strictly linear, one after another, and quickly become repetitive. Missions requiring the destruction of buildings are particularly dreary as they demand long pauses in the action. In this case the only efficient way of completing one goal before proceeding to the next is simply standing motionless and squeezing the trigger until the building finally crumbles (but not firing too quickly, mind you, lest your mech overheat). The campaign ends rather quickly, without ever having involved any elements of character identity or cohesive plot whatsoever, unlike the first PC title in the Mechwarrior series.

The Bottom Line
With its deep level of control and customization, Mechwarrior 3 definitely leans heavily in the direction of a serious simulation, and might not be for some more casual gamers.

With a rough front end, some glaring gameplay defects and a lackluster single-player campaign that could have easily been a lot more than what it is, this is a game that never lived up to its full potential. Nevertheless, thanks to some excellent graphics, the depth of the mech customization feature and a unique, well-balanced combat system with the perfect mix of simulation and FPS action elements, Mechwarrior 3 is a solid, immersive game that reigns supreme over the, uh, giant robot genre.

Windows · by Gerauchertes (8) · 2003

I said to myself, "I think I'm about to be blown away..." - and I was...

The Good
Well, I have to thank ATI for getting me into Battletech. My ATI video card came with an ATI version of MechWarrior 2, and I loved it so much I got the BattlePack version of MW2, MechCommander, and then I got MW3 as soon as it came out.

This is easily the best Mech game I've ever seen, and it has some of the best graphics of any game I know of. The game runs smooth as silk, and the sound effects are really impressive. The voice acting is good, the choices of Mechs are great, and the multiplayer rules. It can use the Joystick/Mouse combination of controls that MW2 had for legs/torso twist, which I love. You can also customize the controls.

When your Mech is hit by bullets, it will pitch over, and can actually fall over if the conditions are right. This is a real pain, but it adds to the realism. Also, if your leg is damaged, it will limp. :) The MFBs (Mobile Field Bases, which let you rearm & repair) are really nice. I wish MW2 had had them!

The Bad
Even though the voice acting is good, the storyline is hard to follow, typical of the other MW games I've played. Basically, I end up finally getting the story after playing it through about 3 or 4 times.

It would have been nice to be able to play on the Clan side. But I guess that would have doubled the price, huh? :)

And even though the graphics and sound are great, I wish the "results" of the impact of the projecticles would be more realistic. I'm waiting for a Mech game that shows bullet holes in the Mech! Also, when missiles hit, they make a big ol' crater in the ground. Now that's neat, but the craters are like perfect circles... it seems like they shouldn't look so "sculpted".

Even though patches have tried to rebalance the effects of the weapons, I still think bullets knock Mech's down too easily.

Also, the single-player is too easy to win. They need to have more enemy Mechs coming at you!

The Bottom Line
You definitely should play MW3 if you are interested in Mech games. It's awesome!

Windows · by Raphael (1245) · 1999

Finally: A reason to complain about realism

The Good
Compared to both its prequels and sequels, MW3 is probably the most physically realistic MechWarrior game. Autocannons create recoil; missiles blind you in their backwash; you can be knocked over by weapon impacts, and it feels like you're actually off balance (as opposed to the other 'Mech games, in which you might fall after a certain quantity of damage is dealt to you in a short length of time, but you have no real warning). The designers of this game did a remarkable job with the physics and graphics, to say the very least.

The missions were also set up brilliantly. Unlike all other MechWarrior and MechCommander titles, there is no form of money in MW3; you have to scrap everything you use. And you can't hold everything you come across, so you will have to decide what you need and what you don't.

The environment effects are far more diverse than what you'll find in any other MW title as well. Buildings don't just explode; they crumble. Trees burn, water slows you down more as you get in deeper, and 'Mechs will explode if overheated beyond a certain point. A whole lot of attention was placed in making this 'Mech game the most realistic, and it seems like the sort of idea that would pay off...

The Bad
...except that it didn't.

There is a reason why MW4 refused to adhere to the realism of MW3: It didn't help the gameplay. The first major flaw involves the Autocannons, which, as I described earlier, have recoil. The first thing you're going to say when you pop off a few shots with this weapon is 'cool!', but don't get too excited: The recoil, especially if the weapon is mounted on an arm, is sufficient to throw the torso into a spin in the middle of firing the three-round burst, thus throwing off your otherwise brilliant shot.

While this looks cool at first, in gameplay it's frustrating. Unless you mount two autocannons, one on each arm, the recoil effect makes your heaviest starting weapon almost pointless. Do I prefer it over the unremarkable, beam-style autocannon shot in MW4? Probably, but just barely, and MW4 doesn't force me into odd autocannon configurations just so that I can land a shot.

The crumbling buildings are pretty cool, but there's a pretty serious issue which stems from the AI behavior. Your allies follow behind you, or can be directed to Nav points. But they don't have very good sense, and there are lots of dangerous things that shouldn't be stepped on or bumped into - mines, collapsible bridges, etc. The AI is inexplicably attracted to these dangerous things and getting them to avoid hazards is nearly impossible. In some missions, I feel less like a lance commander and more like a babysitter. Especially since there are only three allied pilots in the game, and if one dies, well, that's it, you can't have a full lance.

The biggest, boldest reason why realism doesn't pay off involves 'Mech movement. MW4 ended up being superior simply because it was fun to pilot a 'Mech; the torso could rotate with the mouse in order to strafe targets. All 'Mechs had a rotating torso. Guess what? Not here. The torso is fixed, which means that you have to snipe your opponents or make 'bombing runs'. All it really does is prevent you from moving while you fire, which means you just move from place to place, stopping to kill something, then continuing along.

This - and the terrain for most of the game, which is wide open and flat - simply encourages you to load up with the longest-ranged weapons possible. Sitting in one place and firing can be accomplished from 800 meters or 50 meters just as easily; the difference is that, at 800 meters, you're a lot less likely to be hit in return. And the enemy rarely has the sense to rush you, preferring to engage the same way you do, by stopping and firing.

Around the last few missions, you'll find yourself facing 'Mechs which have similarly long-ranged loadouts. Though the expansion would fix this using a 'light-amplification' feature, some of these missions take place at night, and the game designers decided that this means a 'fog of war' has to be placed at roughly 500 meters. So you can lock onto an enemy, and even see your target reticle turn red when it passes over the enemy, but you can't see the enemy unloading its ordinance in your face. It's mildly frustrating, to say the least.

The Bottom Line
Every now and again I return to this game, play through a few missions, and stop at a reasonable point to continue playing MechWarrior 4. This game could've been brilliant, but it's also a lesson in how realism doesn't necessarily improve gameplay.

Windows · by Jackson Schwipp (18) · 2010

[ View all 10 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Need Help configuring... Bob Bob Jul 16, 2013

Trivia

German version

The German version of the game has been censored: Foot soldiers disappear as soon as one aims at them or one is in an position to smash them with the mechs' legs.

Graphics

This game has its own unique style and is, in some places, technically superior to MechWarrior 4: Vengeance. For instance, MechWarrior 3 features landscape mesh transform when you hit the terrain with a weapon. This means that you don't just leave a char mark, the terrain actually changes when you strike. MW4 leaves a decal and that's it. The decal then fades or disappears suddenly after a period of time. In MechWarrior 3, if you leave a crater, it's there until you leave the map.

OEM release

MechWarrior 3 was the bundled software that came with the second production run of the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro 1.0 joystick. The first release was bundled with Urban Assault.

Rights and development

Activision was unable to develop a sequel to MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat after the FASA Corporation, the creators and then-owners of the BattleTech universe, refused to renew the licensing contract after the delays and troubled development of the game, despite its subsequent success. However, this did not prevent Activision from creating and patching the two expansion packs, Ghost Bear's Legacy and Mercenaries.

Initially, development on MechWarrior 3 was influenced by another 3D BattleTech game from the mid-1990s, created by the Virtual World Entertainment Group, which featured eight mutually connected cabinets called "Tesla pods" where players would fight in 'Mechs against each other. FASA acquired this technology to be used in a full-blown video game that was to become MechWarrior 3, under the publishing of MicroProse. For this reason, the FASA Interactive Technologies (FIT) division was formed to develop it. The process was delayed, however, due to struggles with the engine incompatibilities with concurrent hardware.

In 1996, Spectrum Holobyte, MicroProse's parent company since 1993, lays off much of the MicroProse staff and renames itself into MicroProse, and is purchased by Hasbro Interactive in 1998. FASA Interactive merged with Virtual World Entertainment Group, but their version of MechWarrior 3 is eventually put on hold, as Zipper Interactive was called to finish the game. They used a combination of the already developed assets and their own engine, most likely from the 1999 game Recoil.

Meanwhile, Microsoft bought the Virtual World Entertainment Group, but only kept FASA Interactive, and by transition, they now had the rights to the BattleTech license and MechWarrior games, hence the Microsoft logo's appearance in the MechWarrior 3 back cover art and intro.

The original MechWarrior 3 project would be the base of FASA Studio's MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, released a year and a half after Zipper Interactive's finished MechWarrior 3.

Information also contributed by Zaghadka.

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

MechWarrior
Released 1989 on DOS, 1992 on Sharp X68000, PC-98
MechWarrior 4: Vengeance
Released 2000 on Windows
MechWarrior 4: Black Knight
Released 2001 on Windows
MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries
Released 2002 on Windows
MechWarrior
Released 1993 on SNES
Kōshien 3
Released 1994 on SNES
Robothorium
Released 2018 on Windows, Linux, Macintosh
Mech Mechanic Simulator
Released 2021 on Windows, 2022 on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch...
MechAssault
Released 2002 on Xbox

Related Sites +

  • Mech 3 Community Project
    A nice and big Community Website with a good Download-Section (official patches/fanpatches), a good program (gameRanger.com) for playing Mechwarrior 3 online and a well sorted Forum with a very good support.
  • www.mechwarrior3.org FORUM
    The forum-site for Mechwarrior3.org. Very good support regarding technical problems.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 284
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Raphael.

Additional contributors: Rebound Boy, Kasey Chang, Unicorn Lynx, BostonGeorge, Patrick Bregger, Plok.

Game added September 20, 1999. Last modified March 6, 2024.