MechWarrior 4 Black Knight Expansion

MechWarrior 4 Black Knight Expansion is now available for download, publisher Digital Extremes announced on Monday. This is the final downloadable add-on for MechWarrior 4, which launched in November.

Pirates of the Carriers, another of the game's upcoming additions, allows players to take their Mech to a location from which they can choose from a variety of famous fictional locations.

It also includes the ability to be the human pilot of the three new aircraft, the Schuss gunship, and the Atlas 2x6 M-class mech, which can be used as a turret.

"MechWarrior 4 Black Knight delivers intense and exciting combat that will challenge even the most hardened of MechWarrior players," said Frank Sagnier, producer on the game. "We can't wait to get into the action and check out the new weapons, attacks, and other changes to the MechWarrior 4 universe. What we have here at Digital Extremes is a far cry from the expansion we announced at E3 last year and we can't wait to jump in and explore some new MechWarrior 4 content."

Pirates of the Carriers will let players choose from more than 80 different weapons, which will be capable of launching turrets, gliders, and more on their way to taking out your enemies. There are four types of mech: a transforming type, a frontload tank, a ground transport, and a recon type. You can customize your own mech's look by choosing a color. Once you start playing, you'll want to keep track of its stats, including speed, armor, damage, and mobility. While it's not clear how hard-core you are, a detailed breakdown of how you'll be able to collect and customise MechWarrior 4 mechs and weapons shows that it's a relatively painless endeavor, even in the early stages of development.

We can expect to see plenty of gorgeous new environments on display during the E3 demo, including ice areas, an ice fortress, and an icy environment with ice surrounding it. GameSpot will also be at E3 and bringing you an in-depth look at the game. The E3 demo opens with a high-definition view of the mountainous region, followed by a large forcefield in the center of a volcano. The footage switches to a view of the huge North Korean warring ring, where the three of you can join forces to fight for control of the large area.

While the demo has a nice, organic feel to it, MechWarrior 4's central theme seems to be all about space. The demo showed off a larger battlefield than the one we played at E3, which was a much more tactical level. The space level was dominated by large battleships, with gigantic capital ships emplacements that looked just like regular combat vessels. The area was huge, and we could actually use our flying ability to fly the huge battleships into the terrain. The combat seemed very cool, and we can't wait to see how the final game's battles unfold.

MechWarrior 4's core gameplay was that you'd do all the things that you could do with a typical first-person shooter. There were some other mechanics you could do, like shooting. We used the single-player demo, which we started out in an open area and got a good feel for how the game would play. We got a feel for how the gameplay worked. Our main mission involved blowing up a large building and making sure that it was nothing but a mess. Our AI consisted of computer-controlled teammates and taking out targets and manning rocket launchers. This was a pretty mindless shooting experience, so we took it slow and concentrated on more-risky actions that required us to move quickly and avoid incoming fire. We also had a neat mechanic that helped give our team a chance to get in some kills. We managed to land some mechs in a building with more than one team and took them out. This was another game that felt great.

GS: How did you look at the PC version? How much of a challenge did you have to make?

TE: We wanted to focus more on technical challenges. For the PC version, we were very heavily influenced by the tools available on the PC platform. We have a whole lot of tools that we are using to accomplish our goals. We didn't have the same baseline of what we did with the console versions of the game, so we had to push that to the limit. At the same time, we were given the flexibility of the PC game's player base, so we wanted to add an additional layer of complexity. We also took into account the fact that the developers of the PC versions had to put so much effort into developing for the PC. They had to figure out the way to take advantage of the customisation features that were available.

The keyboard and mouse work great on the PC, but we were also planning to support mouse and keyboard in the console versions of the game.