One of the biggest franchises neglected in the last few years is MechWarrior. The recent success of the Transformers franchise shows that people are still interested in combat between giant robots, and MechWarrior has a dark edge and realism orientation that could be more attractive to a wide array of gamers than the transformation abilities of the Autobots.

And it seems that Piranha Games and Smith and Tinker are working on a new game set to reboot the whole universe and allow players to once again worry about cooling lasers and launching MSLRS.

Jordan Weisman, who is the co-founder of FASA and now Smith and Tinker, and Russ Bullock, the president of Piranha Games, talked to IGN about the upcoming game. It seems that it has been worked on since last October and that it is intended to attract a wider variety of gamers to the universe, mainly by making it more accessible.

MechWarrior will begin in 3015, just at the end of the Third Succession War, with Hanse Davion coming into power. Apparently, the story of the game will be taking place all through the Fourth Succession War.

Hanse Davion comes to power, so it is just, as you said, at the end of the Third, right at the beginning of what will become the Fourth Succession War. The single player campaign will be putting gamers in the mechs of House Davion as it tries to fend off Kurita forces, which assault a planet called Deschler. The player character will not be in charge of a lance of mechs right away and the developers are really trying to put together an experience where each class and weapon have a specific role and place, unlike the previous games where everyone wanted to use an assault class.

There are a lot of interesting ideas thrown around for MechWarrior, from emphasizing the power of a single mech to establishing a system where a character gets better if they specialize in a particular mech, but at the moment, MechWarrior does not have a publisher and that’s the main priority in the development process.