MechWarrior 5: Clans is a great throwback with bad acting
I had one gateway to videogames: Wing Commander. The Wing Commander series, with its committed military sci-fi setting, cinematic presentation, and chunky combat, made an impression that has never really gone away. As the industry moved away from the PC and its expensive, dorky joysticks, Wing Commander was left behind too, and its legacy is remembered only by true nerds and the occasional video essay.
Wing Commander hit like an atom bomb, and the series had its share of pretenders: high-concept sci-fi games that wrapped themselves in the skin of a realistic military sim. Star Wars games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter skipped the Luke Skywalker fantasy and embraced the franchise’s best character, Wedge Antilles, casting the player not as a galaxy-saving wizard, but as a normal soldier behind the cockpit of a fragile starfighter. MechWarrior 2 was another claimant to Wing Commander’s throne, and it took up a lot of space in my tiny 10-year-old brain.
MechWarrior 2 is more X-Wing than Wing Commander: it has a story, but it’s not the focus. Instead, it does its best to simulate what piloting a 90-ton walking tank would be like. The rhythmic boom of heavy mech footsteps heard from inside the cockpit is burned into my brain, and the chunky, untextured polygon graphics, state-of-the-art at the time, do a great job of selling the fantasy of these nuclear-powered, building-sized death machines—especially when you blast big chunks off your enemies, disabling weapons and movement through laser amputation.
Where Wing Commander failed to adapt to the 2000s, MechWarrior survived. MechWarrior 3 was a frequent graphics card pack-in, though it had the sterile, Windows XP presentation of a lot of Microsoft-owned games at the time. MechWarrior 4 tried to bring the series back to its narrative roots and add some Xbox-era smoothness to the action, but it lacked impact. The series limped along, like a Jenner with a busted leg actuator, under the stewardship of B.C.-based Piranha Games, who spent most of the last decade honing their skills with MechWarrior Online, a team-based PVP shooter for the hardest of hardcore ‘mech fans. My allergy to the phrase “hardcore pvp shooter” and the lack of narrative for MechWarrior Online kept me at a distance, but in 2019 Piranha quietly released MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, a new single-player, story-driven MechWarrior game in the tradition of the series (both MechWarrior 2 and 4 had stand-alone “Mercenaries” expansions.) Was this the coming of a new age of series, military sci-fi simulators?
Well, no. But its sequel, MechWarrior 5: Clans, just might be.
I’ve only played the first few missions of Clans (thanks, GamePass) but so far it’s a shockingly ambitious, confident experience. Piranha’s experience in the gameplay department is undeniable: the mechs are super fun to control, with the fluidity you expect from a modern shooter and the chunkiness the machines deserve. There is a very surprising focus on the story, and while I have some issues with the storytelling, the fact it’s there at all is wonderful. The story of the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere has been told many times—you could think of this as a reboot of MechWarrior 2 if you really want to—but IGN’s review hints at some big ethical questions and grey morals that the earlier games didn’t touch on. It looks good too, though my trusty Series S struggles to keep its FPS high; I look forward to playing it for real on my PS5 one day.
The budget starts to show in the storytelling, particularly the voice acting. It’s clear costs were cut here. The script is serviceable, there’s a few too many in-universe slang terms for my taste, but the delivery is poor. I’m sure the sheer volume of lines required a very fast recording schedule, but Clans has a severe case of Acting Class Acting that is like nails on a chalkboard for me.
I’ll try to explain, but be warned I’ve been told this is a Pandora’s Box and, once you’re aware of it, you’ll start to hear it everywhere. Young actors are often taught to do every take a little differently: keep the emotion the same, but add a little variety to every attempt. An easy way to do this, especially if you’re pumping out hundreds of lines in a day full of in-universe slang and military jargon, is to change the word you’re emphasizing. So if your line is “He went through that door” you can say it like:
“He went through the door.”
“He went through the door.”
“He went through the door.”
Boom, three variations, three easy takes, one happy acting teacher. The problem is, only one of these makes sense in context. Are there multiple people you could be talking about? Then the first take makes sense. Are you trying to emphasize how he went through the door? Use the second one. Were there multiple possible exits? #3. But it doesn’t make sense to use all three. It’s interesting but it’s not accurate. Clans is full of this trick and it’s due to a few factors.
One is inexperienced actors. This is the easiest and often-deployed criticism. “Bad acting” doesn’t really mean anything, and most paid actors aren’t bad, but they can be unprepared. Actors are like Batman: capable improvisers in a pitch but most effective when given time to prepare. If you have time to study your script, it’s clear who is going through the door, how, and why. But if you’re a non-union actor getting paid very little money to spend 6 hours a day in a booth for 3 days and you’re given a 300 pages videogame script full of words you don’t understand, you probably won’t spend all your free time between your other gigs, classes, and your joe job to do your script work.
Another factor is inexperienced or rushed voice direction in the booth. I suspect the recording schedule for Clans was very tight, so the voice director (if they even had a voice director) just doesn’t have time to give notes and 5 or 6 takes of every line. Stuff gets missed. An example line from early in the game: A friendly Mech pilot says, “Aff Cobalt.” How would you read that cold? “Aff” isn’t a real word and “cobalt” is a colour! What the fuck am I saying? Here’s the vital context for this line: “aff” is in-universe slang for “affirmative” and “Cobalt” is the callsign for the player’s unit. So what the line actually is, and what this actor, had they the time to prepare, would have written on their script, is: “Yes, NAME.” Either they weren’t given a pretty vital note or, for whatever reason, the director went with a take where the actor sounds like they don’t know what they’re saying—because they don’t. (Another really bad example of this is the actor playing the leader of all the clans mispronouncing his own title! Why didn’t anyone say anything to him?)
The third factor is overall direction. Almost every character I’ve encountered is a soldier, but very few of them sound like soldiers. This is a relatively recent cultural trend: emotionally-driven storytelling. Marvel gets a lot of the heat for this but I blame Christopher Nolan for it. Once Nolan started writing his own scripts, his plots got so complicated the dialogue, by necessity, completely flattened out. Nolan’s an efficient filmmaker and his characters speak in almost pure exposition: they’re either explaining the plot, or their emotional state. But actors hate being exposition machines. They’re soft, emphatic, emotional sponges—that’s the job! Even the best actors in the world have trouble saying these kinds of lines and, no disrespect to the cast of Clans, but they’re not Maggie Gyllenhaal and Matthew McConaughey!
So what we get is a cast of twenty-something aspiring actors handed a giant nightmare tome of a videogame script loaded with landmine words like “Freebirth” and “Batchall”, playing characters who don’t use contractions, who are, at the very least, highly-trained elite military pilots. And they sound like actors. No one in this game sounds like their job. Next time you’re on an airplane, listen to how your pilot says, “Flight attendants secure cabin for arrival.” Flat. Emotionless. Professional. Replace that with, “Target destroyed.” The intonation is the same, because the professional is simply giving a verbal update. But in Clans, and in a lot of media, you get, “Target DESTROYED!! WOO!!!” because the actor is trying to force personality and variety into every take, and isn’t given the direction to bring it down a notch.
The line in Clans that triggered this essay was something like, “The cowards are retreating.” Delivered by the leader of your Clan—basically a General and a Governor in one—this line gives us a lot of context with only one word: coward. A professional pilot would simply say, “Hostile contacts retreating,” or something, but the addition of “cowards” tell us a lot about this character: they’re overconfident and disdainful of their enemy. But our poor actor, desperate for direction, growls out “The COWARDS are RETREATING.” She doesn’t sound like a hardened Battlemech pilot who has risen through the ranks to become the leader of her people, she sounds like an actor in a recording booth in Vancouver who doesn’t have any idea what she’s saying and getting nothing but a thumbs up from the other side of the glass.
Next time a line makes you cringe, dig into why a bit more beyond, “bad acting.” It’s a whole ecosystem of time, budget, and direction that is often out of the control of the person reading a line off a page.