Why do mech games rarely let you leave the cockpit? Brigador Killers devs joke that the feature ‘added five years of development time’

I love a mech game, but I especially love when a mech game lets you get out of the cockpit and just run around. It makes things feel so much less gamey, and it more fully sells the scale and power of a mech to contrast it with the perspective of a puny little human. Few games ever do it, though.

It’s an obviously hard thing to do: People and mechs are vastly different sizes, you need to program more and deeper systems of interaction, and how do you even balance such a wide gulf in durability and firepower?

Titanfall, the early access Psycho Patrol R, and the upcoming Brigador Killers are the only games I’ve played that boast this feature. Halo arguably comes close with its vehicles, but I’m gonna say Mister Chief gets to sit this one out⁠—”Mech” means legs, baby. Apologies to all the car centaurs people made in Armored Core 6.

When I recently spoke to brothers Hugh and Jack Monahan, Brigador Killers’ lead designer and artist respectively, I wanted to ask about this feature so dear to my heart, as well as Brigador Killers’ long lead time⁠—it’s been a decade since the cult classic original game first launched. Turns out the two topics are closely related.

How hard could it be?

“We joke that the seemingly innocuous question of ‘What if you could get out of the mech?’ added five years of development time,” said Hugh. Superficially, Brigador Killers strongly resembles the first game, with similar pre-rendered environments and an isometric perspective, but functionally it’s like comparing an FPS and a first-person immersive sim⁠—the shared perspective belies a huge step up in complexity.

“You can talk to characters in this game, you can do a lot more,” said Jack. “It took years to get down to adding the mechanics involved with running around as a human rather than driving only vehicles in Brigador, which is orders simpler. We put all that in⁠—in part⁠—so that the inhabitation of a character on the ground, and being able to talk to people, helps [players] who are more driven by story.”

Jack also argued that adding on-foot gameplay is helping overcome genre misconceptions that players have had about Brigador, like assuming it’s an RTS due to the art style and perspective. “It’s been worth several years of development on Killers,” said Jack, “Because you don’t have to explain that you’re the little guy running around. If there’s a little guy and he’s in the center of the screen, everyone knows that’s your little guy.” But changing some of these expectations had knock-on effects elsewhere.

“I shoot a guy in a mech, it’s reasonable to not be able to pick up a gun off the ground, [but] completely unacceptable at an infantry level,” said Hugh. “Now we need to be able to pick up and drop guns, now we need an inventory⁠—why don’t I have a backpack to put the stuff in? Then I want to be able to drive a car. But a car should be able to fit into a flatbed.

“I see this payphone, can I interact with the pay phone? Or there’s a guy walking next to me on the street, I want to talk to that guy. You start running into more and more of the expectation of interaction with the world [that’s] completely different as a person on foot.”

It sounds like the brothers found all that extra work to have been worth it, though. Hugh was particularly happy with how it met some of their fans’ desire to spend more time in Brigador’s world without blowing it up⁠—or at least before blowing it up.

“We just want to have cool scenes where you can walk around and get more of a picture of what it might be like to be in this place,” said Hugh, “Because that fantasy is a big part of the enjoyment of interacting with games.”

They’ve also got a lot more help this time around. “Brigador was built by four people⁠—two coders, and then Hugh and I,” said Jack. “I did all the art, he did all the design, and that was going to kill us. We have steadily expanded out a team on the early id Software model, which was almost everyone that works on the game originally came to it as a fan, as a modder.

“They built so many cool maps, or did so many cool edits, now they’re punished for it for eternity: By having to build more of it.”

You can wishlist Brigador Killers and check out its demo for yourself on Steam⁠—it recently received a substantial update with added story content, quality of life improvements, and weapon descriptions. There’s also the original game to catch up on, if you haven’t already.