MechWarrior 5

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is set in the BattleTech universe. The game starts in 3015 during the final decade of the Third Succession War, casting the player as a rookie mercenary MechWarrior rising from the ashes of a demolished mercenary unit. They are able to accept contracts from the various factions available in this time period. The campaign goes all the way up to 3049, just before the Clan Invasion.

Following the 2002 release of MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, FASA Studio had been developing Mechwarrior 5. However, it was cancelled in March 2003, due to "not advancing the genre enough to meet and exceed our customer's expectations."

Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries was officially revealed in an early alpha stage during Piranha Games' annual MechCon show in December 2016, where Russ Bullock, the CEO of Piranha Games did a live demonstration showcasing the game with a hangar, a Shadowhawk mech, and combat against an AI-piloted Raven mech. The game was to be developed in Unreal Engine 4, thereby departing from Mechwarrior Online's use of CryEngine, but still using existing assets from Mechwarrior: Online, such as the mech models. The game was underway in preproduction for a while with a teaser at the following MechCon in December 2017 that showcased the dropship hangar, destructible buildings, VTOLs as enemies, and the main story premise of the player protagonist taking on the mantle of presiding over their parents' mercenary company. In 2018, Piranha Games marketed the game with an emphasis on its procedurally generated missions based on different biomes.

At launch, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries received "mixed or average reviews" according to review aggregator Metacritic. Its initial sales on the Epic Games Store generated "hundreds of thousands" of copies sold and the Steam, GOG, and Xbox launch in May 2021 saw the product perform 'above expectations' by selling around 160.000 units with 81% of those units coming from Steam. According to the publisher EnadGlobal7, the PlayStation launch in October underperformed financially. As of July 2023, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries sat at 83% positive reviews on Steam out of 7294 total reviews, a rating Valve classifies as "very positive". As per October 2024, the game sold two million units.