Can't wait for this, however It's going to suck not having my trusty Madcat to pilot anymore, since the timeline is set before that.

They might change it so they show up earlier, you could also be piloting the first madcat prototype, it could even be riddled with bugs that you have to work around. That could be rather fun really

This game is almost certainly going to have DLC or possibly an expansion or two, and it's quite possible that one of these could advance the timeline a bit or feature a lost Clan star or something.

mechassault FTW!
god, I'm terrible at trolling.

There is a rumor that the download link won't be coming until mid-August, but the source is a Wiki article, and you know how trustworthy those are:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/MechWarrior_4

The MekTek packs are great - I hope those would be integrated into the free release...

Can't wait to get My hands on MadCat Mk III XD

Well it looks like the free mechwarrior 4 might finally be coming out "soon".
[url=]http://www.mektek.net/index.php?ind=news&op=news_show_single&ide=1143[/url]

yeah, it seems Smith and Tinker and Microsoft finally got on the same page.
While were waiting, for anyone that has Crysis there is Living Legends. Its a fully fleshed out moddable Mechwarrior game in the Crysis Engine. Arguably the best looking Mech game ever conceived to date.
MekTek... man, they are amazing group of people....
Dare I say the Community hit "Alpha Strike" and won the battle against Microsoft? ^_^

Holy crap, I had almost given up on this ever happening. Still no date or anything though, just another announcement saying it will happen... which is basically all they said last summer... aw man, did I fall for this again!?

Is living legends any good? It was the main reason i bought crysis but haven't downloaded it yet.

Without a scale, "soon" is a pretty useless term. From a small animal perspective, soon could be a day, from a human perspective it could be a week, from a geological perspective if could be decades.
HOPEFULLY they're working on human terms but I assumed that when they announced it last year...

The release was delayed due to legal considerations with Microsoft. Now that that is out of the way it's reasonable to assume the remaining issues will be of a purely technical nature--QA testing, maybe some additional server infrastructure, possibly an update to the MTX client to handle the new game, ensuring the MekPaks are compatible, etc.
Just hope they aren't running on Valve Time. ;)