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Preview BattleTech Kickstarter Update #45: First Look at the Campaign

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Tags: BattleTech; Harebrained Schemes; Jordan Weisman; Mike McCain; Mitch Gitelman

In the first major BattleTech Kickstarter update since August, Harebrained Schemes offer us a long-awaited first look at the game's single-player campaign. There's a screenshot collection and a 25 minute video of one of the campaign missions, which involves the player's mercenary team helping out a group of independent prospectors against a mining corporation. The game has come a long way since the simple skirmish videos we saw earlier this year. Watch the video until the end for a nasty little twist.



The update also includes a brief production report from Mitch Gitelman:

Things are rolling around here! We have the entire singleplayer campaign and mercenary simulation fully assembled and now we’re working through the game chapter-by-chapter, screen-by-screen, feature-by-feature to get everything to a shippable level.

Most mornings, Mike (Game Director) leads playtests/critiques of BATTLETECH in our break room. He holds them in our break room so everyone on the team feels comfortable wandering in and hearing what’s being said. He and Kiva (Lead Designer) determine what they’re going to look at ahead of time and invite the people responsible for that section of the game to play together and collaborate on a plan for improving things. This visibility is key to improvement. When you’re in the thick of making a game, it can be challenging to step back and play it from an audience member’s point of view.

The whole team is methodically working through every part of the game to “up-level” it - missions are getting second and third drafts, designer-created maps are going through full art passes, temporary voice-overs are being replaced with professional actors in missions and cinematics, quiet missions are suddenly filled with dramatic music, and programmer-created interfaces are getting the full art and audio treatment.

It’s a ton of intense work and the whole team meets briefly for announcements and general direction every day before breaking up into small groups for tight communication and progress updates. After that, it’s heads-down for the rest of the day. We try to keep meetings to a minimum and if we have to have one, we do our best to keep it tight and action-oriented.

In addition to all of this, a few members of the team have been diligently progressing on our multiplayer network infrastructure, analyzing data and updating the Double-Secret Multiplayer Beta with important changes. Expect a separate update on that soon.

There’s still a lot of work to do (including tons of balance work) but we can see the next milepost up ahead - the plan is to be feature and content complete by the end of the year, so we can go into full-on bug fixing and polish mode after a much needed break. As Jordan noted in our mid-August update, all indications are that Paradox & HBS will release BATTLETECH in early 2018.

Thanks for sticking with us as we develop our most challenging, complex, and aspirational game to-date. It’s a big one and we truly appreciate all your support.​

Harebrained embarked on a press tour last week, and several sites (PC Gamer, PCGamesN, Rock Paper Shotgun, IGN) have now published their own previews of the BattleTech campaign, including its strategic layer. There have been some misgivings about this game's mechanics during the past few months, but overall it looks to be shaping up into something pretty cool.
 

jungl

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Game needs slightly faster gameplay, more enemies on the screen. 6 instead of 4 controllable mechs upwards to 8 or more in some missions. 4 is too little in these games.
 
Joined
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really like the graphics. Some people are going to whine about the desert map being 'too brown', but they have the wrong opinion and should stick to Japanese manga.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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what is an RPG?
A genealogy of RPGs:

DnD0Eto2Ever2.JPG
 
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Serpent in the Staglands Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
... the use of animations in turn-based games is such a problem. Reduces any sense of momentum while winning and makes losing more unbearable than usual.

Game needs slightly faster gameplay, more enemies on the screen. 6 instead of 4 controllable mechs upwards to 8 or more in some missions. 4 is too little in these games.

Can't help but feel as though these ideas contradict each other.
 
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Crescent Hawk

Cipher
Joined
Jul 10, 2014
Messages
642
I love the way it looks, but somehow everything still fells amateurish and clumsy. Harebrained and their games just dont seem to get the crunching necessary, there is clipping everywhere, weird camera angles, floating shit, janky animations on the mechs.
I dont know, I really want the game to be good, but if they feel this is already good enough to show I dont feel confident for the final game.
 

ArchAngel

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Mar 16, 2015
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Awesome! I hope it has an ironman mode like Xcom does. I don't want to play like plebs and savescum.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Grotesque is trying to say that this game isn't an RPG, so why is it getting newsposts.

My answer to that:

1) Because it's Harebrained Schemes, who made RPGs before this.
2) Because it's BattleTech, a venerated tabletop property.
3) Because it's turn-based tactics, which has always gotten honorary RPG status on this forum.
4) Because it's not getting a lot of Kickstarter updates, so it's not like the front page is being spammed with non-RPG stuff.
 

Nazrim Eldrak

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At the moment I would rate this game as slightly higher than mediocre.
I think Hairbrain...srry I meant Harebrained is doing since Shadow Run a solid work, but still didn´t manage to develope a hit. Maybe next time...
 

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