KickStarter BATTLETECH - turn-based mech combat from Harebrained Schemes

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I almost posted that picture on Avellone interview thread when someone asked about B-tech.

 

[Jimmious]

Btw I just downloaded a 791 MB patch

*Edit: It's 1.0.2:

Release 1.0.2 Notes, 5/4/2018

• Fixes to video player codec behavior to resolve .dll access violations that were causing consistent video player crashes for a small set of users.
  
  
• Memory management improvements.
  
  
• Fixing issues with the Valhalla Shadow Hawk variant failing to load in missions when selected.

 

[Lord Andre]

I usually try to take the retarded sjw shit in stride and make it funny in my head to maintain sanity.

For example, I've given pet names to my crew mates to help the diversity go down easier. I call them: NiggerJim, Sucky Sucky, Jackie Chan and Doctor Oxymoron.

Also, I'm pretending that I'm helping to put Princess Bernie Sanders on the throne because I'm secretly a Taurian spy with the mission to destroy the Directorate and weaken the whole region with communism.

 

[Cael]

Princess Bernie Sanders

Fuck you, asshole! Now I have an image in my mind I will never be able to erase.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Btw I just downloaded a 791 MB patch

*Edit: It's 1.0.2:

Release 1.0.2 Notes, 5/4/2018

• 
  
  
  • Fixes to video player codec behavior to resolve .dll access violations that were causing consistent video player crashes for a small set of users.
  • Memory management improvements.
  • Fixing issues with the Valhalla Shadow Hawk variant failing to load in missions when selected.

I see that they didn't fix random selection on skirmish.

Though SP skirmish seems to be neglected part of the game.

 

[lightbane]

At best, the trolls got a single line.

Would the "violently pushing against the anti-pronoun mod" count as trolling?

I almost posted that picture on Avellone interview thread when someone asked about B-tech.

Care to share please? I checked and that thread is 100+ pages long, I'm not going to waste that much time.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Care to share please? I checked and that thread is 100+ pages long, I'm not going to waste that much time.

There is practically nothing about that there; someone mentioned pronoun stuff in passing and I decided against diluting that thread with stuff that is irrelevant on tale of Obsidian miss-management and negotiation openers gone wrong.

 

[Cael]

At best, the trolls got a single line.

Would the "violently pushing against the anti-pronoun mod" count as trolling?

I was referring to trolls here as I haven't been to the Nexus, so I have no idea. That said, it may pay to host not only that anti-pronoun mod but ALL mods elsewhere if that is what Nexus is doing.

 

[Lord Andre]

Btw, meant to say this in relation to some earlier posts - Dragonfall was probably lighting in a bottle and not a good indicator of HBS writing potential... unfortunately.

 

[fantadomat]

Spoiler

^LOL

Erase the recording

No. Address the crew and give them a dick slapping and an ejection via open airlock.

OK, now that Cael's blood pressure was properly elevated, the joke is over.
This was fake news!

I had to confess before anyone of you freaks starts throwing Kevin death threats over this shit!

Clearly this is true mate. There is no such thing as fake news. We should all begin sending twatters to that.... thing complaining about this event. Oh and the fact that you played for nearly 200 ingame weeks is disturbing.

 

[Infinitron]

Btw, meant to say this in relation to some earlier posts - Dragonfall was probably lighting in a bottle and not a good indicator of HBS writing potential... unfortunately.

Maybe not, but I think with BattleTech they weren't even really trying.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh hey: https://www.pcgamer.com/whats-next-for-battletech/

What's next for BattleTech
From expansions to performance fixes, BattleTech's creators discuss their short and long term plans for the game.

Following Chris' enthusiastic BattleTech review, Evan sits down with Harebrained Schemes' Mitch Gitelman and Mike McCain to talk about the game's reception, incoming bug fixes, and what the studio might explore in future expansions.

PC Gamer: BattleTech's been out for a little more than a week. How do you guys feel?

Mitch Gitelman, studio co-founder: Our heads and our hearts are full. Put it that way. [laughs] We’re not relaxed, I’ll tell you that much. We’re not sitting down and smoking cigars and high-fiving each other.

Mike McCain, game director: Yeah. Launch is always a roller-coaster of emotions. The number one thing, though, is just that there’s a sense of accomplishment, and there’s a sense of—

MG: Duty!

MM: Reward? All the incredible stories people are sharing, it’s incredibly fulfilling. And then there’s a sense of duty, a sense of what’s next. How are we going to keep on building on the success? That’s been the arc of our journey over the last week, culminating with that Kickstarter update. All right, we’ve been working on this game for two and a half years. It’s out there and it’s amazing. We’re hearing a lot about what was done well and we’re hearing a lot about the places where people do still have some feedback. We’ve been synthesizing that, and now we’re jumping back into the fray with a rich plan for what’s next.

I think some folks have this perception that you ship a game and everybody goes on vacation.

MG: Yeah, no.

The way we describe it internally is we just ran a marathon to get to the starting gate. And now, finally, we can start in earnest, growing this thing from the platform that we built.

How do you feel about the commercial performance of the game so far, and the critical reception?

MM: We’re happy with both.

MG: Yeah, yeah. Relieved.

Would you say it’s performed to your expectations so far?

MM: Yeah, definitely, without a doubt.

MG: Without equivocation.

One of the vocal, minority reactions to BattleTech's release centered around a microscopic element of the game—the ability to select a gender pronoun during character creation. Right now, of 1,023 negative reviews on Steam, 47 mention "gender," and 60 mention "politics." What was the reaction within the studio as you were seeing players with very low playtime negatively review BattleTech for such a tiny feature?

MG: We only have one on-the-record answer to that. Internally, what we say to each other is, our work speaks for itself, right? And that’s that. Our only public statement is, we believe that… we make great games that are welcoming to everyone. Our character creation system just reflects that belief. That’s it. And that’s it.

How many people made BattleTech?

MM: Average team size, if I had to pinpoint it in the middle somewhere, was around 30. We peaked at almost 45 people in the final stretch of development. But starting out it was just a few of us on preproduction, and then a core team of maybe 10 or 12 people that were working on the initial prototypes and establishing the framework of the game. Over two and a half years we’ve scaled from that small initial team up to, I think, probably still about 45 people here right now.

Some players have been experiencing crashes and performance issues, which you mention as a top priority in your post-launch roadmap. Do you have a grip on what was causing those issues?

MM: We do now, yeah. It took a few days and some long nights from some of our developers here. We see that stuff happen and there’s a strong emotional reaction. Nobody wants somebody to not be able to play or have a good experience with our work.

MG: The team here is focused less on the bug and less on the game than on the people that they’re hurting. You know what I mean? The people that are hurt. They’re really focused on solving problems for people, which makes it really cool to work here.

MM: That said, it is a small percentage of people that are experiencing a combination of hardware and software compatibility issues, primarily. We have a couple of leads and a patch that we’ll be likely putting out. We just put our first patch out yesterday. We’ll likely have a new public beta patch coming out [Thursday] or [Friday]. The way we do that is we put it out to a beta branch on Steam first, so that people experiencing issues can hop in. This next patch, we believe, has a fix for some of the video player crashes that people have been experiencing. We’re hopeful to continue improving that for the people that are experiencing issues, and obviously we’re continuing to provide a great experience for everyone else who’s been playing.

MG: Like we said in the update, that’s number one. Nothing else matters to us right now besides smoothing that experience for people.

Another thing that some people have noticed is that BattleTech seems to work their GPUs harder than expected.

MM: That one, also, we’re pretty confident is hardware-specific. We’re still working to triangulate a little more within that. We’ve been talking to Nvidia about it. That’s not to say they’re to blame, just that we’re investigating.

MG: We’re aligned in our goals.

MM: Again, it’s specific to some users. We’re also looking at—this next patch will push some memory usage optimization as well. Some improvements there.

Outside of the technical stuff, one of the other conversations around the game has been difficulty. You addressed this in your most recent update, talking about options and managing difficulty spikes. What to you represents undesirable difficulty in BattleTech right now that you want to fix?

MM: When it feels unfair and poorly communicated. When we talk about spikes, we’re talking about outliers to the intended curve and variance of that curve. We’re not looking to create [a situation where] I see a two and a half skull contract and I know exactly how challenging that will be. Some of that variance is exciting. That lends to the drama. "I scored big on this mission or I had to retreat from this mission."

But there are a few issues we’ve had. Either we’re not properly communicating when reinforcements arrive, or every now and then there’s some bugs in that system too. We’re investigating the outliers where it doesn’t feel like part of the intentional difficulty of the experience we want to provide.

Speaking for myself, it's a double-edged sword. Sometimes I roll into a mission all cocky like, "I can use my B-team on this one and use it as an opportunity to level them up, it’s two skulls, whatever." And then I’m getting owned by Demolishers, PPC Carriers, assault mechs. "Oh god, I have to find a way out of this. Maybe I have to withdraw."

MG: The way I think of it, if it tends to make players feel like it’s a bug, or it makes enough players feel like it’s a bug—

MM: Then it’s a bug.

MG: It doesn’t really matter whether it’s officially a bug or not. That’s the kind of stuff we’re trying to fix. If it felt like an intentional surprise, then that’s a big success.

Will we see an ironman setting among the new difficulty levels?

MM: Yeah, we definitely want to do ironman. I don’t know exactly where that will fall on this roadmap, though.

MG: A lot of people right now online are telling me that they’re playing something called, what is it, "Honorman?" Instead of ironman? They’re just doing their own version of ironman. Which I think is kind of cool.

Another thing mentioned in your announcement this week is that Harebrained Schemes would "love to release a paid content expansion or two." What direction might this take? Is it stuff that you think would be very systemic in nature, that would be fit into the existing structure of the game and enhance it? Would it be a new stand-alone campaign? What’s appealing to you?

MM: I think it’s a little too early to say right now. I can certainly say that we have an abundance of ideas. But right now, we’re just a little more than a week past launch. We’re really focused on playing the mid-game. We want to make sure that we’re getting people critical fixes and that we’re reacting to some of the immediate trends and feedback for the game. We want to set this title up for a long and healthy life and growth. As far as DLC, we’re just starting to have some of those conversations, but I don’t want to put a stake in the ground now that we might have to pivot from.

It seems like the BattleTech timeline would allow for several different approaches.

MM: Here’s what I will say, just to set expectations. Any first expansion we put out will not be, "We’re advancing the timeline and here’s the Clans now!" We’re going to start—

MG: Incrementally.

MM: Yeah. We’re gonna work incrementally.

MG: But yeah, we like the idea of moving the timeline forward. We like it. We’ll see what happens, but we like it.

MM: Certainly the Clans are not off the table. But just setting expectations now, if we put out a first thing, that’s not where we’re going first.

MG: BattleTech’s timeline and history is so vast and has so many interesting hooks to play with. The hard part is actually figuring out which of these great hooks to use.

On that note, how did you guys tackle telling your own story in a big, complicated universe that's been around for 30 years?

MM: I think the goal from the start was to bring the BattleTech universe to life in a way that did not require prior knowledge of the lore. We managed to find this blank slate on the BattleTech map that we could work within. That was just fantastic, because it let us build this story without being constrained at every step of the way by lore, the way we would be if we’d tried to integrate a story into the politics of Inner Sphere at the time, which have already been written about extensively. And then, as we’re building this story, we had so much to draw upon from that lore. We could integrate that into our story to enrich it, bringing in the adjacent factions to the Origan Reach, the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat. All these things big and small.

But rather than being beholden those things, we could pull them in strategically to our story based on our story’s needs, to hopefully deliver a strong character arc, and also to onboard people to what makes the BattleTech world exciting. That’s one of the reasons we chose that classic betrayal story for this first title. We’re not going to pretend that we invented this type of story, right? But what we’ve tried to do is tell our betrayal story, tell it well, and make it special by having it in the BattleTech universe and featuring these characters that we care deeply about.

MG: All of that detail that we brought into it adds a layer of texture to it and makes it feel part of something. It’s not just a story that’s on top of the BattleTech universe. It’s within it and it’s surrounded by it.

Best of luck working on the next phase of fixes.

 

[Belegarsson]

I... I honestly can't fathom how this is the same game from the writers of Shadowrun Dragonfall/HK, the story isn't insultingly bad but it's painfully average and frustrating. That merc voiced by Elias Toufexis? He was pretty much like

Spoiler

"hey bruh, you accidentally killed my son in a search and destroy contract where you got fetched false intel, so imma get revenge by crashing my ship, murdering my army and killing myself."

At the end I grew fond of Kamea, but god damn I couldn't shake up the feeling that I was a little insignificant fuck thanks to the story being too personal to her.
Anyway, took me around 75 hours to finish the game. Overall I enjoyed it a lot, not the deepest turn based strategy game out there, but customizing mechs and kicking dumbshits in their balls is still fun. I generally don't play a lot of games after finishing their main story but this one will probably be an exception

 

[Cael]

One of the vocal, minority reactions to BattleTech's release centered around a microscopic element of the game—the ability to select a gender pronoun during character creation. Right now, of 1,023 negative reviews on Steam, 47 mention "gender," and 60 mention "politics." What was the reaction within the studio as you were seeing players with very low playtime negatively review BattleTech for such a tiny feature?

MG: We only have one on-the-record answer to that. Internally, what we say to each other is, our work speaks for itself, right? And that’s that. Our only public statement is, we believe that… we make great games that are welcoming to everyone. Our character creation system just reflects that belief. That’s it. And that’s it.

So, basically 10% of the NEGATIVE reviews focused on the politics and/or gender issue. The other 90% can be... ignored as well because, you know, a bunch of guys hated the real life politics shit in their game. Therefore, we made a great game. No problems. All good. Nothing to see here.

Some players have been experiencing crashes and performance issues, which you mention as a top priority in your post-launch roadmap. Do you have a grip on what was causing those issues?

MM: We do now, yeah. It took a few days and some long nights from some of our developers here. We see that stuff happen and there’s a strong emotional reaction. Nobody wants somebody to not be able to play or have a good experience with our work.

MG: The team here is focused less on the bug and less on the game than on the people that they’re hurting. You know what I mean? The people that are hurt. They’re really focused on solving problems for people, which makes it really cool to work here.

MM: That said, it is a small percentage of people that are experiencing a combination of hardware and software compatibility issues, primarily. We have a couple of leads and a patch that we’ll be likely putting out. We just put our first patch out yesterday. We’ll likely have a new public beta patch coming out [Thursday] or [Friday]. The way we do that is we put it out to a beta branch on Steam first, so that people experiencing issues can hop in. This next patch, we believe, has a fix for some of the video player crashes that people have been experiencing. We’re hopeful to continue improving that for the people that are experiencing issues, and obviously we’re continuing to provide a great experience for everyone else who’s been playing.

MG: Like we said in the update, that’s number one. Nothing else matters to us right now besides smoothing that experience for people.

Oh, only a small percentage of people are having performance issues. Oh wow. All the screams only came from a "small percentage". All the tips on speeding up the game, fixing graphics issues, performance enhancing mods that came out less than a week after release, yeah, all small potatoes, you know. Hardly worth a mention. Well, I can see how much HBS value their customers right there.

Another thing that some people have noticed is that BattleTech seems to work their GPUs harder than expected.

MM: That one, also, we’re pretty confident is hardware-specific. We’re still working to triangulate a little more within that. We’ve been talking to Nvidia about it. That’s not to say they’re to blame, just that we’re investigating.

MG: We’re aligned in our goals.

MM: Again, it’s specific to some users. We’re also looking at—this next patch will push some memory usage optimization as well. Some improvements there.

Yep. Nothing to see. It's all YOUR fault, not theirs.

Speaking for myself, it's a double-edged sword. Sometimes I roll into a mission all cocky like, "I can use my B-team on this one and use it as an opportunity to level them up, it’s two skulls, whatever." And then I’m getting owned by Demolishers, PPC Carriers, assault mechs. "Oh god, I have to find a way out of this. Maybe I have to withdraw."

MG: The way I think of it, if it tends to make players feel like it’s a bug, or it makes enough players feel like it’s a bug—

MM: Then it’s a bug.

MG: It doesn’t really matter whether it’s officially a bug or not. That’s the kind of stuff we’re trying to fix. If it felt like an intentional surprise, then that’s a big success.

A Demolisher is not a bug, you moron. A Demolisher is the standard dividing line between retarded noobs and someone with half a brain cell.

On that note, how did you guys tackle telling your own story in a big, complicated universe that's been around for 30 years?

"By shitting on the lore, making up crap and putting a foot through the Ares Convention. Just little things like that. We are not aiming for anything major or anything at all, really."

 

[Stavrophore]

For example in Shadowrun Hongkong i've read all character dialogues and background because they were passable, maybe sometimes even mildly interesting. In Battletech i had no desire to read any of the character dialogue options. Like characters in shadowrun both dragonfall and hongkong were more believable given the world setting, than the crew of Argo in BT.

 

[Jimmious]

Honestly, there is no reason for the game to have characters and a story. It was a waste of time. They could have just focused to create a better "open" campaign and scratch the story completely. Of course it was a Kickstarter goal so...

 

[Black]

Speaking for myself, it's a double-edged sword. Sometimes I roll into a mission all cocky like, "I can use my B-team on this one and use it as an opportunity to level them up, it’s two skulls, whatever." And then I’m getting owned by Demolishers, PPC Carriers, assault mechs. "Oh god, I have to find a way out of this. Maybe I have to withdraw."

MG: The way I think of it, if it tends to make players feel like it’s a bug, or it makes enough players feel like it’s a bug—

MM: Then it’s a bug.

MG: It doesn’t really matter whether it’s officially a bug or not. That’s the kind of stuff we’re trying to fix. If it felt like an intentional surprise, then that’s a big success.

Tall, squat, and using four treads, the Demolisher has a well-earned, though sometimes exaggerated, reputation as one of the most deadly vehicles on the battlefield.
Designed to counteract the increasing scarcity of 'Mechs during the Succession Wars, the Demolisher became popular, especially on worlds where BattleMechs were not available. Aldis designed the Demolisher to be able to destroy any 'Mech

WOW WHAT A BUG

 

[Cael]

Tall, squat, and using four treads, the Demolisher has a well-earned, though sometimes exaggerated, reputation as one of the most deadly vehicles on the battlefield.
Designed to counteract the increasing scarcity of 'Mechs during the Succession Wars, the Demolisher became popular, especially on worlds where BattleMechs were not available. Aldis designed the Demolisher to be able to destroy any 'Mech

WOW WHAT A BUG

Note that the Demolisher is only able to destroy any 'mech that are SRM-boats, which as you know, the HBS game virtually pigeonholes you into building. That's where the bug is, mate.

Any 'mech optimised for TT would laugh at the Demolisher.

 

[DeepOcean]

Oh boy, I remember the first mission I got with one and a half skull after the main mission on the moon, was an enemy lance with an intact hunchback, two commandos with heavy lasers, a panther with a PPC, 3 locusts with SRMs and medium lasers, 01 spider, two galleons and two strikers. I sweat a little against that setup as a newbie player with shitty weapons loadouts, this was the best aspects of the game and they are going to "smooth" thing up, this smells like codeword for challenge dumbdown so scrubs won't cry.

So, tactics light game will be mind numb easy until getting to the last missions... oh boy, the joy that it is 2018 game design.

 

[Stavrophore]

Honestly, there is no reason for the game to have characters and a story. It was a waste of time. They could have just focused to create a better "open" campaign and scratch the story completely. Of course it was a Kickstarter goal so...

So like Battle Brothers? Wasn't one of the causes of codex discontentment with BB that it was too "aimless"? Campaign would be good, but in a real mercenary way -like your goal is to duel/compete with the best merc company in battletech world, and you take contracts for better reputation, better gear and better crew that your reputation would attract. In your campaign you would skirmish and compete with many mercenaries/merc bands along the way outcompeting them, with better prices, making assignments faster etc, until you got on the top and fight with very best of the best. You would have to deal with sabotage, backstabbing, derailing. You could engage in politics to gain a sponsor/patron from one of the houses, to get to the position faster at the expense of paying levy for protection and more reputation/recognition. This would be an awesome game, with LOTS of replayability, with different factions/paths providing unique challenges, providing resources like different houses giving different bonuses, different parts, like better autocannons/equipment. But no, we got the very bland white-horsey campaign, that completely drop the replayability out of the window. In one playthrough you can train all classes and combinations, have all mechs, have all contracts, there is no reason to pick this game again after completing it, unless they introduce some very drastic changes and second wave alike options akin to what long war did to XCOM. And the game isn't that long, because you can easily finish it in 30 hours if you factor out all the slowing animations and loading times. Hell with fast loading you could do it even in 20 hours, since the last boss fight is laughable, you only need some mix of medium and heavy mechs, assault mechs are completely unnecessary. So is the game worth 40 dollars? Hell no, i would pick it for 20 if you can.Too few hours of gameplay to pay 40 dolla.

 

[Stavrophore]

it's 2018 and they are still running chance to miss mechanics. Has no-one on the dev team attended a game design class in the last 20 years?

The nugget of "wisdom" from steam review

Surprisingly this was a negative review.

 

[Galdred]

Honestly, there is no reason for the game to have characters and a story. It was a waste of time. They could have just focused to create a better "open" campaign and scratch the story completely. Of course it was a Kickstarter goal so...

So like Battle Brothers? Wasn't one of the causes of codex discontentment with BB that it was too "aimless"? Campaign would be good, but in a real mercenary way -like your goal is to duel/compete with the best merc company in battletech world, and you take contracts for better reputation, better gear and better crew that your reputation would attract. In your campaign you would skirmish and compete with many mercenaries/merc bands along the way outcompeting them, with better prices, making assignments faster etc, until you got on the top and fight with very best of the best. You would have to deal with sabotage, backstabbing, derailing. You could engage in politics to gain a sponsor/patron from one of the houses, to get to the position faster at the expense of paying levy for protection and more reputation/recognition. This would be an awesome game, with LOTS of replayability, with different factions/paths providing unique challenges, providing resources like different houses giving different bonuses, different parts, like better autocannons/equipment. But no, we got the very bland white-horsey campaign, that completely drop the replayability out of the window. In one playthrough you can train all classes and combinations, have all mechs, have all contracts, there is no reason to pick this game again after completing it, unless they introduce some very drastic changes and second wave alike options akin to what long war did to XCOM. And the game isn't that long, because you can easily finish it in 30 hours if you factor out all the slowing animations and loading times. Hell with fast loading you could do it even in 20 hours, since the last boss fight is laughable, you only need some mix of medium and heavy mechs, assault mechs are completely unnecessary. So is the game worth 40 dollars? Hell no, i would pick it for 20 if you can.Too few hours of gameplay to pay 40 dolla.

The problem of BB was not that it lacked story, but that it lacked campaign progression:
Jagged Alliance has virtually no story either, but you have a clear goal for the campaign. Same with X-COM.
That is the limit of a pure mercenary game actually: the end goal is not very engaging (save enough money to retire!).

 

[Cael]

it's 2018 and they are still running chance to miss mechanics. Has no-one on the dev team attended a game design class in the last 20 years?

The nugget of "wisdom" from steam review

Surprisingly this was a negative review.

He was negative about the wrong thing :D

 

[DeepOcean]

So like Battle Brothers? Wasn't one of the causes of codex discontentment with BB that it was too "aimless"?.

From what I read, the problem with Battle brothers is a lack of content after a certain point, didn't play the game but that was what I read, those sorts of games don't need to be aimless, you just need to have a series of challenge goals to test you if you can beat them and the fun of the game is to use the mechanics to beat those challenge goals, a non linear game onlu becomes aimless when there is no new challenge goals presented to the player so the player has nothing to work towards.

 

[Cael]

Oh boy, I remember the first mission I got with one and a half skull after the main mission on the moon, was an enemy lance with an intact hunchback, two commandos with heavy lasers, a panther with a PPC, 3 locusts with SRMs and medium lasers, 01 spider, two galleons and two strikers. I sweat a little against that setup as a newbie player with shitty weapons loadouts, this was the best aspects of the game and they are going to "smooth" thing up, this smells like codeword for challenge dumbdown so scrubs won't cry.

So, tactics light game will be mind numb easy until getting to the last missions... oh boy, the joy that it is 2018 game design.

Dang. What did you have on your side? This sounds like a fun battle to re-enact on TT.