You know what we hate when we’re stomping around in our giant war robot? Sunday drivers. You know the sort: you’ll be plodding around some distant planet with your buddies looking for a juicy cache of old tech, when over the hill comes some have-a-go hero who can’t tell his targeting module from his sensor module, overheating his lasers and then falling over behind some crumbling building because his power-to-weight ratios aren’t properly calibrated. ‘It’s like they let just anyone pilot ‘Mechs these days,’ you think, as you pulverise the tiresome interloper with a rocket barrage.
That’s the potted promise of BattleTech, the latest successful Kickstarter project from Shadowrun creators Harebrained Schemes (and how: the funding drive pulled down $2,785,537 with just a mere $250,000 goal). Now in pre-production, it is (or rather, it will be) a tactical-squad-combat-meets-RPG set in the old BattleTech universe – the far future stomping ground of the late-'80s and '90s MechWarrior and MechCommander series.
As the head of a team of opportunistic, space-faring mercenaries, your job is to build up your squad (or ‘Lance’) of ‘Mechs, kit them out with technology bought, scavenged or stolen, train up your MechWarrior pilots and then set off in the ignoble pursuit of cash and plunder.
Succeed, and you’ll earn not just loot, but also the trust and patronage of the universe’s Great Houses. The BattleTech universe is a network of galactic fiefdoms – powerful families each vying for greater degrees of control over systems and planets, while scheming over the best way to stab one another in the back. “It’s Game of Thrones in space,” executive producer Mitch Gitelman tells us.
And much like the families of Westeros, BattleTech’s Great Houses know that while one might really, really want to commit grievous violence against a competitor, it’s often cannier to use an intermediary than declare all-out war. That’s where your squad of mercenary MechWarriors comes in. You’ll begin with deciding your character’s origin story, and progress from there to recruiting and cultivating your squad-mates. They’ll each have different affinities for different technologies or styles of fighting, and the mark of a good mercenary captain will be figuring out which of them deals the most damage in which ‘Mech.
Once you’ve mastered the day-to-day mechanics of running a mercenary ‘Mech outfit, the political machinations of the houses – and how you choose to interact with them – will add a further layer of complexity. As you might expect, your prospective employers don’t look favourably on commanders who duck their contracts or get too cosy with a rival House. A successful villain is a reliable villain.
“We don’t think in terms [of karma],” says Gitelman, of your commander’s alignment. “There’s no dark side/light side or anything like that. It’s more about, ‘this is a person who completes all their mission objectives, or runs from a fight’. It’s about your dependability and things like that as a mercenary, and what each of the Great Houses thinks of you.”
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As with the old games in the BattleTech universe, you’ll also be deciding how to doll up your brace of ‘Mechs, perhaps deliberately taking on a mission that’s risky, but might return you lots of cool spare parts from the enemies you hope to destroy. High-risk missions will encourage players to work tactically, in a way that Gitelman says sets the game apart from the Shadowrun series.
“In Shadowrun, you run into a room, and maybe you leapfrog forward, cover-to-cover, while you decide which of your magic spells or which of your weapons to use. BattleTech is a very different animal. ‘Mechs don’t really take cover. You can run behind a building, if you want – until that building gets blown to smithereens.”
“‘Mech combat has a lot to do with the range of my weapons,” Gitelman continues. “If you engage the enemy in a very confined area, for example, and that BattleMech you’re facing has mostly long-ranged weapons, you have quite an advantage if you’re a short-ranged fighter. [Then] there’s also hand-to-hand combat, melee combat… We have jumping ‘Mechs, so we have something called ‘Death From Above’ where you can jump on an enemy ‘Mech. That’s a real risk/reward scenario.”
There’s a balancing act here for Harebrained Schemes. On the one hand, burying new players under a dump truck of customisation options could be confusing, like asking them not just to buy their first car, but to build the engine as well. On the other, getting oily under the hood is exactly the sort of thing veteran MechWarriors love, and might provide you with a critical edge in battle. According to Gitelman, BattleTech will be accommodating either way.
“The way we think about it is in terms of layers,” he says. “The idea [is] that you could take an off-the-rack ‘Mech, and throw it on the battlefield and command it well and succeed. And if that’s all you want to do, great – you just field your ‘Mechs. Well, and repair and upgrade them, and buy or salvage new ones too of course.”
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“The next [level] is, you might create these variants of ‘Mechs – a long-ranged version of this one, a short-ranged version of another, a ‘Mech that trades off speed for firepower, or armour for firepower, that kind of thing. But if you’re a tweaker, then you can go to another level and you can take that core chassis or one of those variant chassis and start fiddling with them. And then a layer down from that could be, ‘I feel like messing around with its internals. Should I upgrade its fusion engine?’”
“What we’ve said is that we want to make a game that isn’t fiddly, but that’s fun to fiddle with. It’s just a matter of layers, how deep you want to go.”
The point of all this tinkering isn’t solely to give you an edge in combat. As with 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Harebrained Schemes’ hope is that players will grow invested and attached to the mercs-and-‘Mech teams they field, weighing up the risks and rewards of putting their lives (and their precious gear, obviously) in danger. To make this work, the threat of loss has to be real, which is why BattleTech will employ the system that made XCOM such a jaw-settingly-tense affair: permadeath.
“If you want to keep flying, so to speak, you’ve got to live to fight another day,” says Gitelman. “You’ve got to have the money to field ‘Mechs that aren’t heavily damaged for your next mission. So it really comes down to… Not spreadsheet management, but thinking like a mercenary.”
“XCOM is a good reference point here actually,” creative director Mike McCain chips in. “We’re building a procedural contract-generation system and we really want a good feeling of, maybe I screwed up a few times here but my career is still very recoverable. I have options. I’m sure it will be possible to back yourself into a bad situation. Our goal isn’t necessarily to prevent that, but just to make sure that there’s enough warning signs along the way.”
Initially, BattleTech commanders will be fighting a war on two fronts: either battling their way through the game’s story against AI opponents, or duking it out with other players in the multiplayer arenas. These arenas have an interesting-sounding twist to them: ‘arena’ here is not just nebulous dev-speak for ‘online-shooty-game-space’; it’s an actual, physical space in the universe that’s plugged into the BattleTech story. According to Gitelman, the idea is that head-to-heads between rival commanders all take place in a kind of galactic Colosseum – a planet that’s been specially put aside so that fighty merc captains can knock nuts and bolts out of each other for the amusement of the crowd.
“[Multiplayer battles] take place on a very specific planet called Solaris 7,” says Gitelman. “Different arenas are controlled by different Great Houses, different arenas have different rules of conduct. These arenas and these different rules cause you to field different Lances of ‘Mechs. So, you want to create different Lances of ‘Mechs and MechWarriors, and their specific loadouts based on the needs of the environment you’ll be fighting in.”
At some point after release, BattleTech will also get a co-op mode, though Gitelman and McCain don’t go into detail about what that will look like (“We all love co-op here – it’s just a matter of, first things first,” says McCain).
Usually, this would be the bit where we have to deploy the standard Kickstarter caveat. After all, there’s only so much that you can really learn from concept art and developer promises. But the neat thing about the modern age of crowdfunded gaming is that developers – even those with illustrious histories – no longer need to trade past glories for cash. We know that companies like inXile, Double Fine and Obsidian can do great things with fan money – they’ve each got a great game apiece to prove it. Harebrained Schemes, however, have two: Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. No one should ever write a developer a blank check, but in the sometimes capricious world of crowdfunding, Harebrained Schemes feels like a safe pair of hands.
“We ship good games,” says Gitelman, bluntly, when I ask about backers’ trust. “First of all, we say what we’re going to do. We deliver the features, we deliver on time, and the game comes out and they’re in the 80s and 90s in review scores. So, we built up this credibility over time that allows us to go, ‘Here we are with a game that’s in pre-production, we don’t have much to show,’ but because of our track record, not only as game developers, but as Kickstarter developers, we were able to do that and be successful. So not everybody can do that. There’s no code there. It comes from really hard work and delivery.”
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