Can't get over myself to buy Battletech...

[ThatGuyMontag]

FTFY. Let's be fair.

I do agree on the general sentiment.

I wish I could take the "mostly" tack, but trawling through them has left me more than a little jaded. I've taken to dropping in every now and then to downvote the negative reviews as a kind of community service and I have yet to see a negative review that doesn't amount to either "I personally experienced a bug and decided that therefore the game is unplayable", "the loading times are terrible" (have yet to really struggle on my legitimately old computer) or some variant of "I dropped with one skull of 'mechs in a four skull mission and got stomped so the AI cheats". Other common statements include either "This game appears to have been abandoned shortly before release", or "the biggest problem is the devs loved their vision so much they never bothered to playtest the game".

Overwhelmingly, the feeling I get when I read the bad reviews is one of a general despair at humanity's selfish lack of perspective, their overweaning sense that they, and only they, are what counts in this world, and it's hard not to start to worry about the state of the human race.

Then I load up Battletech, stomp some 'mech face, and everything is right again in the world.

 

[sparkyp]

Hello guys,

I'm eyeing Battletech since a long time. When I get close to finally buy it... I had concerns if it's worth it. The reviews are mixed up over at steam, most of them seem to be related to Bugs/updates/performance/loading time.

One specific review caught my attention: Battletech is a grind fest, the same missions do repeat all the times etc. (grinding, repetetiveness are things I'm afraid off).

I had lots of fun with MW 1-4, MC 1-2 and actually had fun with BattleTech (played it in the free weekend on steam) and games alike (X-COM).

Maybe you could help me put some light into the darkness. I even struggled years with Tyranny… normally it's a yes or no… They both are titles I'm not sure of.

Greetings,
Cabal

You played it on the free weekend and enjoyed it?

Probably answered your own ponderings tbh.

 

[Jolly Joker]

Played 26 hours now since I bought it at the weekend, and frankly, the game is great. Yes, loading times are a bit longer than other games I play - so what? It's not like it would take hours or even minutes.

Seriously.

No crash. Game is stable, and, man, it's fun.

 

[starscream]

@Jolly Joker I recommend getting your self modtek and checking out the mods on nexus . The modders are now porting mechs from mwo

 

[KDubya]

I'd get Tyranny, its a nice game with a new lore and a good story. Unfortunately it did not sell well so I think there will never be a sequel but its a nice RPG in a unique timeline.

I'd definitely get BattleTech, it is a great game from a great team and there's lots more to come.

 

[TLRoff]

As long as your clear on what the game is and have an understanding of how get marketed and put together these days. Battletech is right now a fairly simple turn based game set in the time just prior to the 4th succession war within the game lore.. the lore is [Mod edit: Language] extensive but theres only a little itty bits of it referenced in the game.

I expect this will change. The actual size of the coding crew is small. The mod scene is exploding. Custom missions (custom flash points) are about to explode. The first one has been made and you can expect other to follow.

Battletech is not going to ever be a super flashy computer game.. (Mechwarrior 5.. THAT will be flashy) Battletech however is a computer game treatment of the tabletop game and frankly it's not bad at all.. Could use some more depth in the crome but that will happen. Between the dev team and the modders it's all ready well on its way.

Was the game released early? Oh Hell yea it was released early! This is a crowd funded game. Was it a good idea to release without more polish?. My opinion is a resounding "No",
but then again these days we the players are the bloody beta testers.

It's a good game on an awesome subject with most of 30 years of lore and it will get better. And better. And better... did I mention it cannot help but get better?

As for steam reviews.. PLEASE! Most "reviews" on steam especially the "negative ones" have to be read carefully.. Are they using big words well and effectively, or are they using them to make their writing seem more impressive and knowledgeable. Are they clear and specific on what they like and don't like... You gotta do a little deconstruction on 'em. [Mod edit: Flamebait] Ignoring them is the best thing to do. Anything else is prolly illegal. Highly satisfying but yea, bit of a nono.

The reviews to pay attention to are the replays and playthroughs folks post up on youtube and the like. Go find "TheEdmon" on you tube and watch his stuff. He's an expert player and a damd entertaining fellow.

TLRoff Sends

aka Khemaraa Iron Hand, (SFC-II)
aka Sandman Nagasawa, (MW2)
aka, Dame Kuiama Del Solima KDF (STO)
aka Vladimir Nicoli Petrovich, aka, (SCA)

 

[Kreivi]

Hello guys,

I'm eyeing Battletech since a long time. When I get close to finally buy it... I had concerns if it's worth it. The reviews are mixed up over at steam, most of them seem to be related to Bugs/updates/performance/loading time.

One specific review caught my attention: Battletech is a grind fest, the same missions do repeat all the times etc. (grinding, repetetiveness are things I'm afraid off).

I had lots of fun with MW 1-4, MC 1-2 and actually had fun with BattleTech (played it in the free weekend on steam) and games alike (X-COM).

Maybe you could help me put some light into the darkness. I even struggled years with Tyranny… normally it's a yes or no… They both are titles I'm not sure of.

Greetings,
Cabal

Hmm, for my eyes:
It is worth every penny and then some more. But I had great time back in 80's and 90's for Amiga Mech Force +Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, tabletop and RPG (Battletech and Mechwarrior). So naturally I backed this game in kickstart.

But if you have never played games like this (like I bet some for Steam review givers are) yes, I think in every single mission what you more or less do is: you have giant battle robot (usually more then one) and you fight against other giant battle robots. So it is true, it can become quite fast repeating. I do not remember a single mission where you do not need weapons or you do not need to shoot / attack opponent atleast once.

But it is more of game genre, this is not 100% RPG, you can not step out from your mech and do other things. If and when you accept it this is really deep and great game. Definetly worth of waiting around 30 years.

So my advice is: if someone want to get deep RPG experience buy Pathfinder: Kingmaker. If someone want to play Battletech, full of old lore and hints of things what you might have read for last 30+ year buy this game. If someone is looking for more deeper strategy game and love Warhammer fantasy RPG buy Total War: Warhammer (I & II). For these 3 games you are most likely happy atleast next 5 year (with all DLC's included). After that there are allready more games from same developers made (not sure if for Battletech but one can wish, hopefully we do not have to wait for 30 year...)

 

[Aotrs Commander]

I am more of the more... casual? fans, in that thus far I have only played a single run-through and though I have Flashpoint, haven't gone back to it yet.

(Note - I am the sort of person who will wait 18 months for an expansion to come out for Hears of Iron 4 before playing it, or until PoE2 Deafire got all the expansions and a lot ofbugfixes out, so this is more just a case of just "longer I wait, more stuff might come in before I do play it" than anything else and I'm not shor of stuff to play!)



That said, my campaign playthrough was 138 hours, according to Steam, and a good bit of that was me playing Gotta Catch 'Em All with all the emchs and variants (if you weren't bothered about doing that, you could definitely skip some of that grind, I had two sets of 10/10/10/10 pilots pretty, much by the end).

I would, as per usual, advise slapping it on your Steam wishlist and waiting for a sale (sadly, you just missed one!) as PDX games tend to go on sale with a reasonable regularity, unless you are short of something to play Right Now.

(Generally, I either buy something on release if I expect to play it shortly (or there's a good deal on!) or it goes on the list until sale (especially if I'm not 100% sure about it) or I have very actually run out of things to play, which at the moment, I'm very much not!))



I personally rather liked Tyranny, especially post-Bastard Wound as well.

 

[Rabain]

If I'm on the fence about a game all I look at is the minimum time per dollar the game might offer me. My standard is I get value if the game offers me at least 1 hour of entertainment per dollar spent to purchase. Even if I only play through the campaign and later career mode once then the time it takes to do that is more than worth the price of the game and the dlc. So I don't have to worry about whether the game is awesome or not up front, just the cost and the minimum gameplay before repetition sets in. You can find that out easy enough prior to purchase by asking some questions on the various forums.

Battletech has more than provided value.

Tyranny I thought was a great game, it definitely provided value though not as much as Battletech and I much prefer realtime to turnbased. I thought Tyranny was better than Pillars of Eternity 1, that game just lacked something for me. Pillars 2 was a vast improvement. Tyranny was in the middle somewhere.

TLR - buy Battletech, you won't regret it. Buy Tyranny, you won't regret it. You will get more game hours from Battletech though.

 

[ntw]

@TheCabal - pop back and let us know what you decide in the end

 

[Brother Diogenes]

The bugginess might be a legitimate issue for some, which hopefully will be addressed with 1.5, but the other biggest complaint - the endgame grind and "lack of variety" - really seems par for the course when it comes to tactical / management games.

Eventually, there comes a point where you have all the stuff, see all the missions, and breeze through the endgame... but that didn't stop classic X-COM from being a success. Whenever I replay it now, I don't even bother with the Mars missions; I just call the game good once I've got everything I need for it, and start over again.

It's the journey not the destination, basically.

So yeah, pretty much this.

 

[Thorqemada]

The game is pretty good and GoG.com has it on sale every few weeks, so if you wait for a sale you minimize the non existing risk of wasting money.
I have not encountered much Bugs (the game made my PC run to hot but that is fixed) and i dont remember the last time it crashed.
The only issue i have so far is i want a more complex Economy and Business side of the game and maybe a little more Mechpilot RPG Elements and that convoy missions tend to have struggles bcs there allways falls someone behind you have to wake up with moving your mechs back to that "sleeping" Vehicle.
I am very happy i bought it and the only reason i dont play it that much more atm is that i am Skindeep into another task i equally like.

By any measure Battletech is a great game with the potential of being exceptional (given you like that type of turn based Gameplay and Mechlab engeneering)!

As i said - look for a GoG sale and there is virtually no risk of disapointment!

 

[Jernau_]

Its a good game. The loading times can be a bit long, but for me its not really an issue. The only bug i have noticed is that the game doesnt always realize that i have killed all enemies and force me to run to the evac point for the mission to end.

The only negative thing i can say about the game is that it doesnt have a lot of replay value for me as the missions are too similar. This is supposed to be better with the DLC but i havent bought it (yet).

 

[TLRoff]

Toss my own take onto this pile..

Is it worth it? simple answer Yes.

Reasons: One of the original TT game people is your go to guy. (yay Mitch) And frankly if ya like the subject you have no other options then the tabletop game.

It's not to shabby if your into the subject and it's a good start. Encourage the devs and purchase. There is so much more that they can add to the game. Just remember the development costs were crowd funded. Further dev costs come from sales.

For battletech on the computer you have Mechwarrior Online, Battletech, and the upcoming Mechwarrior 5 and that is it. So really the call is yours.

 

[SQW]

Get the base game. It's worth the price.

DLC wise, hold off until 50% off. Content value is marginal if you hate grind and that DLC is exactly the same grind as vanilla but couched with a few text boxes.

 

[Crissa]

The load times are pretty bad, and I'm using a Samsung Pro NVMe drive and a 5Ghz turbo i9. (I have access to a developer's test rig for VR; it's not actually mine ^-^.) Much of the lag seems built into a bunch of the animations, which I've found a little off-putting. There's just something weird that my load times aren't significantly shorter than my friends' and their spinning drives.

That said... If you every liked Battletech, MechCommander, this is it. If you play turn-based games, this is it. The randomly assigned missions themselves have alot of randomness to the enemy mechs, even if they're reloaded, so even a little grind has replayability. Drops are super-random, but you can push them.

There are some busted bits (Why does selling a mech and scrapping a mech have the same price? Why is buying a mech up to 20x more than the sale price?) but nothing wrong with the basic story premise and mechanics.

And this may not be 'a Paradox game' but in all the ways it feels like it; each expansion grows the game, there's a healthy modding community, there's room to grow in both mechanics and player QoL, but it's totally playable and fun now.

I want to play now, but said developer is using her rig so... ^-^

 

[ThatGuyMontag]

The load times are pretty bad, and I'm using a Samsung Pro NVMe drive and a 5Ghz turbo i9. (I have access to a developer's test rig for VR; it's not actually mine ^-^.) Much of the lag seems built into a bunch of the animations, which I've found a little off-putting. There's just something weird that my load times aren't significantly shorter than my friends' and their spinning drives.

It's worth asking what we think load times *should* be. I'm getting times of around 30 seconds on map load running maxed graphics off a low-tier 250gb Samsung SSD from roughly 3 years ago. Maybe it's just the fact that I've been gaming for most of my life but that doesn't strike me as unreasonable, especially as it's roughly how long I spend in the Ranger waiting to drop in XCOM2. It may be a lot worse on HDD, I don't know, but my experience is that SSDs are starting to reach the level of being required for any gaming PC anyway.

Outside of explicit times and comparisons I'm therefore inclined to lump "load times" in the "how long is a piece of string" category of "too vague to be useful".

 

[Crissa]

Outside of explicit times and comparisons I'm therefore inclined to lump "load times" in the "how long is a piece of string" category of "too vague to be useful".

That's probably a good point.

But we're dealing with multi-processor systems, there's really just no excuse to be sitting at a frozen UI for nearly any amount of time. It's not like way back when that we really had to serialize this stuff. So it is kinda a negative.

Loading a mission could be segmented; Darius' briefing and the planet orbiting below don't need to wait for the game to load. Loading of the graphics and the terrain can be optimized; units can be loaded later and lowered to just what's needed for this mission. There are things that could be done, things which make for a better (and ultimately more stable) user experience.

While in a mission many of the animations have eases in and out which have no real reason to exist while watching mechs stomp around the battlefield; that makes the game include lots of little pauses that seem like load times but are clearly not, since they're the same on a slow machine as a fast machine. But they feel like load time to player experience.

It's not a load screen if it's giving the player something to see or do!

 

[ThatGuyMontag]

@Crissa

That all sounds perfectly reasonable: I've no relevant experience to say one way or the other. That said, it's worth pointing out that HBS are an extremely experienced dev team with the better part of a decade experience and nearly half a dozen games using this specific engine. If there were any easy wins on load times I'm willing to bet that they'll have found it, especially as there was an early focus to improve load times and general game speed (alongside the bug fixing).

I'm also on the fence a little about the animations. From my perspective one of the things this game got particularly right was that the 'mechs *feel* like Battletech 'mechs. I have no idea how much the animations can be tweaked to improve speed overall but I do know that I'd want the game to keep that particular feel and given the choice I'd rather spend a couple of seconds longer on a turn and keep that feel, than speed things up to the point that it stops feeling like Battletech.

 

[Lord_CoH]

@TheCabal did you decide to go for it in the end, or are you still undecided/ waiting for a sale?