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HBS_Kiva

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Feb 23, 2018
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  • Harebrained Schemes Staff
Hi, folks! It’s your very own Design Lead, Kiva, back for another developer diary. This time we’re talking about Career Mode, the free 1.3 update feature that will allow you to explore and play in the Aurigan Reach with no story pressure or travel constraints.

Since very early on in the development of BATTLETECH we’ve been thinking of the game as a sandbox. Here’s this big swath of space dotted with almost 200 star systems, each of which has interesting tags and details and descriptions and missions. Our game systems are designed to function at that scale, with procedural construction of shop contents, mission availability, and difficulty.

When we started talking about how we wanted the game to play, we soon realized that there were two different gameplay styles we were trying to present simultaneously. In the game as implied by the system design, players would wander all over the game space, looking for missions that interested them or that would offer rewards they needed. In the game as implied by the narrative design, players would stay in a relatively confined region, pursuing important story goals and advancing their mercenary company primarily as a means to become powerful enough to succeed in the next story segment.

In the end, we decided to emphasize the narrative design choices, because we recognized that this would be a lot of players’ first experience with the BATTLETECH universe, the ‘Mechs, and the weaponry. There’s a lot of complexity and depth to the setting, and that depth wasn’t going to be easy to explore without a well-marked path to follow. The Kamea Restoration campaign (in addition to being a good story!) accomplished that goal: it gradually introduces factions, technology, and setting concepts, giving a new BATTLETECH fan time to take everything in.

But! That doesn’t mean we forgot the overall sandbox concept. Far from it; as we talked about our plans for the future of BATTLETECH, the open-ended nature of the game was always foremost in our conversations. The space in which we set the game was largely unused, despite all the work we put in detailing every single planet and star system in that space. (We have a spreadsheet that includes the stellar class of every one of the 170 systems in the Aurigan Reach.)

When we were planning our first big expansion to the game, we knew we wanted to return to that initial sandbox concept, and see where it would take us. Enter Career Mode. In Career Mode, you can go wherever you’d like; there are no restrictions on your travel. You can take any mission from any faction, assuming they like you well enough to be willing to offer it to you. Difficulty slowly scales up as you become a more widely-recognized mercenary commander, rather than scaling up by story milestones. Without the Restoration missions and their huge payouts, you’re scrambling for the C-Bills to pay salaries and upkeep; you’re also not receiving any ‘free’ ‘Mechs from the plotline.

Career mode isn’t necessarily more difficult, though. There’s no pressure to complete story objectives, or get powerful enough to take on some of the nastier Restoration missions. You can wander around in the less-dangerous parts of the region, taking on routine challenges to build up your bank account balance.

An obvious question is “How is this different from playing the game after the Restoration campaign is complete?” We asked that too, and we looked at what people had to say about the post-campaign gameplay. What we saw most often was ‘there isn’t much to do after the campaign.’ We’ve talked a lot about Flashpoints, and that’s one of the key ways we’re addressing that question, but we also thought a lot about other open-ended games -- Sid Meier’s Pirates and Civilization came up -- and we decided to include a scoring system.

For every area of achievement in the game, we assigned a possible score. For instance, we give a point value to each c-bill you ever earn in the entire game. We assign points to each contract you complete, based on its difficulty. Collecting ‘Mechs, visiting all the star systems, upgrading the Argo; all told, there are more than 15 different ways we rate your overall performance. Some of them are quite simple; you should have no trouble maxing out your Morale bar. Some are very, very difficult, and you’ll need to struggle to get them all and receive the highest possible mercenary rating. (Mitch and I will give you a sneak peak of the ways you’ll be rated in an upcoming livestream.)

The catch, of course, is that there’s no end point to the game. You can keep playing as long as you want, letting decades of game-time pass. To make scores meaningful, we needed to limit that open-endedness. So we’ve added a time limit of 1200 days. You can keep playing after that, but at 1200 days we calculate your final score and display your final ranking, and then we stop tracking score. This means that if you choose, you can compare your final results with others, share screenshots of your ultimate ranking, and compete to try to beat the scores of others.

Why 1200 days? Because that puts the game date somewhere around mid-3028, and we’re well aware of the lore events of 3028...
 
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Reactions:
FIRST!

OH HECK YEAH! \o/

I love the 1200 day limit idea. Genius! Also... hrrrmmm wonder what DLC comes next :)



Stealth Edit...
I've been sitting here for the last 10 minutes mashing refresh... praying that the previously noted 2 week schedule is real! It appears to be so!
 
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4TH Succession War
and
Helm Core
incoming.

I like the sandbox and the career mode but game score keeping is not a motivation for me. I would prefer some kind of unlocks for more story content as you gain status as a mercenary company. Maybe the increases of reputation that unlock contracts with various ruling factions will be enough incentive for me to keep exploring and completing missions. I would also enjoy negative repercussions for completing missions for one faction with the faction that you opposed during the missions. Perhaps something like a bounty placed on your unit that you had to either negotiate or fight your way out of or run from.
 
I would also enjoy negative repercussions for completing missions for one faction with the faction that you opposed during the missions. Perhaps something like a bounty placed on your unit that you had to either negotiate or fight your way out of or run from.

The comments already released regarding Flashpoints indicate the negative repercussions including Faction and "Bounty" penalties. You might already have gotten your wish.
 
4SW cover.jpg


Here you go!

FLASHPOINT ideas for the Epic (rather than episodic) mid-3028 BATTLETECH expansion!

Career Mode will be a blast, I can't hardly wait!

Do you get "BONUS" Points for completing Career Mode using ALL the BATTLETECH Granular Difficulty Settings? : ) (Just had to ask! :bow: )
 
View attachment 409421

Here you go!

FLASHPOINT ideas for the Epic (rather than episodic) mid-3028 BATTLETECH expansion!

Career Mode will be a blast, I can't hardly wait!

Do you get "BONUS" Points for completing Career Mode using ALL the BATTLETECH Granular Difficulty Settings? : ) (Just had to ask! :bow: )
As much as I like me some 4th SW Scenarios... we all know how that ends. So yeah... do not want anything from lore... at all... period.
 
Do you get "BONUS" Points for completing Career Mode using ALL the BATTLETECH Granular Difficulty Settings? : ) (Just had to ask! :bow: )

Because of the way the difficulty settings can synergize with each other to make the game *much* harder or *much* easier than just what's implied by the number that are turned on or off, I decided not to try to figure out all the possible combinations and just how much harder or easier they make the game.
 
In Career Mode, you can go wherever you’d like; there are no restrictions on your travel. You can take any mission from any faction, assuming they like you well enough to be willing to offer it to you. Difficulty slowly scales up as you become a more widely-recognized mercenary commander, rather than scaling up by story milestones. Without the Restoration missions and their huge payouts, you’re scrambling for the C-Bills to pay salaries and upkeep; you’re also not receiving any ‘free’ ‘Mechs from the plotline.
Thank you thank you thank you! This is the game mode I've been waiting for since I first heard of the Kickstarter! The "Mercenary's Handbook" experience!

The catch, of course, is that there’s no end point to the game. You can keep playing as long as you want
That's not a catch, that's a feature - or for me, the feature! :)
 
I am rather new to the lore of Battletech actually this game has gotten me into checking out the lore this will be a noob question but what happens in 3028?
House Davion marries House Steiner and initiates a fairly personal war of retribution against House Liao. House Kurita doesn't fully end up in the suck. House Marik is all... well House Marik. <<< Short Version aka the 4th Succession War in which Davion plays large and ultimately fails.
 
I am rather new to the lore of Battletech actually this game has gotten me into checking out the lore this will be a noob question but what happens in 3028?

Typical intersteller powers stuff. War. Discontent. Backstabbing. Betrayal.

Think medieval politics (or Game of Thrones politics) in space and you're not far off.
 
Collecting ‘Mechs, visiting all the star systems, upgrading the Argo; all told, there are more than 15 different ways we rate your overall performance.
This seems to imply that the Argo will exist in Career Mode. Excellent. :)
 
This seems to imply that the Argo will exist in Career Mode. Excellent. :)
I actually wanted to make 'Leopard Mode' (or maybe 'hysteria mode' ^_^) a setting in Career Mode, but it's a fairly substantial engineering task to rebuild all the game systems that expect you to have the Argo. Alas. Hopefully a modder will give me the awful, awful Leopard Mode of my dreams. :)
 
That sounds like exactly what I was hoping for.

For my tastes the campaign (which is great) discourages replayability, because it does create a framework around the experience, and I can't bring myself to just ignore it (for role-play reasons rather than gameplay reasons) so I'm looking forward to being able to just play in the sandbox.
 
First-pass thought is: This sounds good!

Additional thoughts:
-Instead of the Argo, what about a Union class dropship? It's well-known, it supports 12 mechs, and it takes away some of the snowflake-ness. You could retain some of the upgrade paths by making Unions available semi-randomly via a few time-checkpointed events available after 150 days - in varying levels of repair. This is the Periphery, after all. A Union will even support a pair of Aerospace fighters, which you can hire as mercs (uses: Fight off pirates & other space events; provide limited ground-strike capability; use off-screen to "suppress enemy artillery" or lower the chances of enemy vehicle reinforcements).

-Add a few procedurally generated merc units that operate around the same area at a similar power level. Have them be named opponents that you may face several times to measure yourself against within the universe.

-Add some faction-specific events. Maybe Liao sends a kill team after you if your rep with them is low, or if you go against them in too many flashpoint missions. Bonus points if we get to find a ROM agent and weed him or her out with extreme prejudice (don't trust the phone company! ever!).

-The next step beyond flashpoints is allowing multiple-lance drops - primarily as part of a campaign (Able recon lance has a deep strike mission, Bravo lance guards a convoy, Charlie lance leads a strike mission on an enemy base) - and for special occasions (10% or less), you get to play with two or three lances on the field at once. Even with the game-speed settings turned up, a multi-lance mission is going to take longer, so this has to be carefully balanced to be viable for most players... but as a rare treat it'd be pretty cool. 12v12 will also be lethal due to focus fire.........
 
First-pass thought is: This sounds good!
-The next step beyond flashpoints is allowing multiple-lance drops - primarily as part of a campaign (Able recon lance has a deep strike mission, Bravo lance guards a convoy, Charlie lance leads a strike mission on an enemy base) - and for special occasions (10% or less), you get to play with two or three lances on the field at once. Even with the game-speed settings turned up, a multi-lance mission is going to take longer, so this has to be carefully balanced to be viable for most players... but as a rare treat it'd be pretty cool. 12v12 will also be lethal due to focus fire.........

This sounds like a twist on Consecutive Deployments - instead of just requiring players to go back into combat without making repairs, prohibit them from using the same mech in more than one of the deployments.
 
Thank you thank you thank you! This is the game mode I've been waiting for since I first heard of the Kickstarter! The "Mercenary's Handbook" experience!

Me too! I do love the story, but now that I have played through it several times, I just want to be a Mercenary working the Periphery.

I like that there is now going to be that sandbox experience.