Hiya! It’s Kiva again, with another developer diary. One of the systems we had high hopes for in the early parts of the design of Battletech was the Reputation system. Our plan was that you would be able to declare your allegiance to one of the major regional powers of the Aurigan Reach, and focus exclusively on advancing their interests, or stay independent and balance all the powers against one another, so that you can play all sides and get rich off their wars.
Practically, though, that system ran headlong into the same issue I’ve talked about in previous diaries: we shifted focus away from pure sandbox play to a guided storyline, and tightened the play area to a much more controlled and accessible portion of the map. This approach worked well for our initial goals, but as I mentioned in the Career diary, we’re thinking about the sandbox again, and what we need to do in support of sandbox gameplay.
Naturally, reputation came up. While you were working exclusively for the Restoration, it really didn’t matter what anyone thought of you, so we didn’t spend a lot of time elaborating on reputation-based content. If we wanted to turn you loose on the whole Aurigan Reach in Career Mode, though, we needed a way for you to make some larger-scale decisions about your company’s relationship with the real powers of the Inner Sphere.
The first thing to tweak was the rate at which you gain and lose reputation. We’d intended reputation to be part of a kind of “reward triangle”, along with C-Bills and Salvage, where agreeing to take less payment would build good will and trust between you and your employer. The problem, of course, is that there was no world in which reputation was even close to as valuable to you as C-Bills or salvage. Even if you could max out reputation in one mission by negotiating, it’s very unlikely you ever would.
While we did spend some time trying to figure out ways to make negotiating for reputation more valuable, it eventually just made more sense to stop trying to force that system to work the way we’d originally imagined it. I suspect that we could, but it would take a lot more redesign of other mechanics to fit it all together, and in the end it wouldn’t be more fun than where it’s at now -- and if a change isn’t going to make the game more fun, it’s not really worth doing.
Instead we’ve front-loaded the reputation rewards. Before, you’d get a baseline of 1 point of rep for every point of difficulty. We pushed that up to 1.5, and then to 2, just to see how it felt, and shifted more of the rep gain away from the negotiation process. Just doing missions for an employer is enough to get them to like you, and eventually trust you. But at the same time, this increased rep gain needs to be balanced or every faction would quickly rise to “we love you forever”. The original design was that, generally, your target wouldn’t care if you took missions against them; after all, you were only a mercenary. However, we needed a way to drain off some of that reputation gain, so we sharply increased the rep loss for taking jobs against a particular faction. As well, we wanted to emphasize the criss-crossing alliances and rivalries of the 3025 setting, so on top of the rep loss with the target, you also lose rep with all your employer’s enemies. Take a job for the Federated Suns and Liao is going to like you less, even if they weren’t your target. It’s a minor rep loss, but it adds up over time, and if you keep being a lapdog for the filthy FedRats, their enemies will eventually treat you as an enemy, as well.
On the other end of the reputation system, we needed to address a fairly major omission: what’s the actual point of it all? Why should you bother trying to be friends with Davion or enemies with the Taurians? What do you get out of it? Initially, the idea was that it would just affect mission availability and shop prices, but that’s a pretty weak argument for all the work we were asking you to do to level up your rep. So we started asking: what do people really want out of reputation? What part of the mercenary commander fantasy is being served by it? And what we came up with was alliances.
Your collective reaction to the Kickstarter, and your conversations on our forums, made it quite clear: you wanted to declare your allegiances openly, and proudly represent one or another of the Successor States. Message received! When you reach the pinnacle of reputation with a faction, they’ll make you an offer: formally ally with them, become an employee of their House, and agree to make their enemies your enemies.
As an ally, the contract system no longer offers you missions that target your allied House, and your reputation with them can never fall below zero. They also give you access to special quartermaster shops that contain high-end equipment and rare ‘Mech parts. At the same time, you’ll formally become Enemies with the factions that hate your new allies, and your reputation with them will be reduced to zero -- and it can never rise above zero.
What’s more, if you own the Flashpoint DLC, allying with a faction will unlock access to some of the hardest content in the game. We’ve created one punishingly difficult Flashpoint for each faction with tremendous rewards at the end, touching on major events and conflicts of the setting’s timeline. You’ll be working directly with your faction’s representative, taking on sensitive, top-secret missions to advance their interests in the region.
And, of course, now that we have the notion of alliances and enemies, we have even more hooks to which we can attach content. Each of the Successor States has an agenda, in the interwar period, and those agendas will likely shape future content -- we’re not talking specifics yet, but we’re talking about the timeline and the setting and getting some very interesting ideas.
Oh, and pirates. Did I forget to mention pirates? I suspect that the first person asking if they could take missions for the pirate faction posted that question within 24 hours of our initial Kickstarter launch. While I was looking at our plans for the 1.3 update, I realized that the only thing standing in the way of rampant piracy was a lack of pirate-specific content. So we set some priorities and we made pirate content happen. Now you’ll be able to take missions offered by shady characters with ambiguous morals. Well, different shady characters with ambiguous morals.
Granted, everyone hates pirates, so it’s not a path for the weak of heart. And while you can become allied with the pirates of the region, they don’t exactly have a military quartermaster to offer you top-end weaponry and ‘Mechs, or the resources to mount a major Flashpoint-style operation. But if you want to hoist the 31st century equivalent of the Jolly Roger, you’re free to do so. When the entire Inner Sphere loathes you, and you’re scrounging on the fringes of civilization, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Matey.
Practically, though, that system ran headlong into the same issue I’ve talked about in previous diaries: we shifted focus away from pure sandbox play to a guided storyline, and tightened the play area to a much more controlled and accessible portion of the map. This approach worked well for our initial goals, but as I mentioned in the Career diary, we’re thinking about the sandbox again, and what we need to do in support of sandbox gameplay.
Naturally, reputation came up. While you were working exclusively for the Restoration, it really didn’t matter what anyone thought of you, so we didn’t spend a lot of time elaborating on reputation-based content. If we wanted to turn you loose on the whole Aurigan Reach in Career Mode, though, we needed a way for you to make some larger-scale decisions about your company’s relationship with the real powers of the Inner Sphere.
The first thing to tweak was the rate at which you gain and lose reputation. We’d intended reputation to be part of a kind of “reward triangle”, along with C-Bills and Salvage, where agreeing to take less payment would build good will and trust between you and your employer. The problem, of course, is that there was no world in which reputation was even close to as valuable to you as C-Bills or salvage. Even if you could max out reputation in one mission by negotiating, it’s very unlikely you ever would.
While we did spend some time trying to figure out ways to make negotiating for reputation more valuable, it eventually just made more sense to stop trying to force that system to work the way we’d originally imagined it. I suspect that we could, but it would take a lot more redesign of other mechanics to fit it all together, and in the end it wouldn’t be more fun than where it’s at now -- and if a change isn’t going to make the game more fun, it’s not really worth doing.
Instead we’ve front-loaded the reputation rewards. Before, you’d get a baseline of 1 point of rep for every point of difficulty. We pushed that up to 1.5, and then to 2, just to see how it felt, and shifted more of the rep gain away from the negotiation process. Just doing missions for an employer is enough to get them to like you, and eventually trust you. But at the same time, this increased rep gain needs to be balanced or every faction would quickly rise to “we love you forever”. The original design was that, generally, your target wouldn’t care if you took missions against them; after all, you were only a mercenary. However, we needed a way to drain off some of that reputation gain, so we sharply increased the rep loss for taking jobs against a particular faction. As well, we wanted to emphasize the criss-crossing alliances and rivalries of the 3025 setting, so on top of the rep loss with the target, you also lose rep with all your employer’s enemies. Take a job for the Federated Suns and Liao is going to like you less, even if they weren’t your target. It’s a minor rep loss, but it adds up over time, and if you keep being a lapdog for the filthy FedRats, their enemies will eventually treat you as an enemy, as well.
On the other end of the reputation system, we needed to address a fairly major omission: what’s the actual point of it all? Why should you bother trying to be friends with Davion or enemies with the Taurians? What do you get out of it? Initially, the idea was that it would just affect mission availability and shop prices, but that’s a pretty weak argument for all the work we were asking you to do to level up your rep. So we started asking: what do people really want out of reputation? What part of the mercenary commander fantasy is being served by it? And what we came up with was alliances.
Your collective reaction to the Kickstarter, and your conversations on our forums, made it quite clear: you wanted to declare your allegiances openly, and proudly represent one or another of the Successor States. Message received! When you reach the pinnacle of reputation with a faction, they’ll make you an offer: formally ally with them, become an employee of their House, and agree to make their enemies your enemies.
As an ally, the contract system no longer offers you missions that target your allied House, and your reputation with them can never fall below zero. They also give you access to special quartermaster shops that contain high-end equipment and rare ‘Mech parts. At the same time, you’ll formally become Enemies with the factions that hate your new allies, and your reputation with them will be reduced to zero -- and it can never rise above zero.
What’s more, if you own the Flashpoint DLC, allying with a faction will unlock access to some of the hardest content in the game. We’ve created one punishingly difficult Flashpoint for each faction with tremendous rewards at the end, touching on major events and conflicts of the setting’s timeline. You’ll be working directly with your faction’s representative, taking on sensitive, top-secret missions to advance their interests in the region.
And, of course, now that we have the notion of alliances and enemies, we have even more hooks to which we can attach content. Each of the Successor States has an agenda, in the interwar period, and those agendas will likely shape future content -- we’re not talking specifics yet, but we’re talking about the timeline and the setting and getting some very interesting ideas.
Oh, and pirates. Did I forget to mention pirates? I suspect that the first person asking if they could take missions for the pirate faction posted that question within 24 hours of our initial Kickstarter launch. While I was looking at our plans for the 1.3 update, I realized that the only thing standing in the way of rampant piracy was a lack of pirate-specific content. So we set some priorities and we made pirate content happen. Now you’ll be able to take missions offered by shady characters with ambiguous morals. Well, different shady characters with ambiguous morals.
Granted, everyone hates pirates, so it’s not a path for the weak of heart. And while you can become allied with the pirates of the region, they don’t exactly have a military quartermaster to offer you top-end weaponry and ‘Mechs, or the resources to mount a major Flashpoint-style operation. But if you want to hoist the 31st century equivalent of the Jolly Roger, you’re free to do so. When the entire Inner Sphere loathes you, and you’re scrounging on the fringes of civilization, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Matey.
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