Re: HBS:BattleTech

So, I’ve just finished what I think may be my last Battletech play session. At 284 hours played, it’s been a good run. I’ve been meaning to write a review, as I now seem to occasionally write long-form game reviews, and HBS:Battletech is hands down my favorite game of the last 2 or 3 years.

From a game design perspective, HBS:Battletech is a complex animal. There are at least 3 largely independent components. The tactical mech battles themselves, the mercenary company management subgame, and then the “writing”, which includes the dialog, flavor text, cutscenes and so on.

Taken on their own, I’m not sure I’d grade any of these independent pieces as much better than a B+. The tactical game, for example, is fine. The interface is a bit clunky, the strategies get a bit repetitive, and overall it’s a clear step down from the modern XCOMs. But the combat is nicely rendered -- the sound effects are good, and it’s a fairly satisfying experience. So, B+.

The writing and “strategic” layer aren’t overly impressive by themselves either. What’s really remarkable about Battletech is how well the various pieces fit together. When he reviewed XCOM : Enemy Unknown, Yahtzee heaped praise on the organic interplay between that game’s strategic and tactical modes. But what XCOM did well, Battletech does better. As you blast enemy mechs apart, you’re watching what bits are flying off, not just because watching your enemies wither under your fire is inherently satisfying, but also because you’re always on the hunt for good salvage opportunities.

The writing, meanwhile, may not be at Bioware’s level, but it does place you solidly in the Battletech universe. And that’s worth a lot, because the Battletech lore is easy to lose yourself in, and that makes HBS:Battletech a real gateway into another world.

I think the writing succeeds as well as it does in part because it is cleverly modest. Battletech’s world is big and sprawling, and rather than try and walk you through some of the most dramatic moments in that fictional history, the game’s writers have picked a small corner of the galaxy and timeline for you to play in. That small corner makes your little mercenary company a big fish in a small pond, and gives the writers the opportunity to craft a story that’s wholly new to the Battletech universe.

So combine all three of these pieces -- strategic and tactical games that are ok on their own, but awesome in conjunction, plus a story that transports you deep into a carefully imagined future, and what you’ve got is an overall experience that’s much more than the sum of its parts.

That said, there is a “but”. What I’ve said above applies, certainly, to the 30-50 hours you’ll spend playing through the base Battletech campaign. It does not apply, unfortunately, to the post campaign content that HBS released for their DLC trilogy “Flashpoint”, “Urban Warfare”, and “Heavy Metal”.

Assessing exactly what went wrong in the DLC is an interesting topic. HBS clearly had a great team working on Battletech, and they seem to have kept it mostly intact going into the DLC. So why don’t the DLC build on what worked in the base game, and yield an even better experience?

From a project management point of view, it’s clear that a lot of resources were put into developing assets for new game maps. The urban environments, in particular, clearly posed a lot of fairly serious engineering challenges to get working.

But, from a player’s perspective, all that extra engineering doesn’t actually change the experience of the game much. As you’re grinding up money and rep, there will be a few places where you encounter a new environment, and that makes the grind ever so slightly less grindy -- but it’s a small payoff for such a large investment of developer resources.

Bigger picture, the core push of the DLC is the launch of “career mode”, a game mode that skips the campaign entirely, and lets you develop a mercenary company with no connection to the plot or characters of the campaign. The nominal purpose of playing career mode is to get a mercenary company with a high “score”, which is a number you can watch go up as you visit new planets, make new friends and enemies, and collect more mechs.

I’m not certain career mode itself is necessarily a misstep. Moving to a more “open world” sort of framework feels sensible, as it should yield a lot of single-player replayability outside of the core scripted campaign.

What I think more clearly is a mistake is the introduction of the “company score” mechanics. High level, the idea that your goal is to establish a well-regarded mercenary company makes sense in the logic of the game world. But, the details of how the score mechanics are implemented do not. For example, you get score bonuses for having complete collections of different classes of mechs. But why? Who in this world possibly cares exactly what chassis my company has in long term storage? Your score goes up every time you visit a new world, but, again, why? If it’s a question of developing a wide network of contacts or whatever, shouldn’t I need to do more than merely visit a new world to make that happen?

Despite the nonsensical score number, I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing career mode. And I’ll admit that it does succeed on a basic level -- it does indeed give players a way to keep enjoying the single-player content long after they’ve finished with the campaign.

But, I’m convinced it could have been a much more compelling experience than it is; perhaps by reallocating some of the (apparently considerable) resources that went into developing new map types.

As I’m playing through career mode, I do start daydreaming about what my company might be doing with all the resource’s we’ve collected. From the abundant lore, I know the Grey Death Legion setup a home base on a planet in League space, and then got into any number of adventures involving said base. Once my company has enough mechwarriors and mechs, maybe it will be able to do something similar? Maybe all these resources I’m stockpiling could go into building a company that’s capable of doing more than attempting single-lance missions?

I think realizing some of these kinds of daydreams is a natural direction a better fleshed out “career mode” might go in. Give the player more stuff to invest in -- maybe a home base, maybe an extra leopard, maybe deeper strategic options that only become unlocked after allying with a great house. Implementing anything along those lines would take real development work, of course. But, to create an open world game that feels satisfying and complete, I think that’s exactly the sort of work you need to do.

What HBS has done instead is effectively just to cut out the (pretty solid) tactical/strategic blend that worked so well in the campaign, and let it stand on its own. And on its own, it is still pretty good. But, it’s not as awesome as the campaign was, and overall it can’t help feeling like about what it is -- 2/3rds of a very good game hacked into a form where you can keep playing it more or less endlessly.

The “Flashpoint” missions do give you some world-expanding content that’s designed for career-mode. And again, they succeed at a fairly basic level without really excelling at the level of the campaign. The flashpoints are fun, and they make career mode a bit more interesting, but they also have weaknesses that reveal a certain lack of interest from HBS. For example, with the “Heavy Metal” expansion, much higher quality weapons suddenly became available throughout the game. But, the Flashpoint mission rewards remained untouched, so, something like a Gauss Rifle, which once was fantastically rare, is now a rather underwhelming reward for completing a flashpoint story. Rebalancing the flashpoint rewards for “Heavy Metal” probably wouldn’t have been a huge job, but, HBS didn’t bother, and the result is that playing with the final DLC actually makes the game worse in some ways than playing without it.

I haven’t actually tried replaying the campaign with “Heavy Metal” enabled, but, my suspicion is that it would actually be a much less compelling experience for about the same reasons -- “Heavy Metal” simply introduces too much good stuff that you can get too easily. “Heavy Metal” may be fine for players who have already beaten the campaign, and are on their 3rd iron man career mode playthrough. But, I feel sorry for a player who may be discovering Battletech for the first time, and who makes the mistake of doing their first campaign playthrough with the Heavy Metal content enabled. It’s sad to think that the masterpiece that HBS released at launch has actually gotten less fun as a result of 2 years worth of continued development and DLC.