Nic: After you guys did such a good job with Shadowrun, I think everyone was thinking “I really hope there’s some BattleTech coming next!”
Mike: There were a few Shadowrun backers that were photoshopping ‘Mechs into Shadowrun art, and that was awesome.
Nic: How long have you guys been scheming to get BattleTech onto the books?
Mitch: 4 years.
Nic: Since the beginning?
Mitch: Yeah, since we formed HBS we’ve talked about BattleTech forever. It’s just a matter of licensing, which is its own issue.
Mike: The team burst into a round of applause we announced we got the licenses.
Mitch: Spontaneous cheers!
Nic: So really quick question – is it just going to be called BATTLETECH?
Mitch: Yeah! It’s just going to be called BATTLETECH. We don’t want to equivocate or anything. It’s not “BATTLETECH: THE DISFUNCTION OF JARED’S SIN”. It’s BATTLETECH.
Mike: And it actually is appropriate to what we’re doing, because we’re trying to bring BattleTech back to its roots, both fictionally and game play wise. We’re set in the 3025 era, Third Succession War is over, and the Fourth is just starting percolate. There’s peace, but it’s not really peace. So we think it’s a really cool era, the history of the Inner Sphere, and we can really tell the kind of stories we want to tell. We can explore the depth of feudal and political intrigue of the franchise. We’re really excited.
Nic: BattleTech has been in many forms since its inception obviously. From tabletop to PC to Virtual World to MechWarrior to MechCommander. What style game is this? How will the players be interacting? With a MechWarrior or a ‘Mech? Or both?
Mike: Both! We’re making a turn-based, tactical squad combat game. You’re going to command a lance of 4 ‘Mechs on the battlefield. It’s going to be a single-player mercenary-style campaign. MechWarrior 2 is a good reference for that. You’re going to choose which missions you want to take. You’re going to hire new MechWarriors, upgrade your ‘Mechs, get salvage. All that good stuff, from mission to mission.
Mitch: And develop your MechWarriors too.
Mike: Yes! MechWarriors will grow. We’re careful not to guarantee specific features here, but we’re looking at MechWarriors with different quirks, personalities, strengths and weaknesses that might manifest over time.
Nic: Because from my recollection at least, in existing PC games, there wasn’t as much of a focus as developing the MechWarrior.
Mitch: In
MechCommander 2, we did. And that’s a great basis of knowledge of us to go forward. It was actually very successful in MechCommander 2 and I think the audience reacted well to it. So we can do even more of that.
Nic: Single-player or multi-player?
Mike: The initial game we’re taking to Kickstarter is a single-player, open-ended campaign. We are hoping we’ll do well in Kickstarter, so we are talking about multi-player as a stretch-goal. We’ll have more details about that as we get closer to Kickstarter, in the next couple of months
