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...