BattleTech

We’ve already seen a good bit of BattleTech’s combat as it moves toward launch next year, but last week developer Harebrained Schemes gave me a look at its metagame - an XCOM-style management sim where you take control of a crew of space mercenaries just trying to get by. It’s a seriously cool and complex way to tie together some already exciting combat.

You can also watch new gameplay from a mission early in the story below:

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You’re not heroes or saviors and you’re not the last hope of the galaxy, you’re just some unlucky soldiers trying to feed themselves. There’s a main questline full of revolution and royalty that will thrust your team toward greatness, but it seems almost incidental (and actually ignorable) to whatever story you want to forge for yourself.

And that much more humble story starts in an unimpressive and cramped dropship you call home. It’s full of distinct and interesting characters who manage everything from mech development to navigation to just making sure your crew gates paid and fed.

It’s a sprawling operation to control, and one that will grow differently through your own decisions and actions over the course of a game. You’ll eventually get a bigger ship to set up shop in, and can outfit it with special rooms to entertain or upgrade your crew while you continue to grow your mercenary company in both size and reputation.

BattleTech Out-of-Combat Management Systems 10 IMAGES

A key part of that I liked was how you negotiate terms before each mission, using money, scrap, and personal reputation as bartering chips. You can’t have all three, so you have to decide whether you want more money to pay your crew or more scrap to upgrade your mechs - or less of both so that people will think higher of you later on. It’s a super cool system, and one that doesn’t seem like it will always have an easy answer

I also really like that your character isn’t a faceless commander in all this. Similar to the opening of a game like Mass Effect, you customize your look and choose from a series of backstory choices that help define who you are and where you came from. Then you get to climb in a Mech for yourself and fight alongside the rest of your Lance, the BattleTech name for a squad.

Where the rest of BattleTech’s mech pilots (called MechWarriors) are procedurally generated, building stories and personalities as you actually experience them in missions, it will be nice to have a specific face to connect with in the battlefield. It will also be a bit of a tactical advantage, as your player character doesn’t have permadeath in the way every other MechWarrior does.

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I asked the Harebrained Schemes where the value of those additional soldiers fall on a spectrum from XCOM to Darkest Dungeon - the former making each soldier feel important to keep alive and connect with, while the latter treats its heroes more like batteries to be used up and disposed of - and they said BattleTech is definitely more on the XCOM side of things.

“ It’s a lot easier to replace the meat than the metal.

MechWarriors each have their own stats and specialities, so it becomes a game of matching them up with a mech that suits them best, as well as making sure your overall team fits together strategically. That said, you’ll likely need to resist the urge to bond a pilot to their mech too much, as it’s a lot easier to replace the meat than the metal.

Where mechs can be an expensive and rare resource, one worth protecting when you can, MechWarriors themselves come cheap. You still want to keep them alive and improve each of your troops over time - especially if you start getting connected to them, as I almost certainly will - but if faced with a hard choice in combat, you’ll probably want to make sure your mech is coming home one way or another.

Apart from which MechWarrior is piloting it, each mech can be extensively customized. Different weapons and upgrades can be equipped to every section of your mech, with each arm, leg, and body piece getting their own loadout and stats. It’s a complex system, but one Harebrained Schemes tells me the campaign will ease you into.

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MechWarrior 5 is another long-awaited sequel set in the same universe.

But the idea still isn’t that you’ll be able to one day max out your behemoths to be unstoppable killing machines. BattleTech is fundamentally a game about just barely scraping by, and deciding what to improve and which mech to repair first can be pivotally important choices to make. Even toward the end of the story, you shouldn’t expect to have a perfectly outfitted Lance, and that’s even if you decide to complete the story.

BattleTech doesn’t stop after the main questline is done, and doesn’t end if you decide to skip it entirely - though you’ll be skipping some pretty stellar rewards along the way. But the only way to actually ‘fail’ a campaign is to run out of money and not make payroll. So as tough as the decisions may be, money makes the BattleTech world go ‘round, and you better make sure your metal is safe.