Battletech

Palum_sl said:

OK so, this is going to be Mech Commander v2

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A bit more than just Mech Commander if my hopes and their pitch become reality. There was a legit RPG called Crescent Hawk's Revenge (old old). They reference it in the trailer. My buddies and I believe it will be some kind of Cross Breed between Mech Commander/CHR. It should be a lot more lore than people are used to in Battletech games. There is some great lore to use as well that's reasonably compelling.

I haven't really followed this since the kickstarter launched, but have they said anything about modding options?

It's obviously not a deal-breaker or anything as I already backed it, but I thought there was some good stuff for Shadowrun and with stage 3 and the procedural mission system reached I got curious about it, and I couldn't find anything with a quick search for it.

Fogel_sl said:

Is this real life?

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This is just fantasy.

Not funding, but I hope this game ends up doing very well and becomes a future purchase.

Seems like a golden pitch for a modern mech game, but it comes off as something wrong when they seemingly have several moderately successful games behind them but can only afford to fund a tabletop simulator before running to crowd funding.

Sulrn_sl said:

Not funding, but I hope this game ends up doing very well and becomes a future purchase.

Seems like a golden pitch for a modern mech game, but it comes off as something wrong when they seemingly have several moderately successful games behind them but can only afford to fund a tabletop simulator before running to crowd funding.

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It's not a huge company and crowd-funding means they don't have to rely on publishers for the investment (and all the baggage that comes with it) which is the alternative.

Krag_sl said:

It's not a huge company and crowd-funding means they don't have to rely on publishers for the investment (and all the baggage that comes with it) which is the alternative.

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Which is the excuse for ShadowRun being a go or no; not for the next game to be chess+ or kickstart. See D:OS /D:OS2. Larian saw success with D:OS and has the resources for a D:OS2 as a fully functioning game with a story and crowd funded to go above an beyond.

If you have a successful game with 3 expansions how can you not afford to at least fund a new base game on your own (Stage 1 +2)?

They funded stage 1 which is chess+ and offers nothing else not even a versus mode, much less a story mode.

Larian is also building a sequel i.e. content is "all" they have to make, Harebrained is making a new game which means a huge part of the actual work is the base game which they did fund themselves.

You seem to be assuming that because they made a decently successful game that they made out like bandits and just have a couple of million dollars in profit to put in a new game on top of what they are already investing in the base game and in Necropolis. Non-blockbuster titles just don't necessarily make that kind of money and there's a reason that smaller studios went from publisher deal to publisher deal before kickstarter was a thing.

I could go in depth on explaining why I feel it's safe to say the company is risk averse and placing the burden on the consumer to produce a product, but it doesn't matter if you seriously consider chess+ to be a "base" mechwarrior game without any sort of story, 3d modeling, multiplayer, or multiple stages/levels.

Yea, but honestly at this point I'd take a cool chess game that didn't bore me. I'm just not as interested in dropping three+ figures on this game right now like I have others. I look at Kickstarter as a gamble so the better the odds the worse the potential winnings. I feel like this game is a fairly sure bet but the payoff right now seems OK but there's a tons of way I could end up not wanting to play an RTS because of my finicky tastes in the genre.

Sulrn_sl said:

I could go in depth on explaining why I feel it's safe to say the company is risk averse and placing the burden on the consumer to produce a product, but it doesn't matter if you seriously consider chess+ to be a "base" mechwarrior game without any sort of story, 3d modeling, multiplayer, or multiple stages/levels.

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Do you really think the base game they are making is going to be just the mech models imported onto a wireframe battlefield? For the base skirmish game they are going to have to build out the engine, make the UI, make the battlefields (yes, there will be multiple in the base game), model scenery props, build the AI, combat effects, combat logic and all kinds of other stuff.

I don't think it's wrong to say that the company is risk averse, most businesses are and I don't see how that is much of a negative.

Erronius_sl said:

My only real gripe with the KS/Shadowrun deal is that they had 2 separate Kickstarters totaling about $3 million, and the first 2 games felt like I'd paid to play the Alpha and Beta versions with Hong Kong being the release version (and I still had gripes with that). And I appreciate that even being a small company with relatively few employees that just their payroll would chew through that, but I still get what Sulrn is saying. Is HBS going to go back to Kickstarter for every game indefinitely? Are they going to depend to Kickstarter to pay a large part of their costs in advance forever?

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Only Harebrained can say if they are going to go back to Kickstarter for Battletech expansion and I doubt they have any real plans that far ahead now. I'm just saying that the alternative for many smaller studios have traditionally been to go to a publisher for funding for every game or do contract work (look at Obsidian). Very few independent studios are able to just self-finance a game with this kind of scope.

And no, they probably aren't going to Kickstarter for every game as they are already making Necropolis (though that is a smaller game).

Now I want to play Mech Commander again. Is it on GoG I wonder.

Kickstarter is basically just preorders bros, especially for well established cases like this. All it's there for is for them to establish that yes, enough people will buy this for it to be worth making.

Hitting up Kickstarter seems like a no brainer. Put yourself in the shoes of HBS leadership: you get to significantly offset upfront development costs, you get advance hype/marketing/interest/identify people who want updates, and you also get a gut check as far as how "big" it will be. If they launch this KS and interest is waaay less than expected, then they make a smaller/more affordable game that has a budget more in line with the interest.

The only downside of KS is the 8% cut they take which is still probably less than other methods of financing and makes your cash flow situation way better. A huge risk to any business is screwing up the cash flow equation and KS helps with that a ton.

For a studio the size of HBS and with the niche but very interested audience, not doing KS would be an idiotic choice. Someday if they have some crazy hit that makes $100M+, maybe that changes but this seems like a solid business choice from all sorts of angles.

Vilgan_sl said:

Hitting up Kickstarter seems like a no brainer. Put yourself in the shoes of HBS leadership: you get to significantly offset upfront development costs, you get advance hype/marketing/interest/identify people who want updates, and you also get a gut check as far as how "big" it will be. If they launch this KS and interest is waaay less than expected, then they make a smaller/more affordable game that has a budget more in line with the interest.

The only downside of KS is the 8% cut they take which is still probably less than other methods of financing and makes your cash flow situation way better. A huge risk to any business is screwing up the cash flow equation and KS helps with that a ton.

For a studio the size of HBS and with the niche but very interested audience, not doing KS would be an idiotic choice. Someday if they have some crazy hit that makes $100M+, maybe that changes but this seems like a solid business choice from all sorts of angles.

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No one is arguing that they shouldn't be going to Kickstarter. Only that they're overly reliant on it as a funding scheme to minimalize risk to the company, not the consumer. Saying Kickstarter is an extension of pre-ordering is dead on, and that brings on all the associated arguments of why it's ultimately bad for the consumer and why it's abhorrent for a "successful" company to minimize what they're willing to offer without the consumer taking the burden.

Erronius_sl said:

Yeah, but are they going to have more than one Kickstarter for the Battletech games series like they did for Shadowrun?

Shadowrun Returns by Harebrained Schemes LLC Kickstarter
Shadowrun: Hong Kong by Harebrained Schemes LLC Kickstarter

My only real gripe with the KS/Shadowrun deal is that they had 2 separate Kickstarters totaling about $3 million, and the first 2 games felt like I'd paid to play the Alpha and Beta versions with Hong Kong being the release version (and I still had gripes with that). And I appreciate that even being a small company with relatively few employees that just their payroll would chew through that, but I still get what Sulrn is saying. Is HBS going to go back to Kickstarter for every game indefinitely? Are they going to depend to Kickstarter to pay a large part of their costs in advance forever?



It's going to be difficult quantifying how well they've done, but I thought that they'd sold quite a few games and weren't doing badly.

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TBS, whatevs! They don't even make them anymore so RTS is anything with small units now to me.

Kickstarter tiers have also been a place to market collectibles to fans of franchises as well. As far as Battletech goes, the jackets, house items etc are another aspect to supporting these kinds of efforts where supporters of that tier are satisfied with the swag/game ratio they receive.