297 replies to this topic

[Anjian]

They got a lot of potential I will say, with DLCs for campaigns, maps and new mechs. New mechs will especially be good, if they license more from PGI, which they can share proceeds with.

[Zacharias McLeod]

Anjian, on 26 April 2018 - 06:03 AM, said:

Was it the C64 or Amiga? Or both?

Both.

https://en.wikipedia...k%27s_Inception

I have only the Amiga version. And yes I have a working Amiga 500 too (OK, I have more than one workable Amiga 500 and one Amiga 1200).

[Bragg936]

Got it on GOG for release, got to hand it to hairbrained they really do a good job of explaining the universe,
Here are some example

• Hover over tooltips
  
• lore bites in loadscreen
  
• mech descriptions when you get a new mech

I really like the hover over toolips a la Tyranny, dont remember what character x or faction y are about, hover over for a floaty with some background and relvelnt points.

It also seems your background affects ingame dialouge choices but im not sure if it tranlates to gameplay impacts or just roleplay (did everyone start with a blackjack?)

Battles feel very tactical, but can be a bit RNGesus at times, had an enamy commando that just would not die (stripped and zombied he just kept going), I cant say for certain at the moment if the balance falls foul of tonnage is king just yet.

I find it very fun manageing a company of merc, repair times, medical costs, story events that affect gameplay (one of my dude took his bunk apart for more space). Im wondering if down the line you will get penaltys for working against some factions (you can improve rep for discounts and stuff).

Oh and loot from battles very cool to salvage parts for a mech or get some new weapon off a dead enemy.

The major sticking points as far a gameplay go are not that major, verhicles seem a little overpowered and a wierd difficulty spikes going from 1skull to 2 skulls(out of 5 so very easy,easy,meadium hard and very hard right? (or not as the case may be))

Had a mission where i had to take out 4 tanks(bullpup, manticore, striker and lrm carrier) and 4 mechs (Spider, wolverine, victor and a shadowhawk) rated 2 diff. Killed the spider easily enough but then got stomped by the rest, the lrm carrier and the striker just dumped on me the entire match. The firepower advantage of a mech lance and a tank lance attacking at the same time is huge. So i think they need to poke the difficulty settings again

A few qualitly of life things like right click to cancel, weapons presets and color range bands would be nice addition to the point that im not sure why they did not get picked up in testing.

Perfomance has been ok but im running at max specs, a few framerate stutters and it eats memmory at the moment, but no crashes. (R9 380x, its maxing the card on EPIC setting)

Graphics are pretty good but the terrain could be a bit better, the animated cutscenes are amazing (think endless space/legend art), reckon there some cross studio collaberation going on there (Aurgian system anyone?)

The follow cam is interesting at first but a bit of a pain aftwards, you can turn it off/down though, I have it set for enemy only.

Overall a very cool game

Quick dump on piranha but there is more lore and back story in the opening cinematic, character creation and loadscreens than MWO, I made a post about just putting lore text into MWO a while back and I know others have as well, Hairbrained's Battletech really shines for how much of the Battletech universe they have put into the game. I just wish piranha would take the hint.

[Danger817]

Vonbach, on 25 April 2018 - 05:28 PM, said:

Yeah I'll skip this one. You want to make a SJW game don't expect me to buy it. Money saved is money earned.

I think SJW is stupid but I don't let it bother me or prevent me from playing this amazing game. It's your loss not playing this amazing game.

If I had to guess about HBS stance on the people who are making a stink about the "They" thing it would be this:

[Angel of Annihilation]

I haven't pick the game up for one reason and one reason only. The sheer amount of melee that takes place. Yes I understand mechs did engage in melee but from all the novels I have read melee generally always was a last resort and rarely happened because generally speaking you would do as much damage to your mech as you would the enemy mech. In all the video's I have seen, these mechs are running around kicking, headbutting and smashing into each other like bumper cars and honestly, melee seems to be about the most effective attack. It just totally ruins my vision of battletech.

[Tom Sawyer]

A few missions in and having a blast. Punching tanks or performing a DFA on them is awesome. The rate of pilot injuries seems a bit high. My character was in his shadowhawk when the pirate quickdraw fracking must have blew the RNG as my poor hawk got just blown apart resulting in a 100 day injury lol. Then a random event made my med bay supercharge and he got out in just 20 days. Graphics are meh but the tactics more than make this worth it

[yrrot]

Viktor Drake, on 26 April 2018 - 08:43 AM, said:

I haven't pick the game up for one reason and one reason only. The sheer amount of melee that takes place. Yes I understand mechs did engage in melee but from all the novels I have read melee generally always was a last resort and rarely happened because generally speaking you would do as much damage to your mech as you would the enemy mech. In all the video's I have seen, these mechs are running around kicking, headbutting and smashing into each other like bumper cars and honestly, melee seems to be about the most effective attack. It just totally ruins my vision of battletech.

Melee is definitely not the most effective attack against mechs. I think in the early game, melee seems strong because the enemies you face early have way less armor than stock loadouts. ~10 hours in, and melee is very "meh" compared to an alpha strike, unless maybe you have a mech built for it. It does get around evasion, though, so punching light mechs isn't terrible.

[Dino Might]

Danger817, on 26 April 2018 - 08:13 AM, said:

I think SJW is stupid but I don't let it bother me or prevent me from playing this amazing game. It's your loss not playing this amazing game.

If I had to guess about HBS stance on the people who are making a stink about the "They" thing it would be this:

Agreed. Not buying a game because you are mad about "people making a big deal out of something trivial," is just...precious.

[Iron Heel]

Dino Might, on 26 April 2018 - 09:53 AM, said:

Agreed. Not buying a game because you are mad about "people making a big deal out of something trivial," is just...precious.

Not "crying" or throwing a fit.
And Im relatively sure Harebrained isn't missing my $40 any more than McDonald's misses my patronage since I stopped eating fast food.
It was brought up as a topic and people responded.
I do always find it interesting the diatribes that follow a simple statement, and how it shows more about the person responding than the one making the original statement.
I want to play it and I will play it, eventually. And Harebrained will gladly take.my money when I do decide to..

Game killing, no.
Deal breaker, no.
Stupid *#^%&# marketing decission, IMO, Yes.

Edited by Iron Heel, 26 April 2018 - 10:57 AM.

[yrrot]

Iron Heel, on 26 April 2018 - 10:39 AM, said:

Not "crying" or throwing a fit.
And Im relatively sure Harebrained isn't missing my $40 any more than McDonald's misses my patronage since I stopped eating fast food.
It was brought up as a topic and people responded.
I do always find it interesting the diatribes that follow a simple statement, and how it shows more about the person responding than the one making the original statement.
I want to play it and I will play it, eventually. And Harebrained will gladly take.my money when I do decide to..

Game killing, no.
Deal breaker, no.
Stupid *#^%&# marketing decission, IMO, Yes.

One of the designers at HBS is trans. I'm guessing it wasn't a marketing decision at all.

[Brain Cancer]

CMDR Sunset Shimmer, on 25 April 2018 - 10:21 AM, said:

So I'm just going to put it out there... Magistry of Canopus. The most human-rights oriented place in the entirety of the Inner Sphere or Periphery. Their primary export is Porn, and they have cybernetic catgirls... do you REALLY think they don't offer "they" as a non-binary gender option out there?

My complaint is that we don't have in-game cybernetic catgirl pilots. I mean, Glitch would be a perfect cybernetic catgirl.

Modders, get on it.

[Ghogiel]

I played this a bit.

Combat does drag at times, can't speed up your own, enemy or allies turns even if they arent shooting. And will get samey and in the end no doubt, a just a tad too shallow to be entertaining for more than a play through.

HBS story, dialog and character writing is actually pretty good compared to even large AAA devs.

some mechanics are unbalanced.

skull skill rating can be pretty misleading.

pretty shocking optimisation and performance on the gpu for a turn based game with nothing going on. Working with unity right now in a VR compatible game that has a ton more AI, particles, higher rez models and meshes and so on, and can't quite figure out why theirs runs the way it does.

Load times can be a little long, I think this franchise is cursed lol

It'll probably keep BT nerds interested for a bit longer than a gamer into turnbased combat. 7/10

I'd hope with some QoL changes and some patches to fix the problems, DLCs could bring players back after the intitial play hype dies off. And even if that takes half a year or 9 months, the gameplay is straight forward enough without tons of convoluted skills or combos that you'll remember now to play as good as when you left off in no time.

Edited by Ghogiel, 26 April 2018 - 01:00 PM.

[Anjian]

i am seeing a good number of YouTubers pick up on it. Which is good. Nothing spreads the word around on a game faster than Twitch or YouTube.

[Zergling]

Viktor Drake, on 26 April 2018 - 08:43 AM, said:

I haven't pick the game up for one reason and one reason only. The sheer amount of melee that takes place. Yes I understand mechs did engage in melee but from all the novels I have read melee generally always was a last resort and rarely happened because generally speaking you would do as much damage to your mech as you would the enemy mech. In all the video's I have seen, these mechs are running around kicking, headbutting and smashing into each other like bumper cars and honestly, melee seems to be about the most effective attack. It just totally ruins my vision of battletech.

Melee is useful and has its place, but it definitely isn't the most effective tactic, nor should it be used all the time, or even most of the time.

Dino Might, on 26 April 2018 - 09:53 AM, said:

Agreed. Not buying a game because you are mad about "people making a big deal out of something trivial," is just...precious.

The amount of snowflakes getting triggered over it is just hilarious.

[MischiefSC]

Dino Might, on 26 April 2018 - 09:53 AM, said:

Agreed. Not buying a game because you are mad about "people making a big deal out of something trivial," is just...precious.

Shh. Don't make them change their mind. I bought 4 copies for friends (and will likely buy several more as bugs get fixed and it's optimized for people running on potatoes) and part of the selling point was that MP would be missing the most self-important and obnoxious segment of the gaming population.

A serious case of 'nothing of value was lost'.

The game is awesome. I get that it's a resource intensive beast and people without a beefy system have issues and I hope that gets fixed really soon. However the game itself? Effing amazing. I wish my player took less headshots; he's only been in 14 missions and taken 12 wounds. FFS I can only take him on 1 mission in 3 typically because he's healing from the last injury. My next closes pilot has 8 wounds in 19 missions.

AC5s are awesome. Dragon with max armor, AC20, 2 Smalls is a door-kicker with few peers at this stage in the game. Blackjack with 2xAC5s, I took the Shadowhawk and maxxed armor and filled it with SRMs. Shoot, brawl, shoot. I have a Treb and a Cent both outfitted with LRMs. I find I can sandblast the **** out of mechs with the SRMs and LRMs and then called shots with the Dragons AC20 up close and the 2x5s on the BJ to either pull weapon sides or ideally legs or CTs for quick finishes.

Weapon balance is excellent. I wish LRMs in MWO were as viable and useful as they are in Battletech, which is a strange thing to say. Because of limited mechs on the field, low total firepower for anyone, relatively limited overall range and low relative armor LRMs are in a good place. Useful, but not OP. They mix well with ballistics. Lasers are a bit too hot. MGs and smalls are awesome.

Campaign is just awesome and fun.

[IllCaesar]

Viktor Drake, on 26 April 2018 - 08:43 AM, said:

I haven't pick the game up for one reason and one reason only. The sheer amount of melee that takes place. Yes I understand mechs did engage in melee but from all the novels I have read melee generally always was a last resort and rarely happened because generally speaking you would do as much damage to your mech as you would the enemy mech. In all the video's I have seen, these mechs are running around kicking, headbutting and smashing into each other like bumper cars and honestly, melee seems to be about the most effective attack. It just totally
ruins my vision of battletech.

DFA is built in to inflict damage to your own mech and I've done some looking at the game files already so I strongly suspect that it could be modded so that regular melee does that as well. Could even mod the Guts skill tree to compensate for that by giving self-damage reductions instead of increasing the chance to hit.

[Brain Cancer]

Apparently, there are external methods of speeding up Battletech's animation, but all of them take modding tools that aren't innately part of the game's toolbox.

[IllCaesar]

yrrot, on 26 April 2018 - 12:30 PM, said:

One of the designers at HBS is trans. I'm guessing it wasn't a marketing decision at all.

She's answered a few of my questions on Twitter about the game and has been reasonably helpful. Since the game data is mostly in json files I'll be taking an interest in modding it (already helped somebody start off with a Steiner scout lance) with stuff like starting mech varying based on background so I'll probably be pestering her more that way. Its nice when devs are responsive on social media.

Brain Cancer, on 26 April 2018 - 12:55 PM, said:

My complaint is that we don't have in-game cybernetic catgirl pilots. I mean, Glitch would be a perfect cybernetic catgirl.

Modders, get on it.

Jokes on you, we already have Yang. He just got Yajirobe'd is all.

Brain Cancer, on 26 April 2018 - 07:56 PM, said:

Apparently, there are external methods of speeding up Battletech's animation, but all of them take modding tools that aren't innately part of the game's toolbox.

Nah, there's a debug option in the console for that. I forget how to open it but I saw it mentiond on the Steam forums. Something like using tilde and typing in "HBSrocks", something along those lines.

[IllCaesar]

MechaBattler, on 25 April 2018 - 10:25 AM, said:

Well I only have 8 gigs of ram. I'm hearing you need at least 16 for it to run smooth. Not sure how true that is. But the load screens are making MWO look good. So I might have to look for a sale on memory.

I'm running it on low settings with my laptop that has 8gb ram. On the lowest settings its fairly smooth. Stutters occasionally, usually when making a killing blow, but otherwise it runs well. I'm experiencing crashing but a lot of folks are (and a lot aren't) so who knows. Still though its no more than one per every two hours or so and about half of them were at the very, very beginning of a mission before there was any real amount of progress lost.

[DeadEye COTP]

With 16gb RAM, i7700k and a 980 it runs pretty average and has huge hiccups when components are destroyed or when you open up a new part of the map. Also running it at medium/high settings and there's really nothing to swoon over.

Mech and map textures are fairly average.

I blame them using Unity engine. Not sure why a game that had a massive backing would use such a poor engine to create a game. They made millions before they even started and opted to use an engine for indie games.

Unity isn't inherently bad for what it was created for, but you can really see the limitations as soon as you try to make something complex.

(I've also seen claims of people with 1080's having the exact same issues. Not sure why they would release a game in this state. The reviews are borderline positive. The game itself is not very complex at all and I can't even begin to imagine where all those funds went.)

Edited by DeadEye COTP, 26 April 2018 - 08:48 PM.