Battletech is out, and it’s a good game. But don’t think that HBS is resting on their laurels just yet. The developer has released a roadmap that details some of their plans for the first major update to the game. The roadmap lays out a bunch of plans for the future, with focuses in multiple areas.
The team is aware of the many performance and stability issues plaguing some users, and fixes are on the way. A v1.0.1 has also been released today and a general bug fix update is also planned for later. But it’s not just a technical patch that fans can expect. The devs want to make up for the launch fiasco it seems.
The devs are hard at work analyzing the feedback from players, and integrating it into the game. One of the features coming will be MechWarrior customization so players can heavily modify the look and playstyle of their machines. The following is included in the update which is expected to release in either June or July. This is the first of several major updates planned for Battletech.
- Accelerated combat options – We’re working on options for players who would like to accelerate the pace of combat missions.
- MechWarrior customization – We know that many players would like to change the appearance, callsign, name, and voice of all their MechWarriors, not just their Commander. This didn’t make it in for launch but we’ll be adding it in Update 1.
- Granular difficulty settings – A set of discrete options for players to customize the challenge level of the game in different areas.
- MechLab / Store / Salvage quality-of-life improvements – Interface additions to reduce friction when buying and salvaging new items.
- Tutorial-skip option – Allowing players who have already played the prologue missions to skip those missions when starting a new campaign, and get right to the Leopard.
- Addressing difficulty spikes – We’ll be working on smoothing out some issues with unexpectedly hard (or easy) content. Not to remove all difficulty variance, but to address clear outliers.
- Live-streaming quality-of-life improvements – Audio persisting when alt-tabbed, for example.
Harebrained Schemes are planning more updates later and are also hoping to release “a larger paid content expansion or two”, but the primary focus for the next few months is all about tweaking the core gameplay to make the experience that much better. Fans might even get a handful of expansions that completely change the way the game is played by altering combat. Of course, we can expect plenty of new weapons and mechs too.
If you missed out our review of BATTLETECH, check out what we had to say about this fantastic game about giant robots.
