BattleTech Interview

Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech launched a couple weeks ago to some fairly positive critical reception, as well as a bit of user dissatisfaction with the game’s performance. The developers have acknowledged those complaints in a Kickstarter update where they laid out their plans for BattleTech’s future, but if you’re interested in something more personal, PC Gamer offers this interview with HBS’ Mitch Gitelman and Mike McCain, where the two of them talk about the game’s launch, future, as well as some of its known issues. An excerpt:

Some players have been experiencing crashes and performance issues, which you mention as a top priority in your post-launch roadmap. Do you have a grip on what was causing those issues?

MM: We do now, yeah. It took a few days and some long nights from some of our developers here. We see that stuff happen and there’s a strong emotional reaction. Nobody wants somebody to not be able to play or have a good experience with our work.

MG: The team here is focused less on the bug and less on the game than on the people that they’re hurting. You know what I mean? The people that are hurt. They’re really focused on solving problems for people, which makes it really cool to work here.

MM: That said, it is a small percentage of people that are experiencing a combination of hardware and software compatibility issues, primarily. We have a couple of leads and a patch that we’ll be likely putting out. We just put our first patch out yesterday. We’ll likely have a new public beta patch coming out [Thursday] or [Friday]. The way we do that is we put it out to a beta branch on Steam first, so that people experiencing issues can hop in. This next patch, we believe, has a fix for some of the video player crashes that people have been experiencing. We’re hopeful to continue improving that for the people that are experiencing issues, and obviously we’re continuing to provide a great experience for everyone else who’s been playing.

MG: Like we said in the update, that’s number one. Nothing else matters to us right now besides smoothing that experience for people.

Another thing that some people have noticed is that BattleTech seems to work their GPUs harder than expected.

MM: That one, also, we’re pretty confident is hardware-specific. We’re still working to triangulate a little more within that. We’ve been talking to Nvidia about it. That’s not to say they’re to blame, just that we’re investigating.

MG: We’re aligned in our goals.

MM: Again, it’s specific to some users. We’re also looking at—this next patch will push some memory usage optimization as well. Some improvements there.