BattleTech Update #52 – What’s Next?

Now that Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech has been out for a bit, a new update on the game’s Kickstarter page outlines the team’s future plans that include plenty of bug fixing in the nearest future, quality of life improvements later this summer, and some new content and maybe a few expansions after that. And with how significantly HBS’ Shadowrun series was improved by its expansions, I’m curious to see what will come out of that.

Here’s the detailed post-launch roadmap from the update that includes the notes for the game’s first patch:

BATTLETECH Post-Launch Roadmap

1. Compatibility / Performance Investigations

Our launch last week wasn’t perfect. A subset of players are experiencing hardware/system compatibility and performance issues that our team is working hard to investigate. Solutions for critical issues are always our top priority, and will be released as soon as they’re available and tested. Typically, we will release patches to our public_beta branch on Steam for a few days for testing before we push them to the default branch.

On that note – last Friday we released our first patch to the public_beta branch for testing. Today, that 1.0.1 Patch went live – you can read the full changelog here. We expect to release more patches to public_beta in the coming days and weeks.

2. General BugFix (Late May)

We expect to release at least one general bugfix/improvements patch later in May.

3. Localization (French, German, Russian) and Linux Support

These are both Kickstarter commitments and high priorities for our post-launch roadmap. (Along with a couple other Kickstarter commitments that didn’t make it in for launch.) We don’t have a more precise ETA yet for these items but will update you as soon as we do.

4. Update #1: Customization & Player Options (June/July)

We’re already beginning work on our first larger free Update to BATTLETECH. This Update is all about customization and reacting to common pieces of feedback that we’ve received from you on the game. Here’s a list of items we’re currently looking at for Update 1 this summer

• 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.

It’s important to note that the exact contents of Update 1 may shift during development. Please consider these general directions and priorities. We’ll post a more detailed and updated list of what’s in the Update closer to its release.

5. More BATTLETECH!!

The above is just the beginning! We’ll be continuing with more free Updates after Update 1, and we’d also love to release a larger paid content Expansion or two – but right now we’re staying focused on bugfixes and immediate reactions to launch feedback.

With your support, we could not be more excited to continue making BATTLETECH even bigger and better.