Jordan Weisman on BattleTech Kickstarter

The folks over at [a]listdaily have talked with Harebrained Schemes CEO Jordan Weisman about the company’s plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign for a BattleTech PC game. The interview is fairly brief, but includes some info on what the developers intend to do with the game story-wise, and the reasons that convinced them to go with a crowdfunding campaign and to announce it at GenCon:

What can you tell me about the game?

It’s PC and Mac, and it’s an open-ended mercenary campaign. Where you’re going to be building your own mercenary unit. It’s mixing a lot of turn-based tactical with a lot of RPG elements, because you’ll not only be managing a lance of ‘Mechs but also Mechwarriors as well. You have all their careers and their skill trees, doing the depth of story like we did in Shadowrun that we want to bring to Battletech. As we say, the feudal Machiavellian politics that was at the core of the Battletech universe.

Will you have fiction to go along with the game?

Fiction is an important part, both in the game and accompanying the game. We’re working with the Catalyst guys so we coordinate with their fiction line. We’re putting the game back in the original setting in 3025, because I think it played up the geopolitics really well and it lost some of the feudal nature later on. We want to sell the whole sweep of the story and sell the platform to do that.