Battletech by Harebrained Schemes (Shadowrun Returns)

So, I decided to give it another try, and so far it is working fine.

Just don’t alt-tab suring cut scenes.

The intitial interface for loading out your mechs for your first real battle…painful. Like there’s a warnign telling me there’s a problem with my mech at the deployment screen, but to fix it I have to close that screen and open the mech screen, then try and figure out tonnage etc. Should be a direct click to fix it, and an option to ‘select default.’

I also had to do the modding trick to speed things up.

Seriously, I wonder who thinks some of this stuff up sometimes.

Instead of/in addition to hrs to complete or average hrs played, maybe someone should create a number of clicks to get something done metric.

And measure things like inventories in rpgs. how many clicks to sell something, or transfer it to another hero, and how much time spent in your lootbag, how much time spent in menus.

Ditto how much time spent in cut scenes.

Imho this stuff is almost disrespectful to the playerbase! I wish i’d had a solid month to play this before going to the PDX Con and maybe abusing Jordan Weissman hahaha! (this was a joke. Don’t call the dox police or whatever!)

edit: is there an option to sort salvage by value?

You don’t like the game. Fine. Move along, many of us love it and have had no real problems.

If you dont like his opinions, move along. Many of us love hearing from others with differing opinions.

There are quite a few UI issues with the game, though I do love playing it. Sorting salvage is a legit complaint, for one, as is the inability to automagically refit a mech to it’s stock config.

The camera is the only thing that consistently annoys me now. I’m okay with checking my phone while I wait for the travel cutscenes to play.

The “opinions” were just a gratuitous bashing of the game. A rant, not an opinion. And the things mentioned aren’t things that are even problems, but features. And he calls the game “disrespectful to the player base.” That’s absurd, and he admitted he abandoned it and came back again. Apparently just to trash the game.

If you like opinions, then enjoy mine on the nature of his opinion.

Yeah, there’s nothing “disrespectful” in the game at all. It’s a combo of design decisions that may or may not be loved by all, and trying to fit enough in to the game to be satisfying without bloat and feature creep–something the BT universe could certainly provide in spades.

I usually have a short attention span for filler in videogames, but the universe and gameplay are so engaging I have only been annoyed a handful of times by how slow the game can be. The worst situations are when I need to run a fair distance in my mechs but there are enemies in scanner range (e.g. turrets) so it can take a fair while to keep cycling through turns just moving bit by bit.

CF - AeroTech

No. That wasn’t it at all. This is where I disagree with your opinion completely.

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Well let’s face it, the UI sucks and the inexplicable unskippable cut scene that runs whenever you travel anywhere is pointless and extremely annoying. This last feature is indeed disrespectful because it wastes the player’s time for no reason and offers nothing in return.

That said it’s still a fun game, but the cut-scene decision seems like it’s meant to add play time, which is a grossly improper thing to put into a game without providing some kind of compensation in terms of gameplay or story or something.

I find it hard to believe that the game devs said lets think of things to annoy our customers. I know let’s have them view a cut-scene over and over again. More than likely they did not anticipate the success of their game and that people would play it nonstop, which is the main reason that it hurts so much.

But all you have to do is play the game for a single hour before it gets annoying. And it’s annoying the first time you see it in a new game session too. This is not something they could have overlooked in casual gameplay testing. So it has to have been a deliberate decision, and increasing play-time is the only reason I can come up with offhand.

I’m fortunate in that I’m not easily annoyed by UI and stuff when playing a game I’m enjoying a lot. This happens to be one of those times.

However, if a game in terms of its core game design mechanics is bugging me already, then the UI etc can become among the many things that cumulatively pushes me over the edge.

I’m at 100 hours and still really enjoying jumping in every night to run a couple missions, see what new mechs I can track down, heck, I’m even headed back towards the next story mission from across the galaxy, going to take me months to get there, but when I do, I’m actually going to play the next story mission after Argo.

hahah

Early on, before I made a few changes, the UI delays were annoying me precisely b/c they were delaying and/or interrupting the game play, which I was enjoying intensely. After some editing, the debug console, and now the new patch which improved the memory leak moderately for me, the delays no longer get in the way of the game.

I will give HBS some credit for at least partially addressing the memory leak late game slowdown fairly quickly. Now if they could add some combat speed options, and give us a way to toggle off the jumpship animations, I would be happy to play the game unmodded.

The game itself, is extremely good for all the reasons mentioned here. One more thing I want to add is that although the Mechwarrior universe is a complete mess of sloppy backgrounding and ridiculous history, it’s a glorious mess, which allows some epic tales to be told and creates a setup for some epic set pieces. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the campaign in this game, and the character of Lady Arano. In the words of Lady Arano: “When they see what we’re piloting, they’ll wish they’d stayed home.”

I love the game and even enjoy the travel cutscenes. I love watching my ship fly and jump. Gives a great sense of distance and scale. It is like a short reprieve, a time to take a deep breath before jumping into a 4.5 Skull mission. I don’t need the barrage of mission after mission back to back. I wish there was more to do during the time and I of course also think options are good. Make them skippable. I wager though they use them for a specific purpose like purging memory or loading assets or something like that. The UI can definitely be improved.

I have to say, this is pure hyperbole. Yes, the transit scenes go on too long, and more importantly, are repetitive. But to say it’s “disrespectful” is, IMO, way over the top. Leaving aside my dislike of the entire “respect/disrespect” thing that serves as a stand-in for every other type of human interaction these days, the transit scenes are one way of dealing with transitions that allows random events and the monitoring of the timeline. Is it the best way? For many, maybe most gamers, perhaps not, but it definitely does give you a sense of the passage of time, and an incentive to upgrade your drives, if nothing else. I think with more events, more visual variety, and, yes, an option to simply skip from each task to the next in the timeline, it would be fine for most folks.

As to why it wasn’t done differently, I like the idea that the developer simply did not realize how intensely and for such long periods of continuous time we’d play the damn thing. Unlike the issues with hoarding, which IMO they should have foreseen, this one is a lot more understandable, to me.

Completely agree. The transit scenes do not bother me at all. I typically do 2-3 missions for each system I visit, so the transit scenes are a minuscule portion of my playtime. I don’t really understand how they can be such a big deal.

The only trashing happening here is you on me.

I bought it again because I want to like it, because it has all the ingredients of something good.

The UI is not very good, that’s not trashing, that’s an opinion based on having played many games with many UIs.

No auto refit of mechs? Fitting a mech out is an involving business. If I want to customise it then yeah, that is fun, and desirable, but the mechs do come in stock configurations, why not let me reset to stock configuration? How hard would that be to program? That’s a genuine question because I’m not a programmer, but it seems to me that all the requisites are there, and it’d be just another button.

As for “disrespecting” players, I stand by what i said. You choose to interpret it as a trashing of the game, but there are alot of needless pauses. It says something when Rock Paper Scissors decides to run an article teaching people to remove the extraneous pauses.

People seem to think disrespect in this sense is a super strong term, imho it isn’t. Many games do this (inventory management in nearly every rpg springs to mind.) If you can all suggest an alternative terminolgy to describe this, perhaps “failing to take into consideration how the player spends his time, and focussing on the pleasurable aspects instead of gating them behind unpleasurable intractions,” would indeed be more accurate. Feel free to substitute “disrespect” for the above if that stops you crying @Lohengrin.

Read the article - it’s not difficult to remove the annoying bits, which begs the question of why they were there in the first place. Plus it appears they are going to officially add in more speed options, so suck it @Lohengrin.

Plus there’s the unskippable cutscene. I’m working around that by making my tea/coffee but how in this dya and age, unskippable cut scenes are, imho, not acceptable. They are, that word again, disrespectful of my time. I want to get into the meat of the game, i want t blow shit up, I want to make thos einterestinjg tactical decisions about where to put my mech and why, which mech to use first, which weapon, how to handle the overheating, to see if my theory crafting of this pilot with this mech fitted out in this way makes sense or is a bust.

But no…got to watch a cut scene. And it’s not very interesting either! I don’t know why they added that, but I’m going to be generous and assume it’s because they thought it’d be better than making the player watch the clock run down until their mechs/pilots are ready for the next fight.

@Lohengrin read the replies after your post. These guys get what I’m talking about.

Lastly, and this last is something very subjective, the game crashes alot for me. And it crashes at the end of the missions. At the end.

Which means I have to save it constantly, or risk losing progress…I just lost the most recent misison Iwas playing. It’s doubly aggravating because I played it just right and got some lucky rolls, at one point my light mech one shotted an enemy locust. That hasn’t happened before, and won;t again most likely when I replay the mission.

And I will replay it.

@Lohengrin I hope you enjoy my opinion of your opinion of my opinion, because I certainly didn’t enjoy yours.