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Developer Diaries #4: Career Mode

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HBS_Kiva said:
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When we were planning our first big expansion to the game, we knew we wanted to return to that initial sandbox concept, and see where it would take us. Enter Career Mode. In Career Mode, you can go wherever you’d like; there are no restrictions on your travel. You can take any mission from any faction, assuming they like you well enough to be willing to offer it to you. Difficulty slowly scales up as you become a more widely-recognized mercenary commander, rather than scaling up by story milestones. Without the Restoration missions and their huge payouts, you’re scrambling for the C-Bills to pay salaries and upkeep; you’re also not receiving any ‘free’ ‘Mechs from the plotline.

Career mode isn’t necessarily more difficult, though. There’s no pressure to complete story objectives, or get powerful enough to take on some of the nastier Restoration missions. You can wander around in the less-dangerous parts of the region, taking on routine challenges to build up your bank account balance.
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Although this might be answered in the livestream, I am curious. If we start a new game in career mode, will the Aurigan Reach be under Arano control, or the Directorate?

I think @Prussian Havoc would be ecstatic if it was the Directorate so he could finally work for them :).
 
MeiSooHaityu said:
Although this might be answered in the livestream, I am curious. If we start a new game in career mode, will the Aurigan Reach be under Arano control, or the Directorate?

I think @Prussian Havoc would be ecstatic if it was the Directorate so he could finally work for them :).
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OMGosh!
OMGosh!
OMGosh!

I had not even dared to dream!!!!!!

High Lady Victoria awaits our Service. "MechWarriors of the Aurigan Directorate, MOUNT UP!"
 
HBS_Kiva said:
Because of the way the difficulty settings can synergize with each other to make the game *much* harder or *much* easier than just what's implied by the number that are turned on or off, I decided not to try to figure out all the possible combinations and just how much harder or easier they make the game.
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You know some silly galoot will just come up with ideas to make every aspect ten times harder.....see below.

HBS_Kiva said:
I actually wanted to make 'Leopard Mode' (or maybe 'hysteria mode' ^_^) a setting in Career Mode, but it's a fairly substantial engineering task to rebuild all the game systems that expect you to have the Argo. Alas. Hopefully a modder will give me the awful, awful Leopard Mode of my dreams. :)
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I think you should call that "Edmon" mode, also make it so the Leopard only has one functioning engine, and only one (partially) functional head/latrine/bathroom. Then you *might* get something closer to the challenge Edmon seems to like.
 
HBS_Kiva said:
The catch, of course, is that there’s no end point to the game. You can keep playing as long as you want, letting decades of game-time pass. To make scores meaningful, we needed to limit that open-endedness. So we’ve added a time limit of 1200 days. You can keep playing after that, but at 1200 days we calculate your final score and display your final ranking, and then we stop tracking score. This means that if you choose, you can compare your final results with others, share screenshots of your ultimate ranking, and compete to try to beat the scores of others.

Why 1200 days? Because that puts the game date somewhere around mid-3028, and we’re well aware of the lore events of 3028...
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This is a great plan and I look forwards to playing it very much.

I would question how you arrived at the 1200 day mark for the scoring point however. Ideally I would like the scoring point to be around 5-15 hours of game play and I imagine others would have a their own ideas on the ideal game length that maybe either longer or shorter than that. I think the number of days that pass before a score is recorded should be based more on that than on Battletech Lore. It would be a shame if the 1200 days equated to such a long period of game play that many people who play the expansion can't log enough gameplay hours to reach it.
 
Viktor Heresy said:
Will we have random starting mechwarriors in career mode? Or at least the option? :)
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If I understand it correctly, we’ll have the Solo-Campaign Start so NO random Mechs and NO random MechWarriors.
 
The answer is 1200 days is chosen because that gets you right up to the 4th Succession War in the timeline. It's a not-so-subtle hint as to what's coming in the future, me thinks.
 
If difficulty will be based on mercenary company rating, will there be easier missions at the end game, where company rating is maxed, or only all the same 4 and 5 skulls missions?
 
pedal_pusher said:
This is a great plan and I look forwards to playing it very much.

I would question how you arrived at the 1200 day mark for the scoring point however. Ideally I would like the scoring point to be around 5-15 hours of game play and I imagine others would have a their own ideas on the ideal game length that maybe either longer or shorter than that. I think the number of days that pass before a score is recorded should be based more on that than on Battletech Lore. It would be a shame if the 1200 days equated to such a long period of game play that many people who play the expansion can't log enough gameplay hours to reach it.
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5-15 hours seems...short? Is this including mission sim time or just company management?
 
I like the fact that you are doing something to keep the game interesting in the "end game". Score system is not that interesting mechanic though. What I would find more interesting, is that you gain trust from the different factions quite slowly, and when their trust is low, they give you less important missions. They can be difficult, but not that important for the faction. When the trust is very high, they would give you missions related to their core military operations in their wars, and you would have bigger influence on what happens in the grand campaign. This of course also requires that the campaign is dynamic and the factions wage war against each other and there are some events etc.
 
HBS_Kiva said:
I actually wanted to make 'Leopard Mode' (or maybe 'hysteria mode' ^_^) a setting in Career Mode, but it's a fairly substantial engineering task to rebuild all the game systems that expect you to have the Argo. Alas. Hopefully a modder will give me the awful, awful Leopard Mode of my dreams. :)
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Please be advised that there is at least one person in the player base (me!) who would gladly pay for an expansion with new DropShips - the Leopard, a Union, even an Overlord, all set up so they can take upgrades and your med and tech team can improve.

I love the Argo, don't get me wrong, but if I could upgrade my med and tech teams I'd probably stay in the Leopard forever.
 
Yay! I can't wait till November that I can try this out!

Couple questions and comments:
  1. Randomized/Selectable starting equipment and mechwarriors pretty please. This would highly increase replayability
  2. Sid Meiers Pirates does have a scoring system, but there's also a story about finding your lost family that made me come back to this title multiple times. Any chance we'll get Flashpoints around maybe reconquering our home planet or whatever fits to the player origins?
  3. HBS_Kiva said:
    Difficulty slowly scales up as you become a more widely-recognized mercenary commander, rather than scaling up by story milestones.
    Click to expand...
    Nooooo, why would you do this? There's really not much of a difference between any two planets on the map besides their biomes. Make every systems difficulty fixed, so that there's always a range form 0.5 to 5 throughout the whole game. Being able to find work in a difficult zone whith highly lucrative contracts should be both a reward for upgrading your outfit and a necessity to keep paying for the increased costs of that outfit!
 
I love that your keeping the gaming within the frame work. So many modders have pushed the full IW map and while that is cool it feels so over the top when looking at the game design. Using the Reach you have a large enough area to explore and have a ton of story lines and you also have an area that makes sense for a small mercenary company to work and thrive. Please stay with this direction, it is awesome!
 
Spartakus said:
Yay! I can't wait till November that I can try this out!

(...)
Nooooo, why would you do this? There's really not much of a difference between any two planets on the map besides their biomes. Make every systems difficulty fixed, so that there's always a range form 0.5 to 5 throughout the whole game. Being able to find work in a difficult zone whith highly lucrative contracts should be both a reward for upgrading your outfit and a necessity to keep paying for the increased costs of that outfit!
Click to expand...

I second this , that was what i asked about.
 
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