02 August 2010BattleBlog - MechDreams - The Story of TRO3085 (Post Release 1)

Greetings TRO readers,

Welcome to the year 3085 (Well to a small time warp to 3085, part of the universe is still happily plodding into 3079 with the second Liberation of Terra).  Just a scant four days have passed since the release of Catalyst's most jammed packed TRO and your reactions and enthusiasm has been off the charts. Of course with every cheer of enthusiasm, there are always the inevitable questions, shouts, and even down right well can we be generous and call them complaints?

Some folks say you are not a success until you have your first critic. If you take that approach then Catalyst and BattleTech must be the most popular thing since sliced bread. Well I can't speak for Catalyst as a whole, I'm still just a freelance product developer, but I can say I'm thrilled with the product reception and from what the bosses have deemed to pass onto me, they seem pretty darn happy as well.  The positive reception by far outweighs the not and this product is an overwhelming success. 

Still there are some reoccurring questions and themes in the last few days that I wanted to take a minute to expound upon.

The Night Wolf and the Targe: A lot of "focus" has been given to these designs. The Targe makes some 3025 Light 'Mechs look like a good thing. I mean how many people willingly use MRMs anymore? Unless you want a great mind clearer (MRM  20 and above), then they have some striking weaknesses as a weapon. Yes they do, and the Targe was designed to be bad from the get go. Bad design decisions, limited availability of equipment, and accelerated development all led to a design that makes lackluster seem like a stretch goal.

And that was exactly what the goal was. The Targe was never a stellar success in the Dark Age. If the DA version is an improvement, that kept the unit in use (though probably not still being produced), then you'd need a pretty horrid design for the original version. Designing a dangerous 'Mech is easy, a mediocre one takes work and a down right bad one is really hard.

The Night Wolf is a 'Mech that tries to be a lot and ends up being so so at a lot of things. When Herb first saw the stats for it, he paid it perhaps the best compliment the designer of the stats could have ever received. Herb said "Great cat, it's a Clan Albatross." When trying to build a bad Clan assault, you've got to work carefully. After all the 5/8 niche was filled way back in the original TRO:3050. So anyone who looks at the Night Wolf and thinks it is a design going through an identity crisis, well they are absolutely right.

Infantry: This section began  as an experiment. A wild idea of Randall's that was nothing more than a few sentences on the original outline. It became one of the runaway hits of the product. This was a labor of love and effort of many people, from Randall's initial vision and then brainstorm to stat out all the infantry types from Tactical Operations and TechManual to the stellar work of Chris Marti in taking the outlines for all the infantry and putting them to stats. Fill in the middle of that the product development work and all the fact checking and there are a lot of people to be pat on the back for some stellar team work.

And yes, it was the plan that any of these infantry units could be used as a generic type. Change the names and slap on a generic laser rifle and the Frogmen could be any faction SCUBA troopers.

Proofing of the product: My we do have a lot of missing commas, misplaced bold and other weirdness. Yes, we certainly do. On the one hand it breaks my heart. We worked really hard on this project and still we missed some things. Some of them we didn't even miss, we just got moving so fast at the very end that some of the fixes didn't get to the right place until it was too late. A lot of folks have said something to the nature of "I'd rather have seen the product delayed another week and more effort on proofing done." Sure we could have done that and caught a few more, but we'd never catch them all. So a place like Random House has the resources to rip a book apart and make sure it is perfect. Well almost perfect. Even the huge publishing companies make mistakes and they have far more resources than a small game company.

Someone else suggested a "Beta". This has been highly successful with the RPG. Truth be told, we planned to do that with the TRO. As has been oft cited, no plan survives contact with the enemy and nothing survives contact with reality. Last minute issues in the production schedule meant we ate that buffer we wanted for an external beta. But at the same time, that lost beta was still an internal review time and we never stopped improving the release.

In the end you have to decide when something is "good enough". To that Catalyst practices the adage of philosopher Voltaire, "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." Is TRO:3085 perfect? No it may be Prefect, but it would be nigh on impossible to make it "perfect", so we went for as damned good as we could get. In the end, you have to ship at some point and we reached that point.

You gave away my factions cool tech! We're losing our faction uniqueness! Yes we did, no you're not.

There are enough of you loyal fans out there to help me out here. Reach back to TRO:3025. Now look over those original fifty five 'Mechs and accompanying ASF and vehicles. There were some themes, like the Free Worlds shortage of PPCs, but not a single nation had technology that the other nations didn't have. Anyone who remembers the early days of the game can attest that there was certainly plenty of faction uniqueness to go around. Stealth armor doesn't define the CapCon and the RAC may be a cool autocannon, but it no more makes the Davions, Davions then a coffee maker makes a store a coffee shop.

TRO:3085 is starting a new era of the game. In a lot of ways it is 3025 all over again. Level playing field, where it is how you use the technology, the armies, the politics that defines a faction, not the cool technology.

With all that said, I want to thank everyone for their comments. The good, the bad and the in between, Catalyst appreciates all the comments and the feedback. This game exists because of you and your comments are the feedback we use to guide the future.

Thank you,

Joel BC

TRO: 3085 Product Developer