Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Beautiful Failure of Battletech 3025

Games are a diverse medium. They can be used in many ways to many ends, but for the most part you can divide modern games into three categories. There are games which try to tell a story, games that offer up a system for competition, and games that offer players a toolset with which to create their own story. There’s certainly more nuance to the spectrum of games, and the objectives which games attempt to accomplish beyond this are too many to mention. But for the most part you can break down what most developers are trying to do into one of these categories.

There’s usually quite a bit of overlap in these categories. Call of Duty 4, for example, gave players a compelling story and layered one of the best multiplayer FPSes in recent memory on top of it. Fallout 3 offered up a wonderfully realized coming of age story and simultaneously gave players an almost overwhelming degree of freedom to make their own adventure.

But it’s fairly rare to see a game which provides both a solid storyline, a structure within which to create your own narrative and a compelling multiplayer model. The only major release I can think of that provided all of that is Dynamix’s Tribes, and the DIY storytelling aspects of Tribes were dubious at best and non-existent at worst (although I challenge any gamer to not feel as if they’re part of an epic battle while they soar through the air above a cascade of explosions, struggling to shoot opponents out of the air as they fly).

However, there was a game in development, long long ago, that blended all of these elements, building off of the venerable intellectual property and placing it in a context where players could have a direct impact on a constantly shifting world around them while engaged in some of the gameplay so compelling that it still makes me want to write about it, eight years after the game’s beta’s cancellation.

Battletech 3025 wasn’t a well known game. It wasn’t scheduled to be a blockbuster release. The beta was released as part of multiplayer.net’s now defunct and at the time dismal multiplayer service. It was far from perfect, fraught with bugs and balance issues (good luck fighting a Raven armed with LRMs as a laser Javelin, despite the meager five ton difference) but even as a beta it presented a compelling model which managed a rare “triple threat” of a compelling competitive multiplayer model, complicated and intruiging story (although in this case it was nearly entirely taken from the existing Battletech lore) and a world where players could have an enduring impact through their efforts.

The core of the game was the tried and true MechWarrior combat model. Players would pilot multi-ton mechs of varying size and configuration into 4v4 combat against one another in brutal multiplayer matches from a first person perspective. Visually, MechWarrior has always struck a chord with geek culture (although its hard to see anyone not enjoying the fiction of piloting a giant robot into combat). It possessed all the standard trappings of the Battletech universe that have persisted since its tabletop origins, its only original contribution coming in the form of a new hit recognition and damage calculation system.

But this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing by any means. Battletech’s core gameplay has always been fun, and has never really required a massive overhaul (in fact the death of the series could be linked to the overhaul which Mechwarrior 4 brought to bear on the customization system, which destroyed a long standing gameplay concept). And with Battletech’s gameplay came its story.

The politically charged and morally dubious world of Battletech has never been the sort of place you can discuss in public. It’s sort of embarrassing to even think about when you’re not invested in the games. But once you’re in the cockpit of a Catapult its hard not to be invested, if only at a subconscious level. You might not know anything about House Kurita, but damned if you aren’t going to plant that badass dragon standard over the corpses of all those dudes with fists painted on their mechs.

The Battletech universe manages to offer up enduring and resonant symbols and then back them up with a deeply involved and complicated backstory with real human drama and plenty of moral ambiguity. Even if the writing was never up to Jonathan Lethem or William Gibson the world that Battletech made you a part of was compelling in a way many developers still struggle to grasp.

But what made Battletech 3025 interesting and unique against the sea of other Battletech games was the enduring tactical aspect. 3025 put the tiny, bite sized slivers of action into context, creating a galactic battle map against which players could engage in their skirmishes. Collectively players would win or lose control over swaths of the map, battle lines shifting over the course of days or weeks. Winning territory would translate into experience and cash for players, and holding territory in the long run would mean a slightly bigger paycheck from your faction each week.

It would’ve been fascinating to see how this system could function in the long run, but unfortunately 3025 was in beta for less than a year and never saw release. Numerous groups have tried and failed to resurrect the game, but legal issues and a floundering community which never emerged from its infancy have managed to stymie these efforts.

And so Battletech 3025 will remain forever in the past as a brief, brilliant glimpse of what could have been a revolutionary entry into the Battletech gaming catalog. Before Sovereign failed, before Planetside crawled its way to sustenance, there was another game blending persistent world game play with a non-RPG model. A game that, even with its adolescent pangs and problems, managed something which games today still aspire to.

It managed to remove players from their daily lives, place them in a world wholly different from their own, make them feel at home, and make them feel like they mattered.