- [Man On Radio] This is Orbiting HQ to any available units We have mechs down at NAV Gamma. Golgo one-three reports four moonsharks on site. Bandits are hostile, I repeat, bandits are hostile. [explosion] [burning noise]

- [Jason] BattleTech is kind of a dark, twisted version of knights in shining armor. You've got these huge vehicles that you are the pilot of. Only in this case, the armor is hundreds of years old and beat the crap out of, you know.

- [Female Computer] Reactor online. Sensors online. Weapons online. All systems nominal. [techno music]

- [Jordan] Hi I'm Jordan Weisman, I had the honor of starting the BattleTech ball rolling and basically making up crap for 35 years. When I approach making a game, part of that is identifying what's the real core fantasy to the play pattern that was like what you did when you were 5 years old running around in the backyard. I think it was '83, I created a game called BattleTech which was a tabletop game where I tried to merge tabletop mechanics and RPG storytelling. I wanted and a game universe that could constantly turn so that each faction had its own legitimate worldview. And from one faction's point of view, they're the heroes and the other guys are the villains. Then we could tell the story from the opposite point of view. I also had a limitation as I only had X number of models, and so how do I make those models work for all the different factions. And that's where I came up with the idea that there was this one central government, the Star League, that developed all these mechs. Then they started fighting with each other, all using the same equipment. And then over hundreds of years, their technological base keeps declining to where those old mechs are still the most valuable thing in the battlefield. And that related it back to that kind of knights in shining armor concept, where you would pass the armor from generation to generation. The history of BattleTech in computer games is a long one. The very first ones were done by Infocom. The guys that made the text adventures that were so cool. And so they had produced MechWarrior 1, which was a very early attempt at a 3-D polygonal environment. But it was kinda super crude, and then they started a kind of long and torturous development for MechWarrior 2. The MechWarrior 2 team was really struggling with tech, and they almost abandoned the project. Then a fresh team came in and brought MechWarrior 2 to fruition. For Activision it pretty much tripled the size of Activision. They were putting in cereal boxes, I mean it was everywhere. It was pretty amazing. And then after that, MechWarrior 2, 3, 4 and soon to be 5. [techno music]

- [Russ] MechWarrior, MechWarrior 2, they provided us to actually have a hint of living out that fantasy that we got when we played the pen and paper BattleTech board game. People have always had a powerful fantasy of driving mechs and just absolutely stomping through everything in sight. This rich universe, there's so much there that you dreamed about. And so for me it's about trying to bring a level of exploration and freedom. That's where we wanted to go further. If the player wants to explore the Inner Sphere, and actually run a mercenary unit inside this rich BattleTech universe. You have complete freedom about where you go, where you start, what you buy and purchase, what you salvage, what you can salvage. So much freedom to the player to really run this mercenary outfit. Everything in the game is gonna show some level of damage state. There's very few games that have gone this far with destructibility at all, but certainly for all the MechWarrior fans, they're really gonna enjoy what they play in MechWarrior 5. [techno music]

- [Russ] We trust designers to create powerful arenas and gameplay experiences. Still for a studio of our size to be successful, we had to develop a few key pieces of technology. We weren't gonna be able to put enough bodies at it to create a large 40, 50, 60 hours of gameplay experience without creating some type of level generation system.

- The easiest way to think of it is almost layers to the level. So there's the base layer, which is the outline so, what is the path that the player's gonna take? Where are the mountain borders? And then on top of that, we take the biome dater: where in the universe is this? Is this gonna be a cold planet? Is this gonna be hot? Okay this is where the vegetation layer goes. Where are we in the universe? What sort of trees do we place? So it's kind of building layer upon layer until you get the final product that the players will go and play in. If you're on a oxygen-free moon, you're not gonna have a city with parks and open balconies. That doesn't make sense. An early issue we saw in the game was with the A.I. and how they navigated in the bases in the cities. Our general rule of thumb is if an object is larger than the tallest mech, which is an Annihilator in game, since he fits above your head you probably can't walk through it. And so it was pretty funny where you would walk up to a base and a mech would see you and his first thought was, chase down the player and run through half their base and collapse buildings and just absolutely cause havoc. We kinda liked it so we kept it in to a degree where if a mech has to go through something it will still sometimes take the shortest route and cause that nice collateral damage. So that was a fun evolution of the system, kind of born from a bit of a bug. Sometimes game development feels like that gif of that guy on the train and he's laying the track as the train is speeding forward. So you just have go as you're building it. A common issue we saw with our level generation system early on was having them not really take into account the player or the skill level. And you would walk up to a base and basically the base would wake up. And so all of a sudden you would have all these VTOLs flying out. There'd be a dozen turrets shooting at you and you'd have three Atlases running out. You'd be wiped before you could even get within a hundred feet of the place. So early on that showed us that the system worked, but it definitely needed a lot of tender loving care and refinement and rules, otherwise it would just be a player-killing machine. I want to make it look as big and pretty as possible and it's up to him to tell me what we can and can't do.

- With me with the level generator, the first time I remember it, it was in the DropShip, we would land and then I walked right out and I was inside the major base that was our major objective, and I would just get blown away. We felt like, Oh, what are we gonna do? How are we gonna get this to work? [techno music]

- [Brian] We have the Inner Sphere, we have so many planets. So we wanted to go to all these planets and play with them and there's different biomes on planets. The blueprint system is a really handy tool to fast the develop different kind of algorithms, different generation systems. It will generate missions and how those missions are generated are based off many factors like are you close to a faction border, an enemy? We'll take all that data to generate different missions on the planet, which also generates the actual level itself. Possibly you could have a civilization, trees and animal, fauna and foliage, and stuff like that. And as you get finer and finer and finer into details, obviously the blueprint gets more complex and there's more issues there. The first we did it, we would get weird-looking levels where the tiles wouldn't match correctly. You'd have the wrong kind of foliage based off that. Each tile has a reference of what tiles that it can be attached to and then we generate the tile based off that and then we have a mark-up level that we call it, and that will place the gameplay objects. And those are all randomized as well depending on your skill set, what mechs you're bringing in, your reputation that we have in the system.

- We also wanna make sure that the difficulty is scaled correctly. We will spawn enemies that are relevant to that level so it's a good challenge. We also spawn enemies that fit the timeline because the game takes place over the span of a long amount of time. So we take the hand-placed spawn points and then we take from a unit deck the correct enemies to place based on all those factors. And that can be anything from mechs themselves, to tanks or every the types of turrets you face.

- And the reason why we did it through blueprint is because of our modding system that we're introducing. So anybody could actually mod, they can make their own level generation blueprint. So then you could have a different level generation than what we have. So you could like, I know it's a moon planet, but I still wanna see foliage growing on it. Or maybe there's moon trees. [soft techno music]

- I think one of the biggest takeaways from this current development is create systems that you can prototype quickly and iterate on frequently. If you looked at what the game looked like six months ago, a year ago, a year and a half ago, it's so different on so many levels. And that just comes from part necessity and part decision.

- Well, if we weren't able to succeed at developing the level generation process for MechWarrior 5 it certainly would have changed the product dramatically. The level of exploration and freedom just wouldn't have been there. It would have turned into a linear experience. It reminded us as a studio of just how challenging making games is. We've been doing this for 19 years, but making games only gets harder and harder as the years go by.

- [Jason] There's a lot of giant robot things in the world. BattleTech wasn't the first and it wasn't the last. I think one of the reasons it's still around 35 years later is because of the kind of storytelling setting that we put it in. We were able to create a universe where these things made some sort of sense. Where they were kind of organic to the world and that the geopolitical situation that we projected added a sense of gravitas to it. What have I learned over this 35-year journey with BattleTech and MechWarrior? Always respect your audience, respect the investment they make. And I think I've realized that if you're lucky enough to have created something that people really care about that you can't just do what you want with it because it's not yours exclusively anymore. There's a lot of people who care about it. Nothing starts big. Everything starts small. And you gotta be patient with that. You gotta treat your people well, treat your fans well, and be willing to keep working at it. One of the things that we did as FASA that I think that was kind of a little ahead of its time was looking at how to build a franchise across lots of media simultaneously. When the video game came out the novels were there had been building the story to support it. I'm constantly amazed that 35 years later that people still love this game, they still love this universe. We're here at an event where thousands of people are coming to play from a world championship. There are hundreds and hundreds of people whose creative talents have gone to making this universe what it is, to adding to it over the years. And there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people whose passion for it is why we still care today. So, you know, I think I'm just humbled and honored to have played my part in it. [soft techno music]