Finally sat down and played through the first story mission of Battletech, man this feels like the definition of a jank mixed bag. Especially compared to Pillars 2 which feels nice and polished as hell (almost console port level polish).
Pros from the first 2-3 hours:
+Lots of depth to the combat thanks to body parts/multi-weapons/terrain & heat juggling
+story seems solid
+I like the dialogue choices between missions
+graphics are ok, even maxed still need better AA
Cons:
-Jank as fuck. Half the UI stuff gives you descriptions when you hover over it, half does not. And I couldn't see any way to access the tutorials in mission to find out what some of the stuff does. Pretty annoying.
-Needs a Pillars style FF button. Absolutely needs this. Not a skip animation button, a good speed FF would be exactly what this needs
-Maps are way too fucking long. I wouldn't even mind the slower speed but I did not expect the first story mission to go on as long as it did. Fuck, took me 2+ hours
-Because the maps are so long (I'm assuming they'll get even longer), and because unless things change you can't heal?, the maps just become these long as fuck endurance missions where your team is slowly whittling down and then BAM SUDDENLY BUNCH OF HARD ENEMIES OUTTA NOWHERE for next phase and your team like missing half their weapons and 2 hits from dead at that point and it's like uhhhh do I need to restart from further back in this 2 hour+ map and do it again more efficient? Idk, I don't find this kind of long endurance missions with no idea what enemies will pop up later in the map to be particularly fun. More annoying. Solution would be to have a way to heal between encounters (like using repair items or something?) and to make the maps fucking shorter. Dunno if either of those happen later.
-I really dislike that you can't fully zoom out the map and there's no mini-map. Even in the first mission there was already a time where I didn't know where the fuck I was supposed to go next objective-wise.
-Load times suck, especially coming from Pillars 2 with its almost instant load times improvement, this feels janky, especially since everytime you die and reload you have to sit through a long ass load screen of loading the whole map again, fuck.
I still need to play Dragonfall and HK, but played the post-Dragonfall Shadowrun Returns it felt kinda janky like this, but definitely better than BT. I like the core concept of BT, the mechs, the customization and mecha battle system, the GoT story-line, the comic cutscenes. But right now I think BT is too jank for me to play enjoyably. It feels like the idea factory type jrpgs with good concepts but low budget and jank af.
Do we know if Battletech supports modding? Because I feel like even though they'll probably patch/improve some of this stuff, the few things needed to make the game way more fun feel like simple stuff that there can be fan mods in like 2 weeks taking care of. I'm really hoping either through patches or fanmods they fix some of my major gripes because I do want to play BT but it's pretty much unplayable for me right now. Will stick to Pillars 2.
