What’s Up With BattleTech? GenCon 2013 Session

I was at GenCon this last week enjoying the insanity (you should really try to go at least once if you’ve never been), and was able to take notes during Catalyst’s “What’s Up With BattleTech?” seminar put on by Herb Beas, the BattleTech line developer.

Herb Beas of Catalyst Game Labs

The atmosphere for the session was rather casual.  Instead of just spilling all of the beans about what’s in store for the game over the next year, Herb would answer any question the audience asked. I took an audio recording (see below), and here are some of the highlights of the things Herb shared:

• The upcoming reprint of the Introductory Box Set (estimated to be released Nov 29, 2013) will have higher quality miniatures in the box than before.  Herb had a sample of the ‘Mechs at the seminar, and they really are much-improved (with more detail) over the first print:

• The next product coming out is Field Manual: 3145.  The PDF should be available next week, and print editions will come after that.
• Historical: Wars of the Republic Era print editions will be released after FM:3145.
• For PDFs, the 2765 Field Report books are still being worked on.
• Handbook: House Kurita (the only major faction without a Handbook) is still in production, slated for 2014.  The Handbook series are generally more expensive to produce (and sales vary on the popularity of the faction), so it will likely be the last product in that series.
• No news on the resumption of the out-of-print novels being available in PDF/ePub format.
• Interstellar Operations, the final book in the Total Warfare series, is still being worked on (2014). Some of the book is being reworked for a PDF-only release to make the product more manageable.  The Inner Sphere in Flames system (similar in style to the Succession Wars board game) will likely be the core of the book.
• New novels remain in the plans, but no actual products are being worked on yet (though BattleCorps fiction is still being produced).
• PDF-only A Time of War scenarios / supplements are still planned.
• No-comment when a question was asked about producing miniatures for MechWarrior: Online ‘Mechs, but it sounds like they’re considering it.
• They plan on expanding the Alpha Strike product line with more cards (which were available at GenCon and will be released elsewhere soon) and other products / rules expansions.
• No-comment on the possibility of future BattleTech card games (but it won’t likely be a TCG), but it sounded like it was being discussed internally.
• More Historicals will be coming, including Brush Wars 2 and Early Succession Wars  as well as additional Historicals: Turning Point PDFs (2014).
• Upcoming XTROs are for the Republic, more Primitives, Succession Wars and possible another Boondoggles (2014).
• Catalyst probably won’t be re-releaseing Critter Tek :)
• Era Digest: Dark Age is underway, but with some delays due to author reshuffling.
• The Clan Box Set will not be produced.
• Finally, BattleChats are still on hold due to other priorities.

For a full audio recording of the session here (please forgive the quality), you can download the 43MB MP3 here.