Sarna: Let’s change gears a bit and talk about your ascent to the height of BattleTech‘s development. What’d you do before you got hired at Catalyst?
Ray: My background is in graphic design and production. I left my day jobs to work for CGL, and to freelance a couple times in the past, where I was production or pre-production management. Lots of problem solving and got to be hands-on at different points in a project from concept to realization, but especially, of course, bringing the final piece to fruition.
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Sarna: Sounds good to me. Them Warhammer folks have a ton of backstory to get caught up on anyway. I think the best way to capitalize is to convince them that BattleTech has a bright future ahead of it.
Which leads me to ilClan. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover here, but before we do, how’s it feel to finally be free of Dark Age?
Ray: …not…free…yet.
Sarna: Ah shit.
Ray: We’re actually about two years ahead of ilClan right now, behind the scenes. So in one respect, it was a huge feeling of relief and accomplishment to finally have Hour of the Wolf completed and sending the ilClan sourcebook sent to press, and then again when Hour was finally released and people read through it. And it’s going to be that feeling again when the sourcebook is finally released in August. However, we’re not there yet, and while we’re finally hitting these milestones, we’re constantly working. And so now we’re just waiting until everyone gets their hands on the next sourcebook, or hears about the product after that.
So: it feels great. But then we’re just bound and chained to the next thing, and the next.
What feels good is to have that time in between reduced to months instead of years.
Sarna: So, maybe I’m reading between the lines here a bit, but it sounds like there’s yet more upheaval coming even after this ilClan era, and that’s coming after Dark Age’s upheaval and Jihad’s upheaval. I know the Inner Sphere has always been a rough place, but are we still going to be a while until there’s a relatively calm period in BattleTech?
And by calm, I mean more like the 3015-3039ish period where it’s border wars and political machinations mostly.
Ray: Man, that’s an excellent question.
So for each of these upheavals, we’ve got an era, right? Right now we’re in the ilClan Era. We have a lot of plans for the next several years, all as part of this era, this initial catalyst, if you will, of the Battle of Terra and the culmination of an ilClan. But that doesn’t mean we’ll have a “Jihad” or “Dark Age” era in a couple years; everything in the foreseeable future is the fallout from the dawn of this era.
That said, when you bring up 3015-3039, to me that’s a question of setting stability, something I’m really keen on. The original setting for BattleTech, there was lots of action without huge changes to the setting, which means that there were endless opportunities for gameplay, whether tabletop or roleplay. Even replayability since the future was unwritten. But like many 80’s games, the metaplot demanded setting-shaking changes, and many older games didn’t survive their own metaplots. I feel that’s why we lost some fans in the Clan Invasion, and others during the Dark Age and Jihad: massive changes to the setting.
What I would like to see is to reach a middle ground where we could get to a stable setting, like the Succession Wars or the brief time between the Clan Invasion and the FedCom Civil War, where warfare is constant. We have a setting, games, stories, and characters that everyone is invested in, where fans can play and explore, and we can have major events, but we don’t feel a need to wipe the map clean and turn it upside down every couple years.
But we’re not there yet. Alaric Ward has upset the apple cart.