Before I begin, I just want to point out that this is my entry for the Archdruid Gaming Contest: The 80's contest, and you should go check out the contest and the other entries. I'm not actually the first person to write about BattleTech, either, @bengy beat me to it with his overview of the game.

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As a game designer, I often look back at the games that first influenced me. BattleTech is one; back in the day I worked on a rip-off of it (it wasn't any good, and never really saw any progress beyond a few very basic things I did) because I was super-inspired by it (I think I was like 13 or 14), but I only later came to fully appreciate how influential BattleTech and its MechWarrior spin-offs were in my career.

BattleTech remains one of my favorite games. I don't play it particularly often, but it played a formative role in my childhood as a gamer and also as a future game designer. It was probably one of the first vehicles for stories that managed to fill me with a sense of emotion beyond just simple surface layers. Some of this is because it was influential in my life at the time when I began to be able to form more critical understandings of narratives, but it also represents a masterpiece in actually building a universe that permits those associations to be made.

Worldbuilding

Where BattleTech got things right was its creation of the universe with very deep characters and no Universal good guys. This is not to say that there weren't good guys and bad guys, but simply that you couldn't look at one place in the universe and say "here are the heroes" while also looking at another to find villains. Individual figures within a faction or region the play the role of a hero or a villain, and this created more nuanced moral conflict.

BattleTech drew on medieval Europe for inspiration and as a source of concepts and characters. Set in a sort of dark age, it highlights the destructive potential within humanity, and also drew on notions of family, loyalty, belonging within a faction, and universal justice. As a game, BattleTech's mechanics frequently neglected implementing these themes in any narrative framework, but since I rarely had anyone to play with, I spent most of my time engaged in media that was created using the BattleTech license, like the books and later the video games.

The media did a great job of highlighting small segments of the world, going into particular worlds or small organizations in great detail and showing how everything came together.

This world was both familiar and novel. It was not easy to simply say "oh, so-and-so represents a particular historical figure" for most of the characters, but there was enough overlap that the concepts weren't overwhelming for someone who would not yet claim the sophistication to make deeper levels of interpretation possible.

Even when I wasn't playing the game, I could lose myself in the world. This wasn't a revolutionary thing in BattleTech's day, but it was something that was done particularly well by BattleTech; as opposed to something like Dungeons and Dragons which was very heavily focused on particular characters and ignored the larger picture except as a framework to adventure, BattleTech was brilliant.

Characters

I remember particular characters from BattleTech vividly, even some from books and games years after I first experienced them, and this is one of those settings for which if I were asked to come up with an original character I would be able to do so with no difficulty.

BattleTech is not unique in this sense, but it is one of the first settings to really do this well, and further, it is one of the few settings in which every single faction can produce characters that are meaningful and comprehensible. For comparison, consider more recent examples of highly regarded settings, like Eclipse Phase or Warhammer 40,000. Eclipse Phase is a fantastic game, and received many accolades for its setting, but unlike BattleTech, it relies on clearly defined villains at the expense committing more honest examination of many of the characters that appear in it and their motives for behaving the ways they do. Warhammer 40,000 generally has a really strong faction identity, but actually getting into the daily life and everyday motivations of characters is difficult because it is generally focused on cosmic-scale struggles and has relatively little in the way of "everyday" characters (though some of the novels for it do improve this).

It's also telling that BattleTech generally does not need to rely on heavy use of a meta-plot. In something like a role playing game, the term meta-plot refers to events outside the core story. Series of products, such as adventures or sourcebooks, advance the meta-plot over time.

BattleTech has a meta-plot, but its stories are overwhelmingly character driven rather than being driven by this overarching plot. Advances in the meta-plot serve to bring in new elements to the setting or justify switching focus, rather than being the primary driver of storytelling. Even massive meta-plot events tend to be focused on as the primary plot for their own stories, with galactic repercussions, rather than being something that happens off-screen (compare this to Shadowrun, where every edition comes with dramatic technological and social change that are largely put into the past, and whose events have large repercussions on everything). None of the meta-plot events tend to radically change the universe, though elements like the Clans and the Word of Blake did have major transformative roles in the universe.

One of the best ways that you can identify a good character is if you can explain their philosophy. BattleTech provides characters with a very clear philosophical objectives. On top of the solid political intrigue that comes with world-building, most characters have goals that they wish to see brought to fruition. The various factions each have a particular goal or philosophy, but individuals within the factions are able to make decisions that fly in the face of their own families general philosophy, often developing very distinctive personalities.

This two tiered approach to making characters is a lifesaver for writers. It means that we can generally make assumptions about 2 character, but also have reasons to view the message individual. It comes with secondary benefits. By having an initial assumption about the character based on what we know about their fellows, we can have that assumption proven wrong later in the story. This builds dramatic tension, which simply makes stories more appealing to the reader no matter how you frame it.

It also means that minor characters do not need to be explained quite so much as they might in a universe in which their motives and allegiances might be more difficult to understand. This about a storyteller's to focus simply on the narrative that they are telling, because many minor characters are recycled from known entities. While this may seem to be a lazy method of writing, is a time-honored tradition going back to Greek drama, and actually helps take some of the burden off of the audience.

Motivation

Although I rarely played BattleTech as a wargame, the universe created an excuse for players to match their forces against each other, much in the way that later franchises like Warhammer would build personalities and backgrounds for important factions so that players who would have had only a mechanical connection to the game can begin to build an idea of the personalities of factions in the conflict.

This would later be carried to fruition by games like Magic: The Gathering, which would take things to an extreme by associating colors of mana with gameplay concepts, though the factions of Battletech and other wargames often have defining mechanics that show how they are different from others.

The fact that BattleTech made sense as a game where the results could have actual consequences lent it an additional appeal; I had been familiar with lots of other games in which skirmishes were sort of their own stand-alone elements, but BattleTech created a universe I could fall into.

Wrapping Up

BattleTech is a fantastic game, but it's the world of BattleTech that drew me in and made me think about what could be. Even so, it got me hooked in game design even before I learned to fully appreciate the mechanics and theory of play that I now enjoy working with, because it taught me that games could have meaning.