BattleTech

BattleTech, the turn-based strategy title from Harebrained Schemes, turned a lot of heads when it was released in April. Now the developers have announced their first expansion. Called Flashpoint, it will include new BattleMechs, a new biome and a new mission type.

Flashpoint is the first in a series of procedurally generated short stories, according to a news release issued this week to coincide with the Gamescom convention in Germany. The announcement was accompanied by a new trailer, which we’ve embedded above.

“Flashpoints are high-stakes branching short stories, comprised of procedural mercenary missions linked together with new crew conversations, special events, critical choices, and valuable rewards,” wrote the developers. “To ramp up the intensity, some Flashpoint stories will feature ‘Consecutive Deployments’ in which players won’t be able to repair their ‘Mechs between missions.”

In BattleTech, players take on the role of a mercenary company fighting to return an ousted leader to her rightful place on the throne. The base game tells a complete story, which, as we noted in our first impressions of the game, raises the bar considerably for narratives in a turn-based strategy game. Harebrained cleverly set the events of that game in an unexplored region of the massive BattleTech universe. This new expansion is its first attempt to exploit that open space to tell additional stories that tie in with canonical events in that larger world.