Redbull has previewed BattleTech and interviewed executive producer Mitch Gitelman:

BattleTech: Robots in the skies

After two Shadowrun successes, Harebrained Schemes turns its targeting computer on huge mech combat.

You know what we hate when we’re stomping around in our giant war robot? Sunday drivers. You know the sort: you’ll be plodding around some distant planet with your buddies looking for a juicy cache of old tech, when over the hill comes some have-a-go hero who can’t tell his targeting module from his sensor module, overheating his lasers and then falling over behind some crumbling building because his power-to-weight ratios aren’t properly calibrated. ‘It’s like they let just anyone pilot ‘Mechs these days,’ you think, as you pulverise the tiresome interloper with a rocket barrage.

That’s the potted promise of BattleTech, the latest successful Kickstarter project from Shadowrun creators Harebrained Schemes (and how: the funding drive pulled down $2,785,537 with just a mere $250,000 goal). Now in pre-production, it is (or rather, it will be) a tactical-squad-combat-meets-RPG set in the old BattleTech universe – the far future stomping ground of the late-'80s and '90s MechWarrior and MechCommander series.

As the head of a team of opportunistic, space-faring mercenaries, your job is to build up your squad (or ‘Lance’) of ‘Mechs, kit them out with technology bought, scavenged or stolen, train up your MechWarrior pilots and then set off in the ignoble pursuit of cash and plunder.

Succeed, and you’ll earn not just loot, but also the trust and patronage of the universe’s Great Houses. The BattleTech universe is a network of galactic fiefdoms – powerful families each vying for greater degrees of control over systems and planets, while scheming over the best way to stab one another in the back. “It’s Game of Thrones in space,” executive producer Mitch Gitelman tells us. [...]