>>23421104Mercs games have not just the autogenerated stuff, there's also the entire management game element which is a very specific kind of experience that Mechwarrior games offer to differentiate themselves from any adjacent competitor.
That said I would contest that PGI went for a Mercs game because they wanted to do a Succ Wars era game (HBS Battletech was out like a year prior and this would be the start of the modern resurgence of BT as an IP so maximum brand synergy sounds like a valid move for PGI to make at this point), the Succ Wars being kinda the most classic everyone-likes-that era, Battletech at its most vanilla and entry level approachable. And if they wanted to do Succ Wars, that intrinsically means doing a Mercs game, because the Succ Wars were a golden age of mercenary business within the Inner Sphere. It's not like you can just phone in randomized content freely in those games either as you have to account for timeline events and the gradual changes in borders, tech availability, the helm core, and all sorts of shenanigans that culminate into the CI, not to mention there's enough on the record info about the state of the Sphere during the Succ Wars era that you can't phone in every detail, just that a number of locations have to be marked off as hotspots for missions to be made available in while other planets are just essentially pit stops that affect travel costs.
But yeah not having to immediately do scripted campaign content probably lightened the burden on some of the production. That, and being essentially an early access game of sorts for a few years while gradually DLCing itself into a finished product as it escaped the Epic Store jail.
