RPGFanboy: I saw one article describe it as playing the bad guys.
I'm not up on Battletech lore, but isn't everyone a murderous warlord and just various shades of grey?
The deep lore of the Battletech lore is getting towards 40K levels of depth. As such describing the clans as a whole as the 'bad guys' would be a gross over simplification. Especially given that in the Btech universe war is nominally legal; mostly because 'allowing' low intensity warfare beats the previous way of war. Which was just everyone nuking planets from orbit when they were about to be lost to any enemy nation.
That said thought Clan Smoke Jaguar, who are supposed to be the focus of the new game, are indeed one of the most brutal Clans. Even by the standards of the clans as a whole they tended to be unnecessarily brutal to the population of captured worlds, not to mention they generally not give a damn about civilian casualties when ever they invaded a planet.