This interview mentions something really intriguing.
Our main testing development has been playing it. We look at abilities that are getting used, and abilities getting used too much. You look at the testers, because they play it most and use the most powerful weapons and abilities. It’s about listening to feedback. It takes months and we’ve been working on balance at every step. We’ve inherited this very sophisticated system from Quake Wars that allows us to tweak individual things from day one. One term we use that’s extremely important to the game is ‘necvars’, text files of values that we can change locally, upload to a server and then it gets automatically dispersed through the world.
NA: This is how we update the game very quickly. We have a very limited set of people who play the game, and it’s always been a concern that we’re tuning it to how we play. It’s a potential failing in previous games from the studio, in that they’re a bit hardcore. This allows us to track statistics when the game is out in the wild, and updates stuff really quickly and cheaply. Adjustments are accompanied by patch notes, explaining why such and such a weapon was reduced. It allows us to iterate very quickly.
RH: Do not expect Brink to be a closed system where you buy the game and that’s it. We want to engage people in a dialogue, problems they run into, bugs they’ve discovered. That way we can be responsive to what players feel they need from the game, and it’s very exciting for us.
[…]
RH: If we find that operatives aren’t getting the same love as other classes we can use those necvars. They’re so powerful. Patches are a lot of trouble, with beta testers and certification, and time-restrictions on how many you can do. But with these you don’t have to touch game code at all. We can fix problems reported to us in just one evening. We’ve hundreds of necvars we can play with. Say, how much damage you do with a certain bullet, or the spread radius of shotguns. Cool-down times. Speed of reload. For that last one we just change a value and the game automatically plays the reload animation faster. We’re really pleased to have it in Brink. And it works best when used in concert with players.
This sounds really neat. Instant updates! Will this apply to us lowly console players too?Is this a thing that Microsoft and Sony allow?
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