[QUOTE=Exedore;358841]Thanks for the clarification.
A few people have announced this frustration; can I hear of more please (perhaps its own thread)? The focal point highlight code couldn’t change, but I need to put forth a value assessment for any functionality that further differentiates the platform codebases because it means increased maintenance on our end.
I’m certainly willing to make the case, but I’m ultimately not the one to do the work.[/QUOTE]
so can you ask somebody in the office who would know whats going on with the ATI performance issues and if ATI has given you any information or vice versa?
since every ATI thread in the tech support forum gets ignored
[QUOTE=*goo;359044]Any word on the number of unique players logging in to play each day across each platform?
Asked this question a few pages back but so far, no reply. Really interested in the volume of activity.[/QUOTE]
You will never find that out. If it were high it would be talked about. The highest brink ever got on Xbox (who has the most users) is 16th place and that was for 1 week.
I reckon you’ve got a point. Rahdo referenced player numbers as a rebuttal to someone so my request is essentially to back that statement up with some solid numbers.
It would genuinely be welcoming to see the volumes playing (uniquely).
He made that rebuttal to me and I think it was a bit of a cheap shot tbh. He knew damn well this was a thread about the PC game (it’s based on comments he made on a purely PC gaming site) but because I didn’t specifically state the PC player base had collapsed he saw an opportunity to say the player base was OK (on consoles) and hope that brushed away that particular argument.
I’d like to know how many copies sold on console, and of those how many still play. I wonder if it’s in the same ball park as PC where about 97% of the original player base have stopped playing.
edit: I don’t mean that as a stick with which to beat SD, and tbh it’s not the numbers as much as the percentages that tell the story. Surely they must realise Brink hasn’t been a “normal” game release, it’s shed players quicker than most games, across the board (I suspect), and I’d just like them to acknowledge that (privately, if not publicly) and ask themselves some searching questions as to why that is.
[QUOTE=Kendle;359084]He made that rebuttal to me and I think it was a bit of a cheap shot tbh. He knew damn well this was a thread about the PC game (it’s based on comments he made on a purely PC gaming site) but because I didn’t specifically state the PC player base had collapsed he saw an opportunity to say the player base was OK (on consoles) and hope that brushed away that particular argument.
I’d like to know how many copies sold on console, and of those how many still play. I wonder if it’s in the same ball park as PC where about 97% of the original player base have stopped playing.[/QUOTE]
You may never get that answer, Brink is a funny game for PC guys, it goes up and down dramatically in player base count, right now Brink has been on the top 100 games on Steam the past 2 days with 600/700 people playing then next day it’ll drop off again, lol.
It’s always peaked at about 600/700, but when it falls off the stats site is when less than 300 (sometimes 400) people are actively playing at that given moment. So it could have a peak of 700, but if only 100 people are on it won’t show up. It isn’t so much that it goes up and down a lot as it is you’re viewing the stats at different peak times (EU’s peak actually gets it to the steam list, while the NA peak sees the game drop off the list).
Brink goes on and off the Steam Top 100 because it’s sorted by current players not peak. If you check late night in the US which is also early in Eur you hardly ever see it on there as the current play count is probably <200. Noon US time is usually when it meets its peak.
And yes, i doubt we’ll see any of the real numbers.
Well, the sales have been great (especially considering it’s a new IP) and the ongoing playerbase on console, while not what we’d hoped, is still respectible enough to be considered a success. As much as we’d like? Nope, but we’re hoping the free DLC will bring people back to try again, since during the first few weeks on 360, the lag was pretty bad, and since it’s much better now. Hopefully we’ll pick up a few players who wanted to play, but just couldn’t put up with the issues around launch. And hopefully some of the stuff we’re hoping to do with PC around the same time will help on that front. Fingers crossed
That’s a fair point, and we would have loved to approach things like that, BUT in our experience with players, W:ET (the hardcore but competitively balanced) scared the crap out of casual players. There’s way to much of a barrier to entry, and only the most dedicated (you guys) stick with it. This is even though W:ET is free. Brink, otoh, was going to be a full retail game. We had to ensure that we made a game that people could pick up and play. Throwing them into the deep end of ET after they’d paid full price to get chopped to ribbons by pro players just wouldn’t have been viable. And re: CS, that game is much more approachable because there’s a lot less going on. One objective, no respawn, etc., makes it much easier to pick up and play, and since death is instant, even poor players can get the occasional kill and decide to stick with it. In our formula, where kills have to be earned, and you have to keep 4 or 5 tactical situations in your mind at once to do the right thing, that’s a lot ot throw at newbs. Brink was trying to make it more approachable, while still not alienating the hardcore. That’s what we were trying to do, it’s what we always said we were trying to do. And hopefully this thread gives you guys some honest insight into why in some cases it worked, and in some cases it didn’t…
One thing I can say on this topic though: if we can figure out a way to make a TRUE followup to W:ET (true in all sense of the word, other than the WW2 setting), and actually stay in business, believe me, we’ll do it. Because we really want to do it.
OMG, I’m red faced. Um, please ignore my post from a couple of nights ago. I totally misread that back and forth between you guys, obviously. Sorry. Let’s, um, never speak of it again!
So, while I really do want to engage every point everyone’s made, a lot of them, like these, will just lead to me repeating what I’ve already said on the subject (we’re not evil trying to trick people into buying the game, Brink is a success actually (turned a healthy profit in spite of being a new IP in a down month against much bigger titles and continues to hold decent player counts on console, doing an SDK is a complicated issue), and the back and forth will never end. So I think from now on, I’ll have to skip some posts completely. Please understand this isn’t me ignoring you, but just acknowledging what we all know in our hearts: sometimes people on the internet will just never agree, and all the back and forth won’t change it. Please don’t think this means I don’t respect or unstand where you’re coming from, but if I’m going to be able to keep up with this thread, I can’t keep repeating myself. Sorry Al.
LA noire only had some overlap but wasn’t direct competition to Brink.
LA Noire was the biggest game of the season, the heir apparent to GTA, the biggest game in the world, and it certainly was competition for us, big time. It’s amazing that we did as well as we did in the shadow of it (shades of ETQW shipping in the shadow of Halo3, which didn’t work out nearly as well for us, sales-wise). DOesn’t matter if LAN’s a different genre, it’s a game that had a lot of mindshare, and if it’s grabbed people’s spending money for the month, that’s less they have to spend on other games, even in different genres…
Abandon this thread Rahdo, it will just descend into a flame war (if it hasnt already!)
I don’t think it has to. I think the majority of people want to have a mature and intelligent discussion. People are just frustrated, understandibly so. But if everyone agrees to be civil, and everyone chastises those who aren’t, instead of silently just “letting it pass, because that’s the way it is”, then things can change.
Also, try not to be snarky to each other either, if it’s possible, because that’s the gateway drug to flamage ANd you can never have too many smileys, IMO.
Silly optimist me. I do have 8 more pages to get through
A big part of CS’s success, and W:ET’s, is that they were literally given away for nothing. They are very popular games that didn’t make much money
Sorry, didn’t meant to derail your guy’s comparitive analysis, but just wanted to point out that most very important data point. ANd repeat that this is something that’s not lost on us.
Very good question. Actually, in the case of Brink, we kind of did do what you suggest. We did start from a PC base (ETQW), and over time tried to make that more accessible for a wider audience. In the process, some features that were important to you guys were lost, and with if I could go back in time, I’d try harder to hold on to some of them. Actually, long timers here will remember the weapon bank discussion from like 18 months ago? Where I openly admitted that I’d made a mistake in simplifying inventory usage too much, and apologized. If I could have undone that, I would have, but the realities of schedule and limited manpower often don’t permit second chances.
I think though, with enough time and resources (as I said earlier), anything can be fixed. Anybody got a spare 2.5 mil lying around to cover our dev costs while we do a hardcore PC makeover? That said, we’re continuing to try as best we can to improve the game (tons of patches, improvements to interface, ongoing weapon and level balance tweaks, etc.). It just aint cheap or easy.
We put in d-servers because it was the right thing to do for the PC game. It means we did have to sacrifice quality elements of the console game to make the time to do it (lobbies being a big one, because we had a small online services staff, almost as small as our UI staff). That’s all I’m saying. Console would have reviewed higher and sold more if we hadn’t tried to make PC better. Plenty of other examples (I only listed a few). Remember, this was a response to the “what sacrifices did you make, I didn’t see any”
You miss the point again; the problem with the guns is not their damage. It’s their wild spread and inaccuracy.
No, I get your point, I know that’s what you guys want. I can only repeat so many times that we’re continuing to work on it, and watch for upcoming annoucements.
Oops, now I’m repeating myself, no time for that. Moving on!
But the effort you put into understanding the PC players’ concerns was not there.
Did we make mistakes? Did I make mistakes? Sure. I admitted to that 18 months ago (see above). All we can do is try to make it better within our limited means. And we’re doing so…
Do you feel that multiplatform game development does justice to the people that truly love video games? Would you rather work on a multiplatform or single-platform game next?
That is an EXCELLENT question, and it sucks that I can’t answer it, because I can’t talk about our future plans. All I can say is that it’s VERY good point, and if I could answer it, I think you would like my answer (I’ve said too much)
I don’t know about that. Certainly Battlefield 2 was a big hit on PC. BUt the market is changing, definitley. The success of dota-genere games, counter strike, even W:ET points to a different model. A model that doens’t necessarily mean a drop in quality, just a different way of approaching game dev and sales.
I respect his dogged determination to be positive and look for the good in things, and keep plugging on. I do think he gets a bit to snarky though, and that can lead to flamebait. But overall, I like his message of “look for the good in things” because that’s my own personal life philosophy.
I don’t think that has anything to do with the content of Brink though
Well, that’s not the case, really. Our FIRST goal is to stay in business, because if we don’t do that, we’re not being responsible to our employees who rely on us to be able to pay their rely on us to feed their families. This is something we take VERY seriously, as a company. It’s why we’re still in business.
Our 2nd goal, make no doubt, is to make great games that we can be proud of. That’s a close second. We believe the first and second goal can co-exist peacefully.
We are fiercely proud of the work we’ve done. Don’t take my acknowledgements of “there’s room for improvement” as a contrary to that. If you guys knew the half of the struggles and challenges we went through to get this game on the shelves (I won’t be able to go into all of that until I retire from the industry… oh the tell all book I could write), but in the meantime, I hope i’ve been able to give you guys a bit of insight into the challenges a team faces when it sets out to make a multi-million pound budget game with a small team that tries to appeal to casual and hardcore players alike.
Agreed, totally. There’s a lot of keys on a keyboard, we could have used more of them (or let you guys map more of them, that is). We did keep reload and interact seperate, and in hindsight (even hinder-sight, really, since we already talked about it 18 months ago) we should have kept inv management seperate. And smart/sprint seperation makes sense too. Agreed, that works better for PC.
Also, as an interesting post mortem, about 18 months ago, Aubrey, our SMART designer, tried to get traditional strafe jumping into the game as well, but it proved to be very difficult as the “bug” that made it possible in the first place conflicted with a lot of our core code. Ah well. Just a bit of dev trivia for you there.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment. But Carmack and iD live and work by different rules than the majority of us… we can’t all take 5+ years to make a game. My god, can you imagine how much better Brink would have been if we had double the time to work on it? I drool to think about it, so many improvements, so much time for open betas, more levels, more balanced levels, more time to balance guns, more of everything (we might have actually had time to build a UI dept!). But we didn’t get that extra time. And we were lucky to get the extra year that we did, so I do have to say thanks to Beth for that. But sure, more time (an iD style schedule, a valve style schedule, a blizzard style schedule) would have been amazing. But it wasn’t fiscially viable, unfortunately.
Daz, you post is great, and though this statement wan’t the core of your point, to me it’s really the crux of the issue here. You guys had expectations about the game that weren’t met. In a lot of cases they were never going to be met, and we didn’t do a good enough job letting you know that ahead of time. Manys the time that you guys requested real PC footage, and those requests were totally valid, and chased up the flag pole, but in the end, more console-esque footage is what you got. I can’t go into all of the reasons for that here, but it’s a shame and it’s unfortunate and you should have been better informed about exactly what you were getting. I totally cop to that, our bad. I had tried to explain how things were different (slower, one button stuff, etc.) but clearly the message wasn’t clear enough. All I can do is acknowledge that we could have done better and attempt to do better in the meantime.
And also, which what little resources we have, try to continue improving the PC experience of the game, even if it’s for a much smaller target audience than we would like. And that’s what we’re doing, and I’m not sure if there’s much else we can do. And I’ll be repeating myself again by saying that more info about stuff we’re trying to improve will be forthcoming
Is that the general sentiment here? By the same token, should we just stop our attempts to give you guys an experience closer to your expectations?
Ken, your list is spot on, and it’s the exact stuff we talk about internally. Some of the things you’re talking about i’m very confident will get addressed (gun balance, defense bias), some less so (de-combining keys), but we’re genuinely looking into all of it!
Thanks tang!
I’m not that qualified to say, but what I do know is we were happy to get any help we could get!
Slow and painful, but very nearly there…
a lot of the problems I can’t comment on, in some cases for legal reasons. all i can say is that every single person who did chip in and help on UI was great and went above and beyond in different ways.
and we’re still hiring!
i really want to tell you guys everything that’s going on every day, but i just can’t. more stuff will be coming with the DLC that has been annouced so far. hopefully some of it you guys will like I hate being vague, but I could really get in trouble here, so i have to be circumspect. sorry, it’s really against my nature, i can tell you.
Phew, I’ve made it up to page 16, where my last mega post was (where I’m again embarrased to note that Toka wasn’t directing the phoney thing at me… d’oh!). More probably in a few days or so. Back to my reguarily scheduled life for a moment
All I’m saying is how can you guys say W:ET is for the really hardcore and scared the **** out of casual players when that game still has a following after what, 8 years? So the game can’t be THAT bad?
Or CS:S, still being heavily played and considered “hardcore”.
Seems to me the “hardcore” approach kinda worked in the past
EDIT:
Anyway, just finihsed reading Rahdo’s ENTIRE post.
Thanks for taking the time to write it all down.
I remember the discussion 18 months ago, cause I was a big part in that discussion.
Wish it would have been implemented
(PS: IT WAS GREAT IN ETQW)
Since you’re hinting that SMART or weaponbanks etc won’t be changed due to budget costs, as not releasing the SDK, I hope you guys learned from these “mistakes” and won’t ever make them again in future games.
[PC] guy here, I just wanted to know if you can say or not will the demo/Theater mode ever be place back or implemented in Brink? Brink is a visual eye candy - I lost count on how many times I wished had a demo of a scrim match I just played or just make some type of machinma style video with he characters in game. Also we’ve all seen the Ark and the empty locations in it we have not seen yet, will those Locale/maps something we’ll see in the near future?
Would better matchmaking not eliminate any concerns about ‘hardcore’ players?
Use the challenges to benchmark players on movement as well as shooting etc. If the fear is other players will demolish new entrants, why not reduce that risk by placing ‘lower skilled’ players together.
As they get better, they move on to be matched with higher skilled so the game never gets beyond their ability but continues to push them forward. Players are limited by their skill. Their skill isn’t limited by the game.
Lots of other games cater to various skill levels and I’m struggling to understand why Brink would be any different.
Rahndo, I respect SD a lot. Basically what I personally feel, is that it boils down to this:
You ask did what you could with what you had and you all made decisions and choices based on what you felt was the right way to go. I, and I’m sure many others, font feel that these were wrong choices or you NEEDED to make a different game, but that simply alot of your choices didn’t work out the way you intended. can we compromise on that?
I know i’m new mr.rahdo and the older members probably deserve their questions answered but i play on the xbox and there is really bad lag. Like, i cant even play the game because it freezes and jumps. Not all the time but it does happen a lot. I thought it was my internet but my other games play same as always. Apologies if others have brought this up, havent read all the posts
Wasn’t it mentioned somewhere that when someone with bad pings enter match degrades the overall online performance of everyone in game for console? someone correct me If I’m wrong.
is that answer directed to a console player or a pc player?
are you talking about free2play models? i guess so. i think free2play actually is the future of, maybe not only, pc gaming.
times where you go shopping and buy a box are over, soon at least. i think counter-strike, wolf:et, team fortress or that popular warcraft mod are good examples of how the market of the future should be approached.
there is so much competition and people just get afraid to waste their money. producing demos costs money, so people are either not buying or in worst case, even pirate video games.
but people always will spend money for quality products. if they can lay their hands on a new game that is actually for free and enjoy this game, they will spend money for it. not only for buying hats, but also to support the developer, so that the developer can continue to support the product. its a win/win situation.
the only requirement is to produce a good game. word to mouth will do the rest. with word to mouth id software is what it is today. good games will get popular in the scene. its a natural cycle. maybe im naive, but i think it actually can work this way.
In a further note started by Kill_888,
I purchased a pre-release copy of Overgrowth from wolfire.com.
Just because they show what they do to their community and it looks high quality.
(Just a notice how I spent money on quality without any form of advertisement)
I dont know. Its not every game but it happens a lot. I thought my internet was the problem but that seems to work fine. Its 30mg broadband and i hardly ever have trouble playing online.
Long read. Glad you commented on most key points. And yes, I am a bit snarky :o(had to look that up on google). Time heals all wounds. 360 Brink is a fun experience (for me), despite flaws and blemishes. Just keep plugging along because I think there’s great potential for things to get better for each platform. Its hard not to want to fight for things you really like. Just have to keep it real.
[QUOTE=Rahdo;359152]Well, the sales have been great (especially considering it’s a new IP) and the ongoing playerbase on console, while not what we’d hoped, is still respectible enough to be considered a success. As much as we’d like? Nope, but we’re hoping the free DLC will bring people back to try again, since during the first few weeks on 360, the lag was pretty bad, and since it’s much better now. Hopefully we’ll pick up a few players who wanted to play, but just couldn’t put up with the issues around launch. And hopefully some of the stuff we’re hoping to do with PC around the same time will help on that front. Fingers crossed
[/QUOTE]
Rahdo, please understand, the reason why the ongoing player base drops daily is not because of lack of content. Nor will a DLC with more contents fix the numbers. The reason they are leaving is because of the multiplayer. It can be argued that this game has no real single player campaign, and is purely multiplayer. Problem is the multiplayer is broken since the matchmaking isnt effective. See the oxymoron in playing a multiplayer game by yourself? Whether you choose to reply or not to this, please just know that unless something is done to the matchmaking players will just keep leaving.
(btw, much respect for your participation in this thread)
