That’s fantastic. If there’s one thing I feel Brink definitely needs, it’s more direct feedback on some of these matters. You have no idea how much it brightens my day to see one of your representatives come on and post something simple like “we’re working on reduced weapon spread”.
I’m glad to see that despite all the complications, you guys are still working on the game as best you can.
Thanks for your efforts.
Regards,
Nexo
Thanks Rahdo for your honesty on the difficulties you guys have gone through (even if is what a lot of people dread to hear).
What’s better to hear is going forwards and keeping us updated,
Lol at 95% of Rahdo’s post explaining smart business and creativity goes hand in hand to people who live in a vacuum. Priceless. 
But we are working on weapons tweaking right now. In fact, I believe Smooth has been talking to you guys about it a bit in another thread. Believe me, I would love nothing more than to just make some quick spread tweaks and blast it out to you guys as fast as possible, but that path will likely do more harm than good, because we would inevitably break something. For instance, in one of our internal playtests the other day, some fairly minor tweaks to one AR (the Rhett, i think) unexpectedly turned it into an instant death laser ray that destroyed everyone, but only in certain combinations with various things. If we had blithely rolled that out, it would only sow more confusion and discord. Believe me, as bad as you think it is now, it could be worse, so we have to tread carefully, measure twice, and cut once.
Just make the distinction between mouse/keyboard and a controller this time. I wish I could sit right there offering direct feedback but alas.
I think the big publisher guys have dropped some stitches. I know, it hit my personal interests but from what I can tell these are interests shared by a larger crowd. A crowd that is left dissatisfied and doesn’t carry the game or the names attached to it any more.
Totally agree; really wish there would be a BRINK beta like the TF2 beta so we could show you what we mean really easily.
All I can say is that we did listen, we just weren’t always in a position where we could do something about it, because of a host of issues and situations, some of which are still prevalent today. And we haven’t stopped listening yet, and we haven’t stopped trying to improve things, but the situation is complicated, there’s a lot of moving parts (both in the game and around the game), and we’re progressing as best we can under the circumstances.
You’re correct, you haven’t stopped listening and trying to correct the issues, and I commend you for that. You all are a great group of guys, and I’m glad you all are still in business and can continue to make games. Hopefully the next one will be like ET:QW and W:ET, though.
I’m just hoping when it comes to your next game, you all will see that we were actually right in a lot of ways, and hopefully you’ll be able to have the money, power to negotiate, or whatever it is that holds you all back and be able to give the world a game that is more like what the community asked for and discussed when it comes to spread, movement, etc.
Thanks for replying, glad to know you’re trying to get us more involved as there have been lots of us willing to help you for years (and ET:QW’s 1.5 patch shows that you have a community that wants you to succeed and help you do so, especially as a lot of us ET:QW players are still here). Maybe next time around you all will actually be able to do a closed beta for the PC and invite top teams and players, modders and mappers, and community figures (that know what they’re talking about), so you can get lots of input from players who would actually be knowledgeable enough to give insight on map design, weapon design, etc.
[QUOTE=Thundermuffin;370036]Totally agree; really wish there would be a BRINK beta like the TF2 beta so we could show you what we mean really easily.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah I was about to suggest that. Preferably with vars that admins can play with so you can have dedicated testing groups volunteering, that would give the discussions more substance at well. It’s mostly that I just can’t trust SD’s current batch of production testers nor Exedore’s direction any more.
Only then I realised that there’s no one left to test the game with…
what’s to LOL about? what he explained was the necessary evil of having to juggle finite resources against game development ‘wishes’ - he wasn’t saying it was ‘smart business’ more necessity, which most of us already understood - it certainly doesn’t go ‘hand in hand’ with creativity.
Some people need to understand Valve is a very unique company, It is still privately owned so it doe’s not have to answer to Investors or make them happy, along with Steam Valve rakes in a butt load of money which allows them to take their sweet time on whatever project they are working on. Their update philosophy is something I wish more DEVS would really practice as well, again Most DEVs have to answer to their Publishers and Investors aka Business first then game second because of that a lot of games on the market are just rehashes with no innovative designs all in the name of following a formula to make the most profit as possible with spending the least amount of money.
As much as I’d like to hop the Atlantic and set down with you guys, a more efficient way to get direct community input is to allow us to mod and test a bit. This doesn’t require an SDK project on the scale of ETQW’s awesome one- just give us the ascii decl’s and let us drop modified files in the base directory. I don’t think it’d take much to unlock some cvars to make that possible. Modders find a way- there must be some middle ground between a consumer friendly SDK and the current situation where all the game files are compressed binaries.
[QUOTE=Rahdo;369989]Good afternoon, everyone. So, I’m soo way far behind on this thread, I don’t think I can go back to where I’d last posted from and pick up from there. So I’m going to start from the most recent and work backwards instead. Apologies to anyone who gets skipped in this process… I’m genuinely not ignoring anyone’s posts. But logistically, I can’t go back 20 pages and get through everything, and I promised my wife I wouldn’t spend more than an hour doing this today, so here we go:
The advantage of multiplatform development is you can sell to significantly more consumers for a marginal increase in budget. The disadvantage is that development gets significantly more complex as you’ve got multiple moving targets to hit (usually in the same amount of time), and the end result on all platforms can suffer by variable amounts, depending on the situation.
The cost/benefit analysis on which is better is what high level publishing guys get paid major money to think about, when they’re deciding how to spend their tens of millions of dollars on development.
Generally, developers do the best they can with what they get when those decisions are handed down from on high.
Not sure if I’m adding anything to the conversation here, other than stating the obvious. Maybe this “going backwards” thing isn’t so great after all
I can’t tell you much right now, other than to say we definitely want to change the paradigm I just talked about above.
Believe me, EVERYONE would like to work like Valve (and Blizzard), but no developers (and very few publishers) have the freedom to pour endless amounts of money into a project and keep working on it until it is truly and completely “done”, let alone continue to develop costly additional content without guaranteed revenue streams (indi’s would go out of business, and publicly held publishers would get ripped apart by their shareholders who always focus on the short game). It’s definitely a dream of most developers to work this way, though, us included…
For some players, these are core gameplay principles (look how many knocks Brink got in press reviews for not having enough grind. It’s one of the most common mainstream criticisms of Brink, in fact: “I can make level 10 in under 10 hours? WTF!? Where’s my 50 hour grind?!”).
So the question is, who’s principles do you compromise on? Who do you target if you want to guarantee sales success and not go out of business? And if you choose to target the smaller group, the niche, instead of the broad player base, can you manage costs and stay alive?
These are the sorts of things we’re talking about long and hard here at Splash. Hopefully before too long, I’ll be able to come back here and give you our answers, and hopefully you’ll be intrigued…
I get the impression from this (and from some other posts in the past) that you guys think we were in a strong position to negotiate with publishers after the release of ETQW. Sure, it was a critical hit, and it sold decently for PC numbers (especially considering the month it launched), but releasing the SDK? The post launch fixes? That didn’t come cheap. I’m not sure why you’d think we were in a position of strength when it came time to sign a post ETQW deal…
I think it’s fair to say that both companies have different goals and measures of success of a commercial product, based on the needs of their overall business strategies. But that’s perfectly normal and to be expected…
Thanks guys!
A lot of multiplayer FPSs are starting to do objective based modes. Me, I just look at that as more of an opportunity to play the kind of gaming that we think is so great.
Yes, we could instead opt to not sign the contract, and then quickly go out of business when we can’t make monthly payroll, but not first without going through a long and painful layoff process, like the vast majority of independent studios out there…
Sorry for the unduly snarky answer, but honestly, those are the kinds of decisions you have to make when you’ve got a company with employees and families depending on you making the right choices to secure their futures. Of course, we make these decisions trying to produce the best game we can as well, because if we lose passion for making games, then believe me, there’s a lot more easy ways to make a paycheck. So as long as we still love making games, we’ll keep trying to balance the needs of business and the needs of gameplay.
There’s nothing simple about that. It’s a SIGNIFICANT expenditure of funds for us to do this ourselves. We’d like to, but should we, for instance, lay some people off so their lack of salaries would cover the costs of SDK development? Is that what you’d suggest we do, for instance?
What an interesting place to jump into the conversation. Back to page 34 now
Nephandy’s nailed it. Things are complex, it’s all a delicate balancing act, and we had to get the DLC done first and foremost because we had contractual obligations that we had to meet, for reasons that should be clear based on my points above.
But we are working on weapons tweaking right now. In fact, I believe Smooth has been talking to you guys about it a bit in another thread. Believe me, I would love nothing more than to just make some quick spread tweaks and blast it out to you guys as fast as possible, but that path will likely do more harm than good, because we would inevitably break something. For instance, in one of our internal playtests the other day, some fairly minor tweaks to one AR (the Rhett, i think) unexpectedly turned it into an instant death laser ray that destroyed everyone, but only in certain combinations with various things. If we had blithely rolled that out, it would only sow more confusion and discord. Believe me, as bad as you think it is now, it could be worse, so we have to tread carefully, measure twice, and cut once.
So we’re working on weapon tweaks as fast as we can, and will be getting you guys more involved with the direction of that shortly (hopefully some announcements on that next week, now that DLC is out of the pipe).
Also, for the record, the netvars are only a system that works on consoles, not PC, due to services that MS and PSN provide to developers (mini data clouds, basically). For tweaks and updates to PC, we have to basically release minor patches. Of course, patches on PC are much less painful (don’t have to go through an expensive vetting process by the platform holder), but they are unfortunately a bit more complex than just changing some numbers and hitting the upload button.
And the reason it took so long to get the spawn timers tweaked was because post shipping, we discovered that there were some bugs with the netvars system that had to be fixed in code. So those code updates had to get tested and tested and tested, which took time. We adjusted the timers as fast as we could, considering all the contractual work we had to get done first…
Sorry to hear that, but in the meantime, we’ll still continue to do all we can to improve the game for those who want to stay with us. Sorry you won’t be one of them.
The main thing we’re focusing on right now, with DLC done, is weapon spread adjustments. It’s unfortunately a very small group of guys who are working on it, but they’re doing their best, and are trying to get the game closer to player expectations. So that’s our focus, and if it’s your guys too, that can only help.
Honestly, anyone who’s relatively close to London and has the technical knowhow, and wants to make a day of it, come down to our offices and volunteer some time to help us tweak numbers!
That’s what we’re working on presently…
Page 33!
All I can say is 1) what I’ve already said above about this, an d2) I’m trying to get approval on a system in place where we can start engaging you guys in a MUCH more direct and frank discussion about this stuff (I’m talking about real numbers) than we’ve done in the past.
More as I know it…
All I can say is that we did listen, we just weren’t always in a position where we could do something about it, because of a host of issues and situations, some of which are still prevalent today. And we haven’t stopped listening yet, and we haven’t stopped trying to improve things, but the situation is complicated, there’s a lot of moving parts (both in the game and around the game), and we’re progressing as best we can under the circumstances.
Thanks for asking, good at the moment. I’m clearly (in the immortal words of Danny Glover) getting too old for this ****
Okay, time to take the beagles for a walk. First time it’s been sunny all week, gotta get out there before it starts raining again![/QUOTE]
Just like to say I love Brink, I haven’t tried previous releases but I will sometime. I will continue and support your game untill my disc brakes, then I shall buy a new one I will buy all the dlc that you guys release as I think that this is the best way to allow you to make the game the way that most of your buyers want. That brings me to my two questions, 1) How long did it take from getting the idea for Brink to actually release it, and 2) When is the next piece of dlc coming along 
*Mods, feel free to delete in order to keep this space happy and positive.
[QUOTE=Rahdo;369989]
So the question is, who’s principles do you compromise on? Who do you target if you want to guarantee sales success and not go out of business? And if you choose to target the smaller group, the niche, instead of the broad player base, can you manage costs and stay alive?[/QUOTE]
Q1 - You say this like the only peoples principles who could be compromised are the player base…as if SD has no principles so…uncompromisable!
Q2 - Facebook users. Which you should seriously consider if paying the rent is of #1 importance to you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjZRAvsZf1g
Q3 - SD clearly thought long and hard about this and decided that pandering was the best way to make bank. ahem I mean pay the rent.
I guess the heart of my disappointment with Brink relates to my mistaken belief that SD was a Long Tail kind of company. Certainly the longevity and robust nature of the small but dedicated player base of QW and ET would appear to be the kind of fans that a Log Tail company would love to have.
Brink is a direct departure from the past in that it is a shiny new IP, heavily marketed, which sold well up front and then completely dropped off. You can see how this would disappoint people who were expecting more of the same.
This certainly sounds positive, I look forward to hearing more and hope I’m not reading too much into it.
Believe me, EVERYONE would like to work like Valve (and Blizzard), but no developers (and very few publishers) have the freedom to pour endless amounts of money into a project and keep working on it until it is truly and completely “done”, let alone continue to develop costly additional content without guaranteed revenue streams (indi’s would go out of business, and publicly held publishers would get ripped apart by their shareholders who always focus on the short game). It’s definitely a dream of most developers to work this way, though, us included…
But all people have asked for in Brink is an SDK and PC specific tweaks. By removing that you’ve pretty much killed the long game. Sure those things would cost more than not doing them at all but its not flipping “endless amounts of money”. With an SDK you (SD/Beth) would have access to maps, mods, hud changes, game modes the lot. Stuff you could then port to consoles, official updates or just use to keep the game relevant and selling.
For some players, these are core gameplay principles (look how many knocks Brink got in press reviews for not having enough grind. It’s one of the most common mainstream criticisms of Brink, in fact: “I can make level 10 in under 10 hours? WTF!? Where’s my 50 hour grind?!”).
So the question is, who’s principles do you compromise on? Who do you target if you want to guarantee sales success and not go out of business? And if you choose to target the smaller group, the niche, instead of the broad player base, can you manage costs and stay alive?
These are the sorts of things we’re talking about long and hard here at Splash. Hopefully before too long, I’ll be able to come back here and give you our answers, and hopefully you’ll be intrigued…
My point was a bit blunter than I think you give credit for. I simply mean if SD is breaking their game design to shoe horn in these “popular” features then maybe they need to just focus on making a game around those features. Brink shouts uneasy compromise and suffers at both ends of the spectrum because of it.
However, again, the point is that maybe the process needs to stop trying to combine two things into one and instead find a way for the two things to live separately within a single game.
I get the impression from this (and from some other posts in the past) that you guys think we were in a strong position to negotiate with publishers after the release of ETQW. Sure, it was a critical hit, and it sold decently for PC numbers (especially considering the month it launched), but releasing the SDK? The post launch fixes? That didn’t come cheap. I’m not sure why you’d think we were in a position of strength when it came time to sign a post ETQW deal…
Ironic then that most people feel ETQW failed due to a wanky publishing/marketing by Activision.
Let me ask, was anything of this brought up though? You make it seem like a contract negotiation is all spit and cock fighting. That you had to walk in there cap in hand or else get nothing at all. Nobody is saying walk in there like Divas and demand an endless budget but surely aspects of the contract are open for discussion and business review.
A lot of multiplayer FPSs are starting to do objective based modes. Me, I just look at that as more of an opportunity to play the kind of gaming that we think is so great.
But you’re in the business of selling those games not playing them. A Valve supported product in your exact demographic would put SD in a tougher position to stand out and may push you further away from making an objective based game and more towards making a game with lots of grind.
Yes, we could instead opt to not sign the contract, and then quickly go out of business when we can’t make monthly payroll, but not first without going through a long and painful layoff process, like the vast majority of independent studios out there…
Sorry for the unduly snarky answer, but honestly, those are the kinds of decisions you have to make when you’ve got a company with employees and families depending on you making the right choices to secure their futures. Of course, we make these decisions trying to produce the best game we can as well, because if we lose passion for making games, then believe me, there’s a lot more easy ways to make a paycheck. So as long as we still love making games, we’ll keep trying to balance the needs of business and the needs of gameplay.
But you know that’s not what I’m saying. Let me put it this way. I bought Brink, unseen, pre-release, as I did ETQW. Your next game won’t be, if the next game is a no sale/pass, I’ll not even bother keeping an interest in future SD projects.
Granted, and the best of luck to you, if you replace me with 100 other gamers. But my point is ultimately your ability to make a GOOD game is also crucial to your success unless your business is going to be the sort of developers that churn out any crap for a few bucks. If you’re just accepting contracts that offer you nothing then you’re always going to be indebted to publishers.
Sorry but you seem to talk this big talk but then fall short and say well it’s all we could do within the limitations. Yet you don’t seem to realise that is very damaging for you as a business.
There’s nothing simple about that. It’s a SIGNIFICANT expenditure of funds for us to do this ourselves. We’d like to, but should we, for instance, lay some people off so their lack of salaries would cover the costs of SDK development? Is that what you’d suggest we do, for instance?
Why does everything come down to laying people off, suffering, starvation? Can you threaten some kitties once in a while?
You realise Valve, id, Epic ALL gained success through the work of modders and mappers that made their games well known, well played and long time sellers. Hell even now every open source version of Doom, Quake etc still needs you to buy the original game for the game content. You think anyone is going to be doing that with Brink in six years, hell six months? The SDK serves the interest of Bethesda and SD in the long term, it’s a shocking shame that nobody at SD could convince Bethesda of this right at the start.
to release the sdk is the solution, everything else is a wall of useless text
how many of the ~1000 people that are still playing are able to reprogram brink to make it more fun for the rest of us?
how many good leveldesigners are out there to create maps for brink?
how many would keep playing if the playerbase is split when you modify the game?
there are plenty of other games out there that have a sdk released. i personally would try these out instead of wasting time on a game only very few people still play. and the numbers dont increase, too.
i seriously would suggest developing a parkour system for a sdk that is already out there. because, honestly, thats really the only thing that stands out in brink.
[QUOTE=kilL_888;370219]how many of the ~1000 people that are still playing are able to reprogram brink to make it more fun for the rest of us?
how many good leveldesigners are out there to create maps for brink?
how many would keep playing if the playerbase is split when you modify the game?
there are plenty of other games out there that have a sdk released. i personally would try these out instead of wasting time on a game only very few people still play. and the numbers dont increase, too.
i seriously would suggest developing a parkour system for a sdk that is already out there. because, honestly, thats really the only thing that stands out in brink.[/QUOTE]
People are still modding and making maps for ET:QW despite it’s small player base.
[QUOTE=kilL_888;370219]how many of the ~1000 people that are still playing are able to reprogram brink to make it more fun for the rest of us?
how many good leveldesigners are out there to create maps for brink?
how many would keep playing if the playerbase is split when you modify the game?
there are plenty of other games out there that have a sdk released. i personally would try these out instead of wasting time on a game only very few people still play. and the numbers dont increase, too.
i seriously would suggest developing a parkour system for a sdk that is already out there. because, honestly, thats really the only thing that stands out in brink.[/QUOTE]
I am very interested in making maps and etc for Brink and perhaps a different game mode altogether, so there are a couple of us out there willing to jump in and get our hands dirty…
Parkour system for another game’s SDK? not a simple slap on bro, and its the only thing that stands out!?!? You have the overall designs of the building/environment, characters and overall look of the game that stands out as well, Brink visually is eye candy.
[QUOTE=Darksider;370387]I am very interested in making maps and etc for Brink and perhaps a different game mode altogether, so there are a couple of us out there willing to jump in and get our hands dirty…
Parkour system for another game’s SDK? not a simple slap on bro, and its the only thing that stands out!?!? You have the overall designs of the building/environment, characters and overall look of the game that stands out as well, Brink visually is eye candy.[/QUOTE]
good luck to you then adapting the eye candy in your custom made maps. im interested to see your designs. im also very interested in that game mode that you want to program (idtech4 is c++).
for skilled programmers, the parkour system might not be as had as one might think.
i remember “the specialists”, a mod for half-life 1, where you could wall jump, dive and i think even roll. jedi outcast (idtech3) had some nice moves, too. and this is open source now.
heck, i even remember a modding project i worked once on, where a coder programmed a jump that worked just like the “force jump” in jedi outcast (the longer you hold jump, the higher you jump) in one day.
so, i dont know how difficult that stuff really is?!