Rahdo's words - what happened here?

[Crytiqal]

Parkour in ETQW would be pretty neat.

Holy ****balls that would be AWESOME! :stroggbanana:

I don’t think it would be possible to copy that over if you have the SDK from BRINK and the SDK from ETQW. You prolly need the source code right?

[Chris2]

You could try making your own type but then you would probably need map sources to recompile so the new system can ‘read’ the maps or something.

[Humate]

Parkour in ETQW would be pretty neat.

No thanks

[sanDIOkan]

[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]

when hannes made the promod of qw he was with other 2 or 3 persons
and btw its not your problem how, how many etc

they have to release the sdk, people will do the rest. Tired to beg for things that are normal on other fps and never come on brink

[Smoochy]

loadsa text

thanks again mate.

i have to say i love this game. everyone is different so some people will always be unhappy.

i hate many games that some people love (COD online for example) and i have a life so i dont want to spend months of my life to unlock a gun (like bf2). i like the relatively quick levelling system (i.e. playing and not grinding) to get a character and even with limited play time i have 5 level 20+ characters in different guises (see sig) and they all play differently. to me its a great feature that i cant swap between light/heavy/medium every 30 seconds and its stupid, you cant do that IRL.

And with the abilities it does feel like every character is different, like when you replay fallout and use different abilities: you have to adapt and change with different strengths and weaknesses. i like it that all 5 seem to have a personality and i have to change my play style.

unfortunately (well, not really, im very happy about it) i now have a son (6 weeks early, but he is a strong little fella and doing very well) so my play time is going to be drastically reduced but im eager to get back online and play brink. i wish i could take a day off and come help you testing and tweaking

i can tell its a great game as ive not even played a ps3 game since i bought brink for PC and its the most fun ive had since bf2142 and will possibly overtake it. when playing with mates (steam friends) its 10x more fun (even though we win too easily - big up to spendlove and ceppy to name 2).

yes, some things weren’t as smooth as we hoped. for me the main issue is the magic-one-button-does-all F key needed some more love but when devs try to do something different (i guess its mainly a mechanism to help with the different player speeds in the game) some things will not work as well as hoped. i applaud you for trying to be different and not making a ‘COD Parkour’ game. i also like the styling in the game.

keep up the good work, you are one of the best devs out there in terms of trying something different, that takes big cahones!

[ScumBag]

No thanks

This.

I have an Icarus. How, exactly, would watching a clumsy .5 second animation of me vaulting up onto a rock make QW more fun?

[Dormamu]

[QUOTE=Rahdo;369989]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…
[/QUOTE]
Rahdo/SD, your HL (Valve), and Warcraft/Diablo (Blizzard) was always been and it will always be W:ET. Now with the developing partnership with Bethesda, Id5, it is in your grasp to seize this and clime up to your rightful place. Return to your routs and you will find the power to compete with the others, and become what you/us always dreamed you would be.
After that, you will have the money/time/support to make what you want and the best part is: that you will not need anymore to have excuses, your wife will be really happy that you stayed up late, cos you will have the money to take her and your dogs to spend every weekend on Paradise Island/Belize/Bahamas.

[Rahdo]

(Devil’s advocate) What if there weren’t any grind what so ever?

(mainstream player’s advocate) What? There’s no leveling up at all? I’m just supposed to… play? WTF!!! would have been the likely response.

Just make the distinction between mouse/keyboard and a controller this time.

Yup, you’ll note we did keep reload and interact separate, and I had wanted to get sprint/smart separate too, but unfortunately, another UI issue that came up was the remap screen not allowing for multiple binds

I wish I could sit right there offering direct feedback but alas.

Well, once we get the next pass rolled out, will look forward to hearing what you (and everyone else) thinks!

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

Believe me, I’d love for this to be possible, and we investigated it, but it wasn’t a trivial thing to do, so we’re doing the next best thing we can do: opening up the weapons feedback forum and doing internal playtests based off your guy’s thoughts.

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

What? Questions not related to how much we suck? I’m speechless!

Anyway, Brink’s full dev cycle was just shy of three years, though the first half of it was with a very small team, and the 2nd half of it was with a small team, compared to how big most modern shooter teams are. And for question #2, that’s up to Bethesda. If they want to pay for it to be developed (it costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to do this), then we want to make it…

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.

1. not sure I follow. the point I was making was about how we could try for the big market and go for a hit (which we got) to pay our bills, or we could go for the small market and keep costs even lower to pay our bills. But the two were incompatible in a lot of ways, hence which side do you compromise on?

2. we’ve wanted to make a fun little tapir wars game for those kind of audiences for awhile, but for every big hit that’s out there, there’s 1000 titles that curled up and died. that market’s super saturated…

3. You say pandering, I say “make the best game we can that delivers on an experience that players will enjoy”. Tomato tomahto

Of course, we do consider ourselves long tail, why else would we be here talking to you, or continuing to improve the game as best we can?

But all people have asked for in Brink is an SDK and PC specific tweaks.

And we’re working on the tweaks that we can afford to, and being honest about the ones we can’t. As I’ve mentioned before, an SDK would cost a substantial amount of money (literally hundreds of thousands of pounds in dev and testing time), and we’re not all wearing money hats here…

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.

I think that’s a really interesting point and worthy of further healthy discussion, as in what parts of SD game design were “broken”, in what specific ways. Of course, it’s hard to have that conversation, what with the constant “You suck, Brink sucks, everything sucks, I’ll be back tomorrow to tell you again how much you suck” histrionics there are these days. But I’m trying to get past that to get to the good stuff. And on that point, thanks again to all the folks who are enjoying the game and saying so here on these forums, btw, including in this thread. I know that you’re largely ignored by the those who think everything sucks, but you prove that things in fact don’t suck, and that Brink is actually a pretty damn good game. It’s just not what everyone wanted, but then, it never could be.

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.

I can’t talk about specific contract issues, that’s a great way to get in all sorts of legal trouble. What I can say is that neither Wolf nor ETQW made the company any money, and all of the post release ETQW stuff bled the company dry (SDK and patches), so you can fill in the blanks if you like, because I can’t here in a public forum…

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.

A million years ago, when I made Syphon Filter, everyone said that since it tread on so much of the same ground at Metal Gear Solid (which came out like 4 or 5 months before us) that we were doomed. But the game did well, because we made a game we loved. That’s all we can continue to do, make games we love and our proud of and enjoy playing, and hope that players enjoy it too.

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.

I’m not sure why you think that we don’t realize what problems those (often necessary) compromises can bring. Sure we had some surprises about Brink’s reception and launch (don’t even get me started on that because I can’t really talk about it ) but we always knew we were making a game that changed some of the basic parameters of what ET had been about to help ensure the big sales hit that we needed. And we never hid that. I was here and on Xfire well over a year before we shipped explaining how and what had changed, and why.

In the end, we made the decisions we made to try to deliver the best experience we could while ensuring we didn’t go out of business, and maybe, if we were lucky, make a hit. Some of the decisions were spot on, some of them were wrong. That’s the nature of games dev. And we try to learn from those decisions and do better next time.

It’s not like I disagree in any way with what you’re saying, and I’m not sure why you think I do disagree. I would hope I was pretty consistent in all of these posts…

Why does everything come down to laying people off, suffering, starvation? Can you threaten some kitties once in a while?

Because it costs insane amounts of money every month to run Splash, and if we don’t keep income coming in, we’ll go out of business. Look at the literally hundreds of independent developers over the last few years who have gone under. The odds are against any indi, and they’re against us, and we have to be smart, we have to be careful.

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.

Actually Valve, id, Epic made it to “super-duper mega awesome success” through all of that long term support. But before that, they all made it to “mega success” by releasing games that sold by the boat load to huge audiences, as stand-alone products, making them effectively financially independent, allowing them to do that unlimited ongoing support. I’m not sure why you think that Splash has Half Life/Doom/Unreal money just sitting around in the bank, letting us do what we know is the right thing. Brink, which is by far the biggest financial success we’ve ever had, has the potential to make us some money, but we won’t see that for a long time because of how financial years work. And in the mean time, we’ve got to stay solvent and continue to generate income, so we don’t have to lay off people or go out of business.

This is how things work. First you have a hit (done, finally, with Brink. Wolf and ETQW not so much), then you make some money (check back with us in about a year), then you start doing best practice stuff once you’ve secured your future (and as I’ve mentioned several times in this thread, we do have future plans, which we can’t talk about yet).

Return to your roots

We never forgot them. Watch this space

[Nexolate]

Another excellent post as usual Rahdo, thanks for your time.

Here’s a question that’s always been on my mind, which I’ve never formally asked.
In the future, if time, money and publisher permitted, would you guys ever consider producing a Brink 2 to improve upon the mechanics of the original?

I’ve said it in multiple threads now, but there are some things you just can’t add/fix with patches and DLC. Those kinds of things could turn Brink from being a pretty fun game, into a really fun game. Not to mention all those things you had to cut from Brink due to said constraints.

In the end though, I suppose it depends on whether a sequel would be as financially successful as the first. Those people that bought Brink but hated it for whatever reason would probably not be willing to give the franchise another shot, unfortunately. =/

Regards,
Nexo

[Verticae]

(mainstream player’s advocate) What? There’s no leveling up at all? I’m just supposed to… play? WTF!??

“This almost makes it look like Counter-Strike, and nobody plays that game…” Sure, it’s an easy retort, but a valid one.

I think that’s a really interesting point and worthy of further healthy discussion, as in what parts of SD game design were “broken”, in what specific ways. Of course, it’s hard to have that conversation, what with the constant “You suck, Brink sucks, everything sucks, I’ll be back tomorrow to tell you again how much you suck” histrionics there are these days. But I’m trying to get past that to get to the good stuff.

Hi, welcome to the internet.

Really though, the arguments of broken game design have been mentioned time and again on these forums, and argued to death. Defending ‘trying something new’ is one thing, but defending that same thing being non-functional is another. Though I suppose Bethesda’s PR department is going to raise some hell if an SD employee would post “Yeah, we kinda cocked up the customisation, should’ve probably kept the classes recognisable”, but hey, what can you do.

And on that point, thanks again to all the folks who are enjoying the game and saying so here on these forums, btw, including in this thread. I know that you’re largely ignored by the those who think everything sucks, but you prove that things in fact don’t suck, and that Brink is actually a pretty damn good game. It’s just not what everyone wanted, but then, it never could be.

“Pretty damn good” is a pretty big overstatement for the PC release, I would say. Currently, it’s a decent game, probably mediocre to those focused on individual skill. However, that doesn’t mean Brink doesn’t have the potential to be a fantastic title; but a lot of us were expecting that title at launch, as should be expected. If the game has to be drastically changed in patches, one could seriously argue that the release should’ve been postponed. But that brings me back to Bethesda who’d likely want to see some money first.

I’m not sure why you think that we don’t realize what problems those (often necessary) compromises can bring. Sure we had some surprises about Brink’s reception and launch (don’t even get me started on that because I can’t really talk about it ) but we always knew we were making a game that changed some of the basic parameters of what ET had been about to help ensure the big sales hit that we needed. And we never hid that. I was here and on Xfire well over a year before we shipped explaining how and what had changed, and why.

This goes back to the core of this thread, though: While your words were (mostly) true, they were also very much meant in promotion of Brink. Pretty obvious, since it’s your own product (and bread), but I think that you managed to get people overexcited. A lot of posts came down to “Yeah it’s pretty mainstream, but you can make it better quite easily”. Three months after release, I think you can agree that didn’t quite work out as originally intended, and that may have given ET(QW) veterans false expectations. (In fact, somewhere in this feces-covered gem of a thread, I think you did).

[QUOTE=Rahdo;372870]This is how things work. First you have a hit (done, finally, with Brink. Wolf and ETQW not so much), then you make some money (check back with us in about a year), then you start doing best practice stuff once you’ve secured your future (and as I’ve mentioned several times in this thread, we do have future plans, which we can’t talk about yet).

We never forgot them. Watch this space :)[/QUOTE]

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before: If this level of involvement from you is any sign of what Splash Damage will do in the future, I’ve got pretty good hopes. Although I notice the defensive stance with a lot of SD’s posts, I can’t really blame any of you. Sadly, a lot of people with valid points lack the ability to actually have a discussion.

Enjoy your weekend.

[wolfnemesis75]

Interesting reading, Rahdo. Until I got to the: We do have future plans, which we can’t talk about yet. We at least need hints now. Some may call me overzealous, but I think Brink is one of the better games to come out in a while. Since Gears of War. Brink has style. Originality. Most games don’t quite captivate my attention like Brink does. Aliens vs Marines, USA vs Fictional Russian/Terrorists/German Nazis Zombies gets old.

Brink is fresh and vastly underrated still, and under appreciated for what it tries to do despite popular convention, and this is true in this current gaming culture of play-it safe titles. Making a CODMW3 is a re-skin of CODMW with a couple new bells and whistles but basically the same formula, which is a prudent business strategy and one that Activision has tweaked to financial perfection. (Even though even mainstream fashionable titles like Guitar Hero can fall from grace rather quickly) we live in a day and age of here today, gone tomorrow. One day there’s a Borders on the corner, next day, gone. I don’t mean to pick on COD, because obviously its a great game for many, but after a while it just gets stale after the 10 latest yearly re-skin.

What Brink does well is create a game with its own original context for a war, unique setting, and style and does it in a way that doesn’t bend ultimately to the play it safe zones of gaming. Unfortunately, that means ya get hammered in the Press by some who want the same old thing that’s safe and comfortable. But, for those who want something fresh and that at least tries to push the envelope and is willing to take risks that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, I think we end up with a unique title that keeps demanding a revisit.

I’ve been playing games for a long time. Every system ever put out going all the way back to Atari 2600 and the arcades when every mall in America had at least one, all the way up to PC games back when PC gaming was the best thing if you wanted high graphic performance, and now all the way up to Xbox which has become a more accessible alternative and the go-to gaming system for online multiplayer. I would’ve killed for a game like Brink then, and know how awesome it is now and what it does to distinguish itself from the try-and true done to death formulas. I know gaming and invest a lot into this hobby. That’s why I don’t let other people’s gaming needs or beliefs, whether its about skill or depth or whatever, influence what I look for in gaming! Every game I’ve ever played I judge as itself unless it was perhaps a direct sequel, but even then I’ve learned that the process and end product is gonna be different for every iteration no matter how much one would want it otherwise, because nothing is created in a vacuum.

You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need! Oh ya!

It doesn’t surprise me that Brink is SD most successful project. It does a lot of really cool things, and succeeds more than it fails, but does frustrate the hell out of ya if you’re playing alone and some random bot named Jenkins takes off your hack box with 10 seconds to go, lol.

[sachewan]

Do you have anything to say for those of us who brought Brink PC in America and have literally nowhere to play because of how fast players abandoned this game and how few servers there are? Do you realize you sold people a multiplayer game that is unable to be played in multiplayer right now? Can I get my money back? Can you do ANYTHING to increase the playerbase so there will at least be a FEW other people to play with? (more free weekends, permanant price drop, etc)

[Chris2]

What Brink does well is create a game with its own original context for a war, unique setting, and style and does it in a way that doesn’t bend ultimately to the play it safe zones of gaming. Unfortunately, that means ya get hammered in the Press by some who want the same old thing that’s safe and comfortable.

Brink never got hammered in the press for its setting or style, that was just about the only thing most reviewers could agree upon that the style was nice.

[tokamak]

Yup, you’ll note we did keep reload and interact separate, and I had wanted to get sprint/smart separate too, but unfortunately, another UI issue that came up was the remap screen not allowing for multiple binds

In testing I mean, weapon balanced derived from controller testing doesn’t necessarily apply to M/KB.

[H0RSE]

Because it costs insane amounts of money every month to run Splash, and if we don’t keep income coming in, we’ll go out of business. Look at the literally hundreds of independent developers over the last few years who have gone under. The odds are against any indi, and they’re against us, and we have to be smart, we have to be careful.

In the words of Varric from Dragon Age 2 -

“Running a business is like owning a puppy. Take your eyes off it and there’s **** all over the floor.”

[wolfnemesis75]

[QUOTE=H0RSE;372928]In the words of Varric from Dragon Age 2 -

“Running a business is like owning a puppy. Take your eyes off it and there’s **** all over the floor.”[/QUOTE]Ha ha. Good point, man.

[Throbblefoot]

[QUOTE=Rahdo;372870]
What I can say is that neither Wolf nor ETQW made the company any money[/QUOTE]
That’s just heartbreaking. I had hoped you’d done better with ETQW. I’m glad you guys got a hit and have future plans.

Thanks for posting on the weekend again!

-Throbblefoot

[sanDIOkan]

rahdo i will ask forever

instead waste your time and your resources trying to fix this game, why dont you just release the sdk?
isnt it faster?

dont tell me you have to program it cause i dont believe you dont have an editor that can be turned into a sdk…

[Nexolate]

[QUOTE=sanDIOkan;372958]rahdo i will ask forever

instead waste your time and your resources trying to fix this game, why dont you just release the sdk?
isnt it faster?

dont tell me you have to program it cause i dont believe you dont have an editor that can be turned into a sdk…[/QUOTE]

He’s already said several times that developing an SDK would cost far more than you seem to think.
Drop it.

Regards,
Nexo

[tokamak]

instead waste your time and your resources trying to fix this game, why dont you just release the sdk?
isnt it faster?

Faster in achieving what?