Just because I was so positively surprised by it: Rahdo replied to this thread by private message on CrossFire. Seeing as ‘private message is private’ is pretty sacred in my book, I’ve decided not to post the contents of the PM here, though I will say that he cleared a few things up. Next to that, it shows personality for him to actually reply to it, and I must say I respect him for doing it.
Rahdo's words - what happened here?
AnthonyDa
(AnthonyDa)
#123
pics or gtfo ? 
edit: gotta luv the new posts from rahdo on xfire.
Basically, he is saying that the “smaller hardcore fanbase” didn’t like the game. While this is true, he is also forgetting that 95%+ percent of the PC players left the game. I dont think that the PC player is only made of a “smaller hardcore fanbase”.
Rahdo
(Rahdo)
#124
Hi guys. First off, let me say I’m sorry I haven’t been posting to the boards for the last year or so. As long timers know, I used to post tons, but had to quit because it was consuming too much of my personal life. I already spend 60+ hours a week working (even now, post Brink shipping), and don’t get to see my wife near as much as I’d like (nothing pisses her off more than when I’m doing work related stuff on my laptop while we’re on vacation), and to spend hours and hours posting from home just isn’t viable for me any more. And that was back when our boards were only 25% as active as they are now. For me to keep up with everything nowadays would literally be impossible given the constraints of my personal life.
Anyway, I still regularly read the boards, and obviously this thread jumped out as maybe a good one-stop thread for me to jump in and talk to you guys about stuff, so here goes. First I wrote an email to Vert, because honestly, because he wrote to me personally on XF when he posted here, and I always reply to all personal messages, eventually. It’s just rude not to, and my momma didn’t raise me to be rude.
Please note, I can’t promise that I’ll be as good as I’d like about replying to everything on going in this or any other thread, because again, honestly, I love my wife, and her happiness is more important to me than anything else (I hope you can understand that), but still I figured I could spend an hour on a lazy Sunday morning answering some questions if I can
So, might as well start at the top:
So let me say I don’t quite understand how this doesn’t apply to the game we shipped. Yes, we call medpacks syringes, and yes their functionality has changed from traditional medpacks that you throw on the ground, but was anyone surprised by this when they bought Brink? There were dozens of videos, hours and hours of footage showing exactly how the game worked before we shipped, and the way we were handling medic stuff was very well known. We even did that “here’s how classes work” vid, which detailed exactly how things went.
So I’m not sure how this is an example of a bait and switch or a lie that I told. Sorry if you think that it was, but we obviously tried hard with all the pre-release vids to let players know what they were getting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rahdo
Q: Will it be possible to change the crosshair to only a dot?
A: Definitely possible. But first we’ve got to get a GUI coder and artist on board.
Not even that.
I’m glad you used the whole quote here, because as I clearly said, it was possible we’d get that in if we got enough guys to do the UI. If you go read the whole thread these quotes are from, you remember I mentioned this many times, that we were having a hard time getting a full UI team to handle all the million things we wanted to get right. That situation never really got better. Our UI needs dogged us till the day we shipped, and a lot of thing that we (I) desperately wanted to get in, like this feature, couldn’t make it, because of manpower issues. Which is why that quote is dead accurate. I didn’t say that it would go in, but that it would if we could get the folks to do it.
Obviously, that didn’t happen, and I’m sorry about that. It seems like a simple thing, I know, but believe me, making a game to launch on all 3 platforms in all territories on the same day is hard, and sometimes you have to let some simple things not in the game to make time to fix crashes or what have you. Anyway…
Quote:
Originally Posted by rahdo
Q: Just to make it clear, I don’t expect you to create ET2. I just want to have a fast-paced and smooth game experience. Free running as alternative to trickjumping? Damn, I’m fine with that as long as you implement it in the right way!
A: It seems perfectly reasonable to me to say that another one of those user-controlled ‘hardcore match’ settings could easily be ‘disallow ironsights’, along with user control over spread modifiers. it’s options like that which make me (perhaps foolishly) believe we can make a game that crosses over between pub and pro play…
Where is this? A fully customizable server for competitive play would be killer; it’d honestly have saved this game from it’s competitive death.
This is another example of stuff I would have liked to do better, but manpower issues limited what we could achieve while trying to ship on all 3 platforms at once. More server setting were definitely on the list, but there were higher priority features that had to be taken care of. Of course, again if you read my quote, I was very careful not to promise this, because at the time, I wasn’t sure if that was going to go in, because I knew we had limitations and couldn’t do everything we want in the time we had.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rahdo
Q: Spread is arguably a random factor that in my opinion has too much of a negative impact on a players actual eye-hand coordination skills.
A: Yeah, spread is a powerful tool though to again give players more depth to their experience, since of course, spread is basically eliminated if you burst fire instead of spam bullets. so again, another skill (or tactic, really) for players to master.
Burst fire is not eliminated at all with burst fire, unless you wait a full second between bursts. Then it’s a little less.
So obviously, here we’ve got a quote that you do agree with (burst does work), you just not as well as you like. Fair enough, that’s totally viable feedback, and we can agree to disagree on how well burst should work (and please bear in mind, we know that a lot of you guys aren’t happy with the balance of the guns. Believe me, we track these conversations reguarily (you can always see when we’re reading the boards). I can’t promise you how we’re going to address issues (because even when I don’t promise things, like this thread is showing, it gets perceived that I am promising things ), but I can say we are listening.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rahdo
Q: Will there be ET/RTCW spawntimers & selfkilling?
A: All the normal rules and tactics you’ve come to expect from ET will be in Brink
No, and no.
Selfkilling, now this one, I do have to raise my hand and say “sorry”. Obviously this was a quote where I did specifically state will be in the game, no ambiguity, no “we’ll try” or “we’ll see”, and yet it’s not in the game. So I genuinely want to say “sorry” about this; it was not meant to mislead, because when I posted that, selfkill was in the game and worked fine. There were reasons it was taken out (Exedore can talk about this if you guys want to have a discussion about it), and when it was, I should have let you guys know that something I definitely promised had changed. So again, all I can say is that I’m sorry I didn’t correct this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rahdo
Q: Can you record demos i Brink?
A: We definitely have plans for demos, but are working out the specifics now.
The specifics right now: No demo recording.
Yup, that’s because if we’d left demo recording in, it would have crashed the game. And we couldn’t ship with a feature that crashes the game. And there wasn’t time to fix this crash, so we had to turn it off. Believe me, this was one of the more heartbreaking decisions we had to make close to shipping. Everyone wanted to keep it in, but the realities of only having 24 hours in a day intruded here. So yes, we did definitely have plans, but they didn’t work out. We knew having them in the game was important, but so was hitting our street date.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rahdo
Q: Will there be also strafejumps as in W:ET and RTCW?
A: There aren’t strafejumps, per se, in the game (really, a lot of the levels wouldn’t support it very well anyway, but there are movement elements that are very much skill based. you might have heard about the SMART button and how it automates climbing and whatnot, but it’s important to realize you can do the jumps yourself manually, and with correct timing you’ll get more effecient movement over terrain than players get who are relying on the smart button.
Simply false. There’s no ‘manual’ alternative for SMART.
Well, on this, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. There’s lots of stuff that skinnies can do only if you bring personal skill to the equation, and practice your timings until you can nail moves 100% of the time. I watch BrinkTV matches, and I often notice teams on offense trying to take one of the many parkour shortcuts in the game (in aquarium, shipyard, etc.), and totally miss the timings (so while 3 guys tried to move forward together, only one of them made it and the others had to try again, for example). This is because a lot of the really useful parkour in the game takes practice and time to master. Sure, you don’t have to master the timing to climbing over a crate that you were previously using for cover, because we didn’t want that to be hard to do (though you’ll do it faster if you manually jump instead of rely on only the smart button). But the levels have lots of places where if you don’t practice it, you’ll never be able to do it. Le Parkour vid on youtube shows a lot of these, and comp players are using them too.
So like I said, we’ll have to agree to disagree here
I might sound a little harsh here, but these few points alone would’ve meant a massive improvement for Brink, both in a public and a competitive way. I’d like to ask Splash Damage what happened to these features; why aren’t they ingame?
Hopefully that answers your question a little bit. (and I’m already at 20 minutes spent on this thread, but we’ll keep going)
For a year and a half, he gave similar answers to these ones. I hardly think that’s similar to ‘just another interview’, especially seeing as it’s the exact playerbase he’s addressing here that’s seen the biggest letdown from the game; being the competitive PC community.
Well, tbh, it was more like 3 or 4 months, not a year and a half, that I was actively posting to XF, and yes, you guys feel let down. I guess my number one message here is that there’s a lot of stuff in the game that we did get in specially just for you, and we’re continuing to do work to make it better for you. But more about that below.
Believe me, you have no idea how bad it makes me feel that you think I was purposely lying to you guys. When I posted on XF and our own boards, it was only because I was so excited and because I wanted the game to be the best it could be, so I wanted to talk to you guys about what was important. As you saw above, I was really careful to not promise stuff that I wasn’t sure we could deliver (though I did screw up sometimes, I’m only human), but it was never to “con” or trick you guys. So I feel really bad that my posts borne of enthusasm and passion for the game have had this effect. So I’m here to say that I’m sorry you feel that I lied to you, but genuinely I didn’t. If I ever run in to any of you guys in real life, I’d be more than happy to buy you a beer and go over this stuff in even more detail.
There were several things we were planning to do with ironsights that were unique (and I thought, cool), and not all of them made it in. One of the ones that did was the “adjusted iron sight” attachment, which is a small thing (as I said, i doubt you guys would care anyway), but I know I prefer using it.
Honestly, lets talk about any quote where I said specifically something would be in the game that isn’t there. Of the ones that Verticae mentioned, one was a genuine issue (the selfkill), and there were reasons for that swap (though you’d have to talk to Exedore about them). But I’m willing to listen to the other specific quotes from interviews or posts where I was misleading, and try to explain what happened (though I’m already breaking my promise to my wife and this thread is at over an hour so far, but onward I continue!)
What sacrifices is he talking about?? I dont see any…
Basically, what I meant was that we did try to get as many PC centric features in the game as we could. Did we succeed as much as we wanted? No, of course not. Did we have to sacrifice in other area of the game to get what we could? Most definitely yes. Couple of quick examples: dedicated servers. This took time and resourses, dedicated coder support, and the time spent on them meant that other features suffered (party support, lobbies, etc.), and those were features that would have improved our review scores if we’d prioritized them. But we wanted you guys to have dedi servers, and so we sacrificed in other areas. Another example: we got a fair bit of negative critism about how the guns “don’t feel as good as CoD”, and we knew we’d get hit with that, because we were going for lower damage weapons. Why? Because we wanted to be true (as we could be) to the core gameplay that the ET games have already had, so that was a conscious sacrifice to our review scores we knew we were making to make the game more PC comp centric. Now, don’t get me wrong, we also did this because we believe it makes the game more fun, but it was still a sacrifice that we could have easily avoided by simply saying “make 'em all like CoD”. There’s lots of stuff like that, where we were trying to make a more broadly accessible game, we knew how to do it, but we kept stuff in to stay true to our roots.
I don’t regret them, because I’m proud of the game and I think it’s a lot of fun to play, and a lot of other people do to. As I said in the original quote, I’m bummed the PC guys don’t like it more, because a lot of that stuff was done for you, but cest la vie. And we’re continuing to focus on improvements for you too. Getting spectator mode working better, for example. That’s obviously to help foster a better comp experience. Improved server browser. Clearly we’re working to improve the PC experience. So again, it’s not like we’re not trying, but it’s also not that we can instantly fix every problem you guys have with the game either. But we do what we can
At what point have I EVER represented myself as a PC gamer? You can read dozens of interviews with me where I point out I’m a console guy, through and through. That’s why I was having the dialog with you guys to better understand how we could make the game work for you (while still making a game that would sell well on console, which fortunately we achieved). Believe me, as I stated above, it would have been so much easier to ignore PC, but we didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to do that, and we didn’t do that. We spent literally thousands of manhours doing PC only code and features. Not as many as we wanted, obviously, but there’s only so many hours in a day, and we had limits. So we did our best under tight tight circumstances. In the end, we don’t have millions of players on PC, but we stil do have many thousands (bear in mind that the maximum concurrent users is always only a fraction of the total base), and we still want to make the game better for them wherever we can (updated server browser, getting updates and fixes out, DLC, etc.)
Thanks DarkA, and everyone else who comes to the forums to be positive and constructive. A big thanks to all of you, I just wanted to take the opportunity to say.
Just wanted to add that I don’t regret getting invovled with the community, I just regret that I don’t have enough personal time to keep it up. Real life intrudes, and I can’t give you guys the service I’d like to (post time so far: 90 minutes and counting )
Well, the reason was pretty simple: making games is hard. If it wasn’t, everyone would do it and every game would get 10/10. Just like 90% of games in development, it turned out to be harder than originally thought, and just like 90% of games in development, there were delays.
Also take a look at the old videos of this game. Everything looked so much better. It makes you what happened during the development with this game. All these cut out features were features that console players would never use or care for.
There were plenty of features that had to get cut that were for console players too, believe me. The list of cut features is pretty long, and pretty bloody, and hits PC and console features equally. But we made the calls we made ensure what remained would be better. Did we get every call right? Nope, we’re only human. But we did the best we could in a difficulty situation, and fortunately, Bethesda was supportive to give us the extra time to improve stuff, for as long as they could
It’s quite obvious they just wanted to cash in on the console market. They shouldn’t have lied to the pc community about it at least.
I think I’ve already mentioned this, but it was never my intent to lie to anyone, and if there are any specific examples, please let me know and I’ll do my best to explain.
That is an excellent quote to bring up, because it does cut to the heart of a lot of the problems. If I could have made more time to continue connecting with you guys directly, then after that out of context quote came out, I could have gotten online and meant what that actually meant. But instead, we were too busy making the game, and stuff fell between the cracks, and I didn’t do as good a job as I should have talking to you guys, and that’s defintely something I regret… there should have been more two way communication throughout the games dev. Apologize for that (and I’m at 2 hours of my sunday now, but I will see this through).
For the record, what I meant by the “let’s not mince words” quote was talking about certain ET features that were really important to me, personally. Those were objective driven gameplay that encourages people to actually work together as a team. I believe in that regard, we are carrying on where ET left off, I believe it completely. To me, that was always the most important goal for dev of Brink. And every time I play a pub game, and other human players buff my kevlar, or give me revive, or protect me while I’m doing an objective (all of which happen a lot), I’m reminded that we did succeed. That we created a game that gets strangers actually working together instead of everyone lonewolfing. That’s special, that’s my feeling of what ET did so importantly.
For other players, ET means something completely different. And obviously, if i’d gotten online after that interview, we could have had a conversation about that, and there’d have been more clarity regarding this interview. But I didn’t, and that was unfortuate, to say the least. But I had hoped that this difference was clear anyway, since let’s face it, we were including iron sighting but not strafe jumping, and we’d never made a secret of that. And since every time I talked about being ET-like, I was always in interviews talking about objective-driven team play, I would have hoped I was being clear. Obiously, I wasn’t clear enough…
BTW, it occurs to me that a very important counter quote to this one is one of the first ones I ever did on XF, which seems to have been forgotten:
That’s argubably the most important post for PC players I’ve made in my entire time on the development of Brink, it was so important that I repeated that sentiment several times in the original mega thread on XF. Long story short (too late for that!) I never meant to give you guys the impression that we weren’t first and foremost making a game to have a broad appeal. Go back and read the original thread and you’ll see it was there I was always up front about that. Throughout Brinks development, we were trying to maintain a delicate balancing act between console and PC, between pub and pro. We made the best choices we could to make the best game we could for the most players we could. I think we succeeded in that goal, even if we failed at some other goals we had. And yes, that means we had to sacrifice stuff for you guys (and every other type of player, as mentioned above), but I told you about that as far back as 30/08/09, 10:51:50, according to XF forum records.
Continuing on (digging up that quote took awhile… at 2.5 hours now, and i’m only on page 2! gulp!)
Bura, to you and everyone else who feels that way (that we set outto deceive you), I’m sorry you feel that way, and please see my quote above, from august 2009, where I set the parameters of what Brink would be. Again, I could have done better repeating that over the ensuing 2 years, but I remember I did repeat it a lot back then, and I figured everyone understood. Clearly I could have done better.
Now that’s an interesting point, because obviously, the entire existence of this thread is because i used to get online reguarily and post at length about how and why we did things, so it was kind of what you’re asking for here. And yet we can now see what’s happened. Obviously, if I could have kept up my volume of posts, and completely given up my personal life (2 hours 45 mintues it’s almost 11am now), then I expect we might not be where we are today, you and I. but I just couldn’t do it. Though I wish I had, I don’t see how I could have without getting a divorce. So it’s a tricky problem. Hopefully this post at least goes a little way towards mending bridges?
I guess that’s one way of looking at it. You’ve gotten 8 years of awesome gameplay for the price of a copy of Brink (and ETQW). So assuming you played 365 days a year, that’s all that great gameplay for just 3 cents a day! Less than the cost of a stick of gum. So many good memories for such a small price!
(sorry, had to lighten the mood, apologies in advance if anyone thinks this is me doing anyting other than a light hearted joke)
You joke, but I do often wonder if I did more harm than good talking to you guys in the first place, since I couldn’t keep it up. I started somethign and didn’t stick with it. Believe me, it genuinely pains me that anyone would think my enthusiasm for making the best game I could which led me to post was anything less than 100% me trying to make the best game i could for everyone. It sucks that maybe I should have just kept my damn mouth shut. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow if I’m making another mistake now (I’m sure you guys will let me know )
3 hours and counting. My wife was really excited about playing Agricola this morning, but she’s given up waiting 
I was kinda agnostic about the “Is Brink SD or Beth’s fault?” thing. Then I read Rahdo’s posts on crossfire, and hmm. Heartbroken? I don’t know how it’s possible, looking at Brink, to be even slightly surprised that it bombed on PC.
Never underestimate the power of optimism for an optimisitc guy like me. Every video of me you’ve ever seen, that’s just the way I am, upbeat, excited, passionate, and full of hope for a brighter better tomorrow. So yeah, I knew there were problems, but through it all I felt that even though the game wasn’t perfect, I was confident we’d made a fun game. And I know that to be true. But obviously, it wasn’t fun enough for everyone… Ah well, can’t let it keep me down, just gotta make the next game even better! (and here comes that optimism again)
WolfNem is now my new personal hero. He said it so much better than I could have (since it’s what I was trying to say back in aug 09, see bolded quote above). And I hope that if you can do that, and enjoy the game you bought.
OMG, I JUST HIT PAGE 4! There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Stick with me guys, we’re almost through!
Kin, can you point me to that? I’d like to answer it there. Thanks!
Ironically, that’s how I actually started posting on XF (see the bolded quote above). But they all forgot that part, I should have repeated it more often (though I did say it several times). Lesson learned for me (and I don’t mean that in a passive aggressive kind of way, btw. I genuinely mean that this whole thing has been a huge learning experience for me, and hopefully in the future, if i do any more online interactions with fans – still not sure if i does more good or harm – i’ll defintely redouble my efforts to be crystal clear about stuff like this)
Great example of what I’m talking about here. Yes, you feel that the customizaiton is crappy, because it doesn’t suit your purposes, and in fact actually works against them. Totally understand and totally talked about this at length years ago with you guys, and what we were doing about it (remember the backpacks? shame the didn’t work). In the end, for a broader appealling game, we put customization in, and it was well worth it. The majority of players LOVE it. They just do. That was a feature that was a big success. Does it hurt comp play, definitely. No doubt. Class icons over the head helps, sure, but it’s a sacrifice we made to hardcore play to better appease mass market play. Please note earlier on in this reply, i gave examples of sacrifices we made to mass market considerations to appease hardcore players too. Those are the kinds of decisions we have to make all the time during dev. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, unless you’re casting a very small net. When we eventually figure out how to make enough money to stay in business casting the small net, we’ll let you know, I promise (though I guess the theme of this thread is my promises mean jack squat, but I’ll still promise anyway )
I already mentioned this earlier, but if you feel that way, then it means we did too good a job making parkour usage require dedication and exploration. With the benefit of hindsight, we maybe should have made it all more obvious, but that was one of those sacrifices we thought we were making to mass market players to appease hardcore. But I guess maybe that one backfired?
Okay, it’s been another half hour. I think i’m going to start skipping through stuff faster, because I want to get this finished before lunch Sorry in advance if I skip any particarily salient points (or have already done so)
Did they completely throw away the game they were working on and restart? There’s no way you could think any of the stuff we asked for would have made it in the game with the game playing the way it does.
Good question. Answer: no, we didnt throw away and start over. But the reality of development is that when you get close to shipping, you’ve got a lot of features in and not all of them work. Some of them are kind of there, some of them crash the game outright. You’ve only got so many hours in the day to fix bugs and clean stuff up. Your ship date at some point literally can’t be moved any more, no matter how much you’d like it to be. Millions of dollars have been committed to advertising, to reserving space on store shelves, etc. etc. So you have to make the hard calls and cut stuff that’s near and dear to your heart, even if it’s working great and just has one dumb little bug (too bad that bug is hard to reproduce and causes a crash once every 10 hours of play). So the feature gets cut, you ship the game, hopefully people like what didn’t get cut, the game is popular, and a sequel gets greenlit, so you can get those features back in. That’s basically how it works in the industry. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now, and I’ve never seen it not happen on any game, nor any game that any friend of mine has worked on. It’s unfortunate, and it leads back to the question asked earlier that if this is just “the way things go” (for better or worse), was I wrong in talking about features in the first place, before we shipped. Maybe I was. You guys tell me (I’m sure you have opinions )
p.s. final post writing time, 3 hours 20 minutes. I’m going to go play Agricola now (and maybe some Brink later)
Verticae
(Verticae)
#125
Holy ****. I’ll try reading all of this later, but… Holy ****.
So I’m not sure how this is an example of a bait and switch or a lie that I told. Sorry if you think that it was, but we obviously tried hard with all the pre-release vids to let players know what they were getting.
Let’s make it very clear that I never intended this thread as an ‘omg they lied to us!!11’, but more as a means of asking what happened to such features. A lot of the features are so incredibly high on the wishlist of competitive players, that it make so little sense not to include them.
I’m glad you used the whole quote here, because as I clearly said, it was possible we’d get that in if we got enough guys to do the UI. If you go read the whole thread these quotes are from, you remember I mentioned this many times, that we were having a hard time getting a full UI team to handle all the million things we wanted to get right. That situation never really got better. Our UI needs dogged us till the day we shipped, and a lot of thing that we (I) desperately wanted to get in, like this feature, couldn’t make it, because of manpower issues. Which is why that quote is dead accurate. I didn’t say that it would go in, but that it would if we could get the folks to do it.
Obviously, that didn’t happen, and I’m sorry about that. It seems like a simple thing, I know, but believe me, making a game to launch on all 3 platforms in all territories on the same day is hard, and sometimes you have to let some simple things not in the game to make time to fix crashes or what have you. Anyway…
[…]
This is another example of stuff I would have liked to do better, but manpower issues limited what we could achieve while trying to ship on all 3 platforms at once. More server setting were definitely on the list, but there were higher priority features that had to be taken care of. Of course, again if you read my quote, I was very careful not to promise this, because at the time, I wasn’t sure if that was going to go in, because I knew we had limitations and couldn’t do everything we want in the time we had.
As I mentioned in my XF reply: ETQW had a lot of this in place already, at least in terms of customisable HUD. Why not simply modify it to Brink’s needs? It seems odd that a company can’t recreate (or plain copy/paste) an element from a previously created game.
Next to that, if the UI crew was so small; surely someone at BethSoft must’ve been able to drop by and say ‘hi, I’ll do that’? I’m not sure I understand why it took so long until you could find a UI programmer. On top of that, you say they had more important things to do than the server-side variables: While that’s all fine and dandy, with such sales numbers, surely they could come back and ensure that this game has competitive merit for more than a single tournament?
There were reasons [selfkill] was taken out (Exedore can talk about this if you guys want to have a discussion about it), and when it was, I should have let you guys know that something I definitely promised had changed. So again, all I can say is that I’m sorry I didn’t correct this.
I’d love to know that reasoning.
Now that’s an interesting point, because obviously, the entire existence of this thread is because i used to get online reguarily and post at length about how and why we did things, so it was kind of what you’re asking for here. And yet we can now see what’s happened. Obviously, if I could have kept up my volume of posts, and completely given up my personal life (2 hours 45 mintues it’s almost 11am now), then I expect we might not be where we are today, you and I. but I just couldn’t do it. Though I wish I had, I don’t see how I could have without getting a divorce. So it’s a tricky problem. Hopefully this post at least goes a little way towards mending bridges
I’m pretty sure dazman was referring to what SD will do in the future to ensure their games will have more competitive merit.
Great example of what I’m talking about here. Yes, you feel that the customizaiton is crappy, because it doesn’t suit your purposes, and in fact actually works against them. Totally understand and totally talked about this at length years ago with you guys, and what we were doing about it (remember the backpacks? shame the didn’t work). In the end, for a broader appealling game, we put customization in, and it was well worth it. The majority of players LOVE it. They just do. That was a feature that was a big success. Does it hurt comp play, definitely. No doubt. Class icons over the head helps, sure, but it’s a sacrifice we made to hardcore play to better appease mass market play.
sv_forceClassModels 1
Would it really have taken more than an hour to make a couple of distinct outfits per class, and have a serverside variable that locks players to them on a server? It’s little things like that that could’ve made the game so much better.
Rahdo, as I mentioned on CF; props to you for responding to this. I sincerely hope this can shape up into a constructive debate.
yoomazir
(yoomazir)
#126
I don’t play this game anymore, but boy I’m glad I come from time to time to check this forum.
The drama, THE DRAMA, is more fun than the game, feels like those 50 euros spent for this game weren’t all that wasted.
wolfnemesis75
(wolfnemesis75)
#128
Read all of that… good stuff and explanations. That post will give a lot of folks something to chew on, better get yer reading glasses on peeps. yikes.
And yes the customization is a hella fun. ha ha ha!
Chris2
(.Chris.)
#129
Thanks for putting the effort to address people’s concerns.
While the more vocal people here are primarily from a competitive background it would be naive to think that it’s just that the competitive side of the game that was lacking. A lot of the problems persist in both public and competitive play alike.
For me it’s quite a big problem fullstop. Perhaps it’s because I’ve played SD’s past two games to death but been able to identify the enemy and their class is a big deal for me and others out there. I’ve team killed/bled far too often in this game and been killed by the enemy through hesitation quite a bit also.
The following thread was something I put forward a while back that explains my thoughts a little more on the matter.
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27741
Regarding the HUD/GUI it’s a real shame you guys couldn’t find the right people for the job. ET:QW had one of the best GUI’s ever, going from that to Brink was a bit disheartening.
I hope you are able to build upon what works in Brink and address the issues raised and go on to make a cracking follow up. Brink is hardly the worst game in the world by any stretch of the imagination but trying to follow up ET and ET:QW was a hard task while trying to broaden your target audience and still please your existing fan base.
neg
(neg)
#130
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
I’m glad you used the whole quote here, because as I clearly said, it was possible we’d get that in if we got enough guys to do the UI. If you go read the whole thread these quotes are from, you remember I mentioned this many times, that we were having a hard time getting a full UI team to handle all the million things we wanted to get right. That situation never really got better. Our UI needs dogged us till the day we shipped, and a lot of thing that we (I) desperately wanted to get in, like this feature, couldn’t make it, because of manpower issues. Which is why that quote is dead accurate. I didn’t say that it would go in, but that it would if we could get the folks to do it.[/QUOTE]
So you had a system already working exactly the way it should have in ETQW and yet you apparently cant easily port the same crosshair system into a game, designed on the exact same engine as ETQW was? lazy? or just didnt care? both i assume.
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
Obviously, that didn’t happen, and I’m sorry about that. It seems like a simple thing, I know, but believe me, making a game to launch on all 3 platforms in all territories on the same day is hard, and sometimes you have to let some simple things not in the game to make time to fix crashes or what have you. Anyway…[/QUOTE]
Really? yet you or Bethesda had the smart idea to push the games release forward a week instead of continuing to work on the game? what would of pushed you to release an unfinished, untested game earlyier than it needed to be? you didnt even have a Day 1 patch full of fixes you had been working on since the game was completed, simply the ‘improved steam error reporting’, i wont go into the performance issues on PC, which clearly should of been picked up by QA
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
Selfkilling, now this one, I do have to raise my hand and say “sorry”. Obviously this was a quote where I did specifically state will be in the game, no ambiguity, no “we’ll try” or “we’ll see”, and yet it’s not in the game. So I genuinely want to say “sorry” about this; it was not meant to mislead, because when I posted that, selfkill was in the game and worked fine. There were reasons it was taken out (Exedore can talk about this if you guys want to have a discussion about it), and when it was, I should have let you guys know that something I definitely promised had changed. So again, all I can say is that I’m sorry I didn’t correct this.[/QUOTE]
so you know the reason why you removed it from the game yet wont divulge why? Not everybody who plays games plays them on pub servers, you… Splash Damage were touting Brink as the next ‘big’ competitive game in almost every single interview you SplashDamage had with interviewers
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
Yup, that’s because if we’d left demo recording in, it would have crashed the game. And we couldn’t ship with a feature that crashes the game. And there wasn’t time to fix this crash, so we had to turn it off. Believe me, this was one of the more heartbreaking decisions we had to make close to shipping. Everyone wanted to keep it in, but the realities of only having 24 hours in a day intruded here. So yes, we did definitely have plans, but they didn’t work out. We knew having them in the game was important, but so was hitting our street date. [/QUOTE]
So here we have a feature that clearly crashes the game ‘apparently’ and you remove it from the final release of the game yet it worked perfectly fine in ETQW? same engine again and yet you manage to break it magically? Oh and you didnt stop the final release from having an insane amount of performance issues, or bugs that should of… been easily found with QA on PC, arnt you really glad it sold well on Consoles then? oh wait…
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
Well, on this, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. There’s lots of stuff that skinnies can do only if you bring personal skill to the equation, and practice your timings until you can nail moves 100% of the time. I watch BrinkTV matches, and I often notice teams on offense trying to take one of the many parkour shortcuts in the game (in aquarium, shipyard, etc.), and totally miss the timings (so while 3 guys tried to move forward together, only one of them made it and the others had to try again, for example). This is because a lot of the really useful parkour in the game takes practice and time to master. Sure, you don’t have to master the timing to climbing over a crate that you were previously using for cover, because we didn’t want that to be hard to do (though you’ll do it faster if you manually jump instead of rely on only the smart button). But the levels have lots of places where if you don’t practice it, you’ll never be able to do it. Le Parkour vid on youtube shows a lot of these, and comp players are using them too.[/QUOTE]
i truely hope you are kidding when you posted that…
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
When I posted on XF and our own boards, it was only because I was so excited and because I wanted the game to be the best it could be, so I wanted to talk to you guys about what was important[/QUOTE]
another joke i hope? Since all you’ve succeeded in doing is taking peoples money for an unfinished, unpolished title from a supposed ‘Triple A’ games developed
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
Basically, what I meant was that we did try to get as many PC centric features in the game as we could. Did we succeed as much as we wanted? No, of course not. Did we have to sacrifice in other area of the game to get what we could? Most definitely yes. Couple of quick examples: dedicated servers. This took time and resourses, dedicated coder support, and the time spent on them meant that other features suffered (party support, lobbies, etc.), and those were features that would have improved our review scores if we’d prioritized them. But we wanted you guys to have dedi servers, and so we sacrificed in other areas. Another example: we got a fair bit of negative critism about how the guns “don’t feel as good as CoD”, and we knew we’d get hit with that, because we were going for lower damage weapons. Why? Because we wanted to be true (as we could be) to the core gameplay that the ET games have already had, so that was a conscious sacrifice to our review scores we knew we were making to make the game more PC comp centric. Now, don’t get me wrong, we also did this because we believe it makes the game more fun, but it was still a sacrifice that we could have easily avoided by simply saying “make 'em all like CoD”. There’s lots of stuff like that, where we were trying to make a more broadly accessible game, we knew how to do it, but we kept stuff in to stay true to our roots.[/QUOTE]
so you are pretty much right there blaming the PC community for having alot higher standards than our Console counterparts for some, or most… of the failings of the game? purely because we wanted dedicated servers? so you wanted the guns to be like ET but made them nothing like ET, and you wanted? really…
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
I don’t regret them, because I’m proud of the game and I think it’s a lot of fun to play, and a lot of other people do to. As I said in the original quote, I’m bummed the PC guys don’t like it more, because a lot of that stuff was done for you, but cest la vie. And we’re continuing to focus on improvements for you too. Getting spectator mode working better, for example. That’s obviously to help foster a better comp experience. Improved server browser. Clearly we’re working to improve the PC experience. So again, it’s not like we’re not trying, but it’s also not that we can instantly fix every problem you guys have with the game either. But we do what we can :)[/QUOTE]
Im afraid the ‘few’ people who actually find the game enjoyable must be an endangered species because those people would be few and far inbetween. game went from a reasonable top 10 in steam stats to out of the top 100 in under 2weeks
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
At what point have I EVER represented myself as a PC gamer? You can read dozens of interviews with me where I point out I’m a console guy, through and through. That’s why I was having the dialog with you guys to better understand how we could make the game work for you (while still making a game that would sell well on console, which fortunately we achieved). Believe me, as I stated above, it would have been so much easier to ignore PC, but we didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to do that, and we didn’t do that. We spent literally thousands of manhours doing PC only code and features. Not as many as we wanted, obviously, but there’s only so many hours in a day, and we had limits. So we did our best under tight tight circumstances. In the end, we don’t have millions of players on PC, but we stil do have many thousands (bear in mind that the maximum concurrent users is always only a fraction of the total base), and we still want to make the game better for them wherever we can (updated server browser, getting updates and fixes out, DLC, etc.)[/QUOTE]
Its blatantly obvious that there are very few people who are PC games at SplashDamage anymore, its no wonder the game got such poor support/testing on the PC side of things, and that all of you or majority of you guys from SplashDamage have your Xbox live stats in your profiles on here aswell, you would of been better off not releasing this… travesty to PC gaming at all and just releasing it as a console only game! and save yourself some pain and save us PC gamers some money we could of… if we wanted to waste on other games?
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
Well, the reason was pretty simple: making games is hard. If it wasn’t, everyone would do it and every game would get 10/10. Just like 90% of games in development, it turned out to be harder than originally thought, and just like 90% of games in development, there were delays.[/QUOTE]
oh my not even going to not even
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
There were plenty of features that had to get cut that were for console players too, believe me. The list of cut features is pretty long, and pretty bloody, and hits PC and console features equally. But we made the calls we made ensure what remained would be better. Did we get every call right? Nope, we’re only human. But we did the best we could in a difficulty situation, and fortunately, Bethesda was supportive to give us the extra time to improve stuff, for as long as they could :)[/QUOTE]
once again why bring forward the release date if the game wasnt up to your ‘standards’ being a ‘Triple A’ game developer and all
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
That is an excellent quote to bring up, because it does cut to the heart of a lot of the problems. If I could have made more time to continue connecting with you guys directly, then after that out of context quote came out, I could have gotten online and meant what that actually meant. But instead, we were too busy making the game, and stuff fell between the cracks, and I didn’t do as good a job as I should have talking to you guys, and that’s defintely something I regret… there should have been more two way communication throughout the games dev. Apologize for that (and I’m at 2 hours of my sunday now, but I will see this through).[/QUOTE]
so is there some specific reason why you dont have a community manager who does a better job of reaching out to the community about what they want, and about what they need? Because in the occasion that the community manager does post, its typically not even on topic or related to any issues… when you were developing ET there was a thread in the forums with what you were currently working on, and what you hoped to be working on and constant updates on development, but here youve taken the stance of lets not tell anyone anything and hope they dont all leave our game for something better, and what little information you give out is either lacking in detail or just useless… see the ATI issues on PC
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
For the record, what I meant by the “let’s not mince words” quote was talking about certain ET features that were really important to me, personally. Those were objective driven gameplay that encourages people to actually work together as a team. I believe in that regard, we are carrying on where ET left off, I believe it completely. To me, that was always the most important goal for dev of Brink. And every time I play a pub game, and other human players buff my kevlar, or give me revive, or protect me while I’m doing an objective (all of which happen a lot), I’m reminded that we did succeed. That we created a game that gets strangers actually working together instead of everyone lonewolfing. That’s special, that’s my feeling of what ET did so importantly.[/QUOTE]
the current state of Brink hardly encourages any team-work on pub at all, regardless of buffs or not
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
Throughout Brinks development, we were trying to maintain a delicate balancing act between console and PC, between pub and pro. We made the best choices we could to make the best game we could for the most players we could. I think we succeeded in that goal, even if we failed at some other goals we had. And yes, that means we had to sacrifice stuff for you guys (and every other type of player, as mentioned above), but I told you about that as far back as 30/08/09, 10:51:50, according to XF forum records. :)[/QUOTE]
another i cant even begin to fathom post
[QUOTE=Rahdo;357556]
Yes, you feel that the customizaiton is crappy, because it doesn’t suit your purposes, and in fact actually works against them. Totally understand and totally talked about this at length years ago with you guys, and what we were doing about it (remember the backpacks? shame the didn’t work). In the end, for a broader appealling game, we put customization in, and it was well worth it. The majority of players LOVE it. They just do. That was a feature that was a big success. [/QUOTE]
another one of those replies that fails to make any sense what so ever, so who exactly are you saying ‘LOVED!’ the Cusomization of the weapons and the way it was designed? care to point us to these people who apparently never played an online FPS ever before in their entire lives? or who are not paid to like your games apparently?
TLDR disappointed with the entire handling of the release and development of the game, the lack of information the seemingly infinte amount of false information and false promises to a title that could of been so much greater than it was had you of either said oh hey guys lets not release this game for PC this time around, or hey lets not design the entire UI so it looks like something out of Halo, honestly you have to look at yourself as a whole and think gee how did we so royally screw the pooch on this release and on this game as a whole, considering you seemed to have learnt from some mistakes you made in ETQW which were too be blunt quite large mistakes, and others you just completely pissed them into the wind and said nah lets do this AGAIN but WORSE!
In any case i think you have lost alot of your player base from pc and wont be getting it back anytime soon, i for one dont intend on buying any of your games on release day anymore not until i know fully what i am buying, as wasting good money on an unfinished title, and untested one aswell isnt something i enjoy
edit: im surprised SDK wsant once mentioned in there anywhere
shirosae
(shirosae)
#131
Firstly, that PM I sent you yonks ago still applies. Dunno if that helps or not, but I hope it does.
If SD had started work on their new game, hired all these new people, released such console-centric gameplay footage, and had refused to talk to this community that put so much effort into their previous games, the uproar would have happened then rather than now.
I don’t think you hurt things by talking to us.
The only time I think anything you’ve said has hurt, maybe, has been recently in Xfire. You’ve talked about not being able to make a game ‘for the minority’ profitable. How many people bought PC Brink? 100k? And how many still play? I don’t think you intended to imply that the hundred thousand people who didn’t like PC Brink are unimportant, but it could easily come across that way.
WARNING: THIS IS PROBABLY GOING TO SOUND REALLY CONDESCENDING BUT I’M TRYING TO HELP HERE.
Yeah, I’m familiar with this; I used to co-run a gaming website back in a previous internet life and lost hours each day just trying to keep up.
If I can offer some advice: You don’t need to directly reply to every individual query or post or thread.
What you need* to do is demonstrate that you understand what the problems with Brink are. This does not mean that you say ‘I understand’. It means that you say something like:
“The lottery spread on all SMG whilst moving in Brink has destroyed pretty much all skill requirements for close quarters combat, so that particular aspect of combat from ET is not present in Brink, and for a lot of you this is the most fun thing about an FPS. As it is, you either spray your gun and hope the RNG favours you, or you take a rifle and sit behind a box. If you like skill-determinedl close quarters gunplay, Brink has nothing to offer you.”
So far, the -only- stuff I’ve heard from SD in reply to the gunplay is either “We understand”, or “Use a rifle”. Neither of those demonstrate that you understand.
That’s all I want. I want to know that you understand what’s gone wrong. It doesn’t need to be long. It doesn’t need to be just you that says it. It doesn’t need to be written in reply to every instance where it comes up. It doesn’t need to be in reply to me. Just have SD demonstrate that they understand, even if it’s just in a short post somewhat regularly where a bunch of issues are discussed briefly.
Ideally, the community can then discuss the stuff (like we did all through development), and you then have a feel for how the ideas will be received.
Not everyone will be happy, and you’ll still have people who have written you off. You do have supporters though, who can see that Brink could become a fun game. If you want any hope of winning those people back, this is what needs to happen: You need to show them that you get it.
*You don’t ‘need’ to. But you know what I mean.
Okay, you clearly don’t understand what the problem with Brink is. That’s okay; you’ve said from the outset that you’re a console gamer, and you went across to Xfire to try to understand what PC gamers wanted. I’ve said it before; I respect you for going that far, even if Brink didn’t turn out so well.
This is what’s wrong with Brink: Your core game is broken. The guns which should allow movement don’t, because as soon as you do they turn into (more of) a lottery. The guns which reward aim penalise movement. The barbie stuff hinders tactical play. The movement speed encourages camping and damages close quarters dancing. Smart and the unibutton are just …urgh. If I get good at both movement and aiming, I’m forced to choose.
Brink is a game that doesn’t reward people for playing it. There’s a ubiquitous cap on how much your ability as a player is allowed to influence the game.
That cap might make sense if you’re talking about console controls, but it’s going to be different for different platforms, and for different levels of player. I don’t understand why this wasn’t the very first thing that made it into a multiplayer multiplatform FPS game.
You have a load of stuff that might be fun, but it’s all stacked on top of a fundamentally broken core. Nothing is going to change until that core gameplay works.
I think the most disappointing thing is that it’s easy to see how amazing Brink could have been, if the important things had been locked down first.
I still think it could be, but given how you said it was too late to change the unibutton stuff all that time ago, it seems even less likely that it’ll happen now. If you have ideas in place for fixing the PC version, the best idea is probably to post them up and let the community to rip them to bits, so you can see what’s likely to work/not work in advance of spending the time/money doing it.
Otherwise, an SDK is probably the single wisest thing you can do at this stage.
The approach you’ve taken with Brink PC though; make a game, then consider PC at the end. This is not going to work. If you truly want to make great multiplatform games, you need to consider that your platforms are different. Dedicated servers are not a sacrifice. They’re a necessity. If you want to avoid having your next game die like Brink has, you’re going to need to understand that your game has to adapt to each of those platforms, and get that in from the very start.
With Brink, you could have had a set of differing controls/gunplay models from the very start, so the same gameplay ‘feel’ was adapted with differing core mechanics so the game survived and thrived on all platforms. Brink wouldn’t be identical, but it would have been appropriate.
Anyway, Kudos for posting. No offence intended with anything I’ve said. SD are a cool studio, and you seem like a guy trying his best. I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t think there was at least a chance you could benefit from it.
wolfnemesis75
(wolfnemesis75)
#132
^not gonna go there. But could not disagree more with the previous two posts. Sorry.
MoonOnAStick
(MoonOnAStick)
#133
I’d just like to thank Rahdo for posting so comprehensively. Taking 3 hours out of your Sunday morning to respond to disappointed PC gamers is probably not the most entertaining way to spend your weekend but it does reflect well on him and on SD.
sereNADE
(sereNADE)
#134
Why do some people think that a feature will just magically transfer from one game to the next simply because it’s the same engine? Gripe all you want and for good reason but at least use a bit more sense.
sereNADE
(sereNADE)
#135
what’s not to disagree with in the second post? there are a couple good points (shirosae’s)
Chris2
(.Chris.)
#136
Yeah some things such as the 1st person spec and demo recording were down to the virtual textures afaik.
Not sure about the HUD and GUI though.
shirosae
(shirosae)
#137
If he can’t disagree more, than he disagrees with all of it, presumably. Including the bits where I call SD a cool studio, say that Rahdo is doing his best, and that his talking to us didn’t cause us more problems than we’d have had anyway.
Alternatively, he didn’t read the post and is just trolling like usual.
sereNADE
(sereNADE)
#138
[QUOTE=neg;357569]So you had a system already working exactly the way it should have in ETQW and yet you apparently cant easily port the same crosshair system into a game, designed on the exact same engine as ETQW was? lazy? or just didnt care? both i assume.
Really? yet you or Bethesda had the smart idea to push the games release forward a week instead of continuing to work on the game? what would of pushed you to release an unfinished, untested game earlyier than it needed to be? you didnt even have a Day 1 patch full of fixes you had been working on since the game was completed, simply the ‘improved steam error reporting’, i wont go into the performance issues on PC, which clearly should of been picked up by QA
so you know the reason why you removed it from the game yet wont divulge why? Not everybody who plays games plays them on pub servers, you… Splash Damage were touting Brink as the next ‘big’ competitive game in almost every single interview you SplashDamage had with interviewers
So here we have a feature that clearly crashes the game ‘apparently’ and you remove it from the final release of the game yet it worked perfectly fine in ETQW? same engine again and yet you manage to break it magically? Oh and you didnt stop the final release from having an insane amount of performance issues, or bugs that should of… been easily found with QA on PC, arnt you really glad it sold well on Consoles then? oh wait…
i truely hope you are kidding when you posted that…
another joke i hope? Since all you’ve succeeded in doing is taking peoples money for an unfinished, unpolished title from a supposed ‘Triple A’ games developed
so you are pretty much right there blaming the PC community for having alot higher standards than our Console counterparts for some, or most… of the failings of the game? purely because we wanted dedicated servers? so you wanted the guns to be like ET but made them nothing like ET, and you wanted? really…
Im afraid the ‘few’ people who actually find the game enjoyable must be an endangered species because those people would be few and far inbetween. game went from a reasonable top 10 in steam stats to out of the top 100 in under 2weeks
Its blatantly obvious that there are very few people who are PC games at SplashDamage anymore, its no wonder the game got such poor support/testing on the PC side of things, and that all of you or majority of you guys from SplashDamage have your Xbox live stats in your profiles on here aswell, you would of been better off not releasing this… travesty to PC gaming at all and just releasing it as a console only game! and save yourself some pain and save us PC gamers some money we could of… if we wanted to waste on other games?
oh my not even going to not even
once again why bring forward the release date if the game wasnt up to your ‘standards’ being a ‘Triple A’ game developer and all
so is there some specific reason why you dont have a community manager who does a better job of reaching out to the community about what they want, and about what they need? Because in the occasion that the community manager does post, its typically not even on topic or related to any issues… when you were developing ET there was a thread in the forums with what you were currently working on, and what you hoped to be working on and constant updates on development, but here youve taken the stance of lets not tell anyone anything and hope they dont all leave our game for something better, and what little information you give out is either lacking in detail or just useless… see the ATI issues on PC
the current state of Brink hardly encourages any team-work on pub at all, regardless of buffs or not
another i cant even begin to fathom post
another one of those replies that fails to make any sense what so ever, so who exactly are you saying ‘LOVED!’ the Cusomization of the weapons and the way it was designed? care to point us to these people who apparently never played an online FPS ever before in their entire lives? or who are not paid to like your games apparently?
TLDR disappointed with the entire handling of the release and development of the game, the lack of information the seemingly infinte amount of false information and false promises to a title that could of been so much greater than it was had you of either said oh hey guys lets not release this game for PC this time around, or hey lets not design the entire UI so it looks like something out of Halo, honestly you have to look at yourself as a whole and think gee how did we so royally screw the pooch on this release and on this game as a whole, considering you seemed to have learnt from some mistakes you made in ETQW which were too be blunt quite large mistakes, and others you just completely pissed them into the wind and said nah lets do this AGAIN but WORSE!
In any case i think you have lost alot of your player base from pc and wont be getting it back anytime soon, i for one dont intend on buying any of your games on release day anymore not until i know fully what i am buying, as wasting good money on an unfinished title, and untested one aswell isnt something i enjoy
edit: im surprised SDK wsant once mentioned in there anywhere[/QUOTE]
I think footage and official videos detailing brink features and gameplay were there beforehand as fair warning to PC gamers. Plenty of alarms sounded here in the forums months before release as to what we were getting into. Did you not sense any warning whatsoever? What part of “blurs the line between single player and multiplayer” does not tingle your spider sense? That was a core “in your face” part of BRINK’s claim to being BRINK that hurt to see upon release as much as we knew it would when we were waiting for it over a year ago.
At least one person avoided BRINK (apples) and another person purchased BRINK for PC full well knowing it was a “console” game. They knew what they were getting simply from the official promotional material and from the SD forum discussions prior to release.
wolfnemesis75
(wolfnemesis75)
#139
Show me the good points. To be quite frank, its tough to find that many. You do realize that Brink did not sell well out of the gate for PC. There was never much there. 70k sales is not gonna get it done. It speaks volumes that at this particular hour, SD spends so much time on PC at all. It may be their roots, and it shows, but is also from a business perspective, more along the lines of “loyalty” rather than “necessity”. but they get blasted and bashed for it anyway. Or tell me I am wrong. because 70k sales on PC is enough to keep the electric running in the building for one month. not much more than that. And they still support PC. Scratch another slash on the wall of the asylum.
Yeah. It is pretty epic. I’ve been a member of other forums… never seen a game dev answer that many questions like that in a thread before. usually, its a one sentence response here or there because they are busy working on games, not writing stuff on threads. This may sound mean but: many disappointed PC gamers on here just wanted ET:QW2. or ET3.
They did not want Brink. And this feeds their frustration.
They sorta beat around the bush and use Brink (and its fans) as whipping posts for this want. That’s what I see and the impression that I get. Right or wrong. If you write up a punch-list about how each distinguishing feature of Brink is “broken core” or “flawed” or “not good enough” and dredging up ancient interviews from the bottom of the lake, you are pretty much looking for a different game. And that makes a group that is impossible to please.
I am sure I will get some hate for saying that, but this is a Brink forum, not ET3 or ET:QW. It is similar to the folks who just want another COD. At the end of the day, its always gonna be about Brink. I said two months ago, you aren’t gonna stop that train. Its left the station. There is plenty of fun to be had in Brink. If you put down the “ET:QW punch-list” that you have in your head and put away the microscope, and just played Brink, you’d stand a better chance of having fun.
Rahdo
(Rahdo)
#140
We just finished our game of Agricola, it was a good one. So I’ve got a little more time to post before we take the dogs for a walk
[QUOTE=Verticae;357560]
As I mentioned in my XF reply: ETQW had a lot of this in place already, at least in terms of customisable HUD. Why not simply modify it to Brink’s needs? It seems odd that a company can’t recreate (or plain copy/paste) an element from a previously created game.
Next to that, if the UI crew was so small; surely someone at BethSoft must’ve been able to drop by and say ‘hi, I’ll do that’? I’m not sure I understand why it took so long until you could find a UI programmer. On top of that, you say they had more important things to do than the server-side variables: While that’s all fine and dandy, with such sales numbers, surely they could come back and ensure that this game has competitive merit for more than a single tournament?[/quote]
One of the things I should have mentioned above, the people who did work on UI did a heroic job, getting a lot done with very little resources or support, and often it wasn’t their job (i.e. gameplay coders, tools coders, etc. would chip in to help out). The issue of “why can’t it just re-use ETQW code” is beyond my simple caveman brain, but I was assured often that it’s not that simple. Coders would have to answer that better than me.
Also, for the record, we’re STILL hiring for UI, if you check our jobs section of the website. So if you know anybody, send them our way
I’m pretty sure dazman was referring to what SD will do in the future to ensure their games will have more competitive merit.
Yup, and i’m just worried about talking about future plans anymore, considering my history with it
Would it really have taken more than an hour to make a couple of distinct outfits per class, and have a serverside variable that locks players to them on a server? It’s little things like that that could’ve made the game so much better.
Honestly, I’d guestimate that would have taken a week of coder time, plus a maybe 2 or 3 man weeks of character artist time? Making our character models with the customization system we’ve got is very complex and time consuming, and we had a very small character art team. They did an amazing job producing as much content as they did. On the code side, the actual task of setting something like that up wouldn’t have taken too long, a day, maybe a day and a half at most. But the you put the testing time on, and the time to fix bugs (because something like this, that touches several different system, would cause a bunch of bugs), eats into one’s schedule really really fast, especially when it can cause different bugs on different platforms…
Agreed, it’s a problem full stop, as you say. I think it’s more of a problem for comp play, where actual prize money can be on the line based on how fast you can identify the enemy. It’s also tougher for console than PC, since with a mouse you can more quickly and accurately target people determine class.
However, another way to look at this whole thing is that in Brink, with the classes semi hidden, it adds a different layer to gameplay. You do have to study before you shoot, figure out the best target by evaluating the enemy. The enemy can know this and be smart about knowing when to move their key engineer forward, surrounded by “fodder” guys, to “hide in the crowd”. I do find it satisfying to take that half second when a group of guys runs past me, doesnt’ see me, and I systematically go “eeenie, meanie, myiney, MO!” and shoot the medic when I finally spot him
Regarding the HUD/GUI it’s a real shame you guys couldn’t find the right people for the job. ET:QW had one of the best GUI’s ever, going from that to Brink was a bit disheartening.
As I said, we’re still hiring!
I hope you are able to build upon what works in Brink and address the issues raised and go on to make a cracking follow up. Brink is hardly the worst game in the world by any stretch of the imagination but trying to follow up ET and ET:QW was a hard task while trying to broaden your target audience and still please your existing fan base.
Thanks for the kind words.
Neither actually. See above.
so you know the reason why you removed it from the game yet wont divulge why?
That’s not actually what I said.
Splash Damage were touting Brink as the next ‘big’ competitive game in almost every single interview you SplashDamage had with interviewers
I don’t think that’s the case, actually. In fact, we almost never spoke about tournament/comp play in any of our interviews. We always talked about pub play. Got any links?
the current state of Brink hardly encourages any team-work on pub at all, regardless of buffs or not
I’m sorry Neg, you and I clearly don’t see eye to eye on this, so I’m not sure what more we can talk about. Hope you find another game that you enjoy playing, and sorry Brink wasn’t for you.
Wow, well I DEFINITELY didn’t mean to come across that way. In fact, I can’t imagine being farther way from what my intended message was, which was basically Splash Damage loves PC play, we’ve pours lots of work and attention into making the best PC game we could, in spite of the obstacles we face (one of which being that when you’re talking about making a multi-million pound budget game, you have to hedge your bets and ensure you cover the biggest possible audience. We wanted that broader audience, but we didn’t want to give up on our traditional fans. I’ve given lots of examples today of stuff we did, and decisions we made. All I can say is that was certainly not what I meant by that statement!
If I can offer some advice: You don’t need to directly reply to every individual query or post or thread.
What you need* to do is demonstrate that you understand what the problems with Brink are. This does not mean that you say ‘I understand’
I understand, and I agree. We need to get better at this level of conversation with you guys. I can’t do that from home, and honestly, I don’t have the chop to speak authoritatively about it anyway, I’ll tell you that right now. All I can say from my couch here is that you’re right, and we can be more detailed in the back and forth, and the conversation would be better for it. The kind of points you’re bringing up in this post here, about the conflict between the stats on the weapons as they exist, and the intended way to use them, is, I agree, the kind of stuff that ideally we’d all be working together to go through. I’m sure our side and the player base won’t always see eye to eye on every detail, but ideally we should be talking about them (the way you and I used to about body type locks, IIRC).
But as mentioned above, I can’t make promises for anyone here, because I’ve obviously done too much of that in the past…
Anyway, Kudos for posting. No offence intended with anything I’ve said. SD are a cool studio, and you seem like a guy trying his best. I wouldn’t be honest with you if I didn’t think there was at least a chance you could benefit from it.
No offense taken. I’ve always enjoyed our back and forths, as you know. I hope we can have them again in the future!