Splash Damage is a studio with the ability to create cool team-based multiplayer shooters seemingly implanted directly into its DNA. Hits like Enemy Territory and Quake Wars established its reputation, but the developer suffered a bit of a knock recently with 2011’s Brink, which never really recovered from its rocky launch. Now the team is back with Dirty Bomb, a free-to-play, PC-only shooter some three years in the making that aims to get back to the core of what they do best. I tracked down Splash Damage co-founder and chairman Paul Wedgwood to quiz him on the game’s lengthy development and beta process.
GameWatcher: First off, you’ve spoken about how you don’t want to purposefully build Dirty Bomb as an eSports game, and that you’d rather build up a loyal community first. Do you expect it to take off that way, though? Did you have to bear competitive play in mind when developing the game?
Paul Wedgwood: The first thing is… you know, half of our team specialises in making bumper one hits with world famous IPs for big, Hollywood companies. We’ve been doing that for years, with Batman, Wolfenstein, Quake, all those franchises. But when we invest in something we want to make, our own title, the luxury of that is that we can choose to make something that doesn’t need to immediately satisfy everyone in its first weekend of play. In fact, we can make a game where we know you might even dislike it at first, before you get dragged in and discover that actually you really like it. Over weeks, months, years, things start falling into place. It’s chess, rather than drafts, is the analogy I use.
When you look at the teamplay in this game, the potential for tournament play, one of the things people probably think is that winning or losing is down to the skill of the enemy. While that factors in, it’s the combination of characters chosen that makes a huge difference, and that’s easy to miss when you’re new to the game. Kind of an epiphany people will have is recognising how important these characters are on the field – if you see Proxy in your base, say, you know you have to catch here before she steals your objective, if you see Rhino you know you need to get out of the open or he’ll mow you down. That creates a very interesting dynamic. The choice to make the game hardcore makes the game far more fitting for tournament play.
For two years we’ve had a closed beta running with our hardcore fans, who are all tournament and contest players. We’ve had more than five thousand messages from them just covering competitive play. So what we believe we’ve done is, rather than setting out to purposefully create an e-sports game, is instead create a really solid game that has the potential to go in that direction if that’s what the community wants. Ultimately we’ve built a set of rules that results in something really fun to play as a team – it’s up to our players if they want to play in a ‘jumpers for goalposts’ way, or if they want to build a stadium around it.
GameWatcher: You mentioned there that the characters are hugely important tactically. What made you opt for the MOBA-esque hero roster, rather than class-based play?
Paul Wedgwood: I think we’re very conscious of the advances made in other genres, and one thing I’ve noticed is the way having lots of character options makes them really cool to play. When I came up with the original concept for the game, I kept thinking about all those other references, and what might happen if we unbound the game from traditional classes. Classes can be a great way to teach people how to play your game, but what if we hyper-specialise? I started thinking about possible combinations in team games, and then it struck me that there wasn’t really a limit to what could be done with that idea. In a five versus five game, what if your medic has an aura she can drop in a key area where people can hold up, versus your traditional ‘Rambo’ medic role. From more than a decade of making multiplayer shooters, we know the specialist roles that people love to play.
But we didn’t want them to commit to just one class for a game, so we gave them the option of taking three characters into each match. So they might have two primary and secondary roles, then a third choice which is clearly a risk, but you can look at the makeup of your opposing team and get really tactical about what you choose. It gets really complex. At the high-end of ranked play, we’ve already got hundreds of thumbs up comments from our beta players who really like how that plays out.
From there we get on to the interesting point of – how many people will hate it? How many people will dislike that part of the game. I think we’re prepared for that, but it’s entirely likely there will be some people who think it’s too punishing. So that’s going to be interesting to see. Matchmaking is really important for that. That will help create a great community for new players, so they’re playing with other people who are right on their level.
GameWatcher: How much inspiration did you take from the MOBA genre? I’m seeing a lot of crossovers in what you’re talking about there, in terms of creating an essentially hardcore game that can still attract a big audience.
Paul Wedgwood: Yeah, but I think… I’m nervous about using that as a reference, because it’s really nothing like a MOBA. If I’m a big Warcraft 3 fan and I hear the phrase ‘MOBA game’ I know I can jump in and feel at home, because they’re very similar in the way they both control. But if you were to make that recommendation for this game to MOBA players, I think they’d hate it! I think the target audience is hardcore shooter players who’ve got some experience with other shooters, and are looking for a great teamplay game. Where I think fans of other genres will have fun is if they’re willing to forgive their initial destruction that’s going to happen to them over and over at the beginning. The teamplay side of things is really compelling here, expect we tend – and I’m touching wood here – we tend to not have a toxic community. If you enjoy teamwork but you’re fed up with twelve-year-olds being sexist and racist, you’ll find our community much more progressive.
GameWatcher: I wanted to ask you about that, actually. You’ve built up a loyal following of hardcore fans from games like Enemy Territory and Quake Wars, but at the same time Dirty Bomb is exploring some new areas that have opened up in the industry in recent years, like microtransactions and F2P. Have you found it hard to reconcile those ideas with your fans?
Paul Wedgwood: We just asked them. We talk to them non-stop all the way through, we’ve asked them what they thought of the F2P model, what they would like to spend money on. The main thing we definitely agreed on is that it cannot be ‘pay-to-win’, there can’t be a paywall, and everything in the game has to be available at some point to someone who just wants to play the game without spending money. That being the case I think Dirty Bomb has the potential to do really, really well. Beyond that I think you can charge for fun aesthetic things and cosmetic items.
The game doesn’t take itself too seriously, it’s quite quirky, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have fun with it. Its foundation is one where we can do pretty much whatever we want, we just aren’t doing that right from the start. We have to be mindful of how much we spend, because we want to support the game as long as we can. That means having dozens of people on the team for the next year or two at the least, and it’s already been in the works for almost three years. To make sure we do that carefully we have to listen to what our fans want, and give them more of that rather than try to bleed money out of them.
GameWatcher:I still find it really interesting that you’re a studio with such a focus on multiplayer. There aren’t many studios out there who are specialists in that area, that have that focus.
Paul Wedgwood: If you come to the office you’ll see it on the wall. We exist to build friendships by creating the best, most fun multiplayer that we can, and to support that we make hits for people using their own IP. That’s actually literally on the wall of my office! That’s our passion, it’s what we do. We make cool things for big names so that we can focus on creating the things we love for a much smaller audience. It’s a great way to work.
GameWatcher: Was the pretty lengthy development time for Dirty Bomb a conscious decision after Brink, which had a bit of a rough launch that kind of knocked it off the rails.
Paul Wedgwood: Definitely that played a big part in it. To give you an idea, our closed beta players have found over five thousand bugs for us to squash, so it really is working! If you look at games we released in the past, the ones with the longest beta periods are the ones which have stuck, and that people have been playing for years and years. Arkham Origins multiplayer, we still have a huge following for that. It’s really different from what people are used to, and we’ve got some great feedback from it. In the case of this game, because it’s ours and we’re under no pressure to hit a particular deadline with it, we can really take our time and release it when it’s ready. That was something that Id Software taught us, the ‘when it’s ready’ mentality. That’s why we’ve taken so long.
Talking of Brink, once we’d patched it up people gave it really great reviews. So think about what might have been if I hadn’t got that launch wrong. Having lag, which is embarrassing, shameful for a multiplayer game. The fact I didn’t catch it just drives me potty, because as soon as we fixed that we got a great response for the game. We’ve got such a great Metacritic score as a studio, seven consecutive hits and then ping… Brink is yellow. And it’s our fault because we really screwed up with the patching. So yes, absolutely, you can’t test long enough. Even after two years we’re still picking up issues.
Many thanks to Paul for chatting to us in what turned out to be a particularly chilly warehouse. Actually that makes it sound like I kidnapped him and forced him to answer at gunpoint, which I definitely did not. The closed beta for Dirty Bomb kicks off today, and you can register for a key over on the game’s official website. For more of my thoughts on the game, check out our preview.
