Multiplayer experts Splash Damage have definitely taken their time with Dirty Bomb, the team-based shooter that they first announced back in 2012, and has only just entered a Closed Beta on Steam.
According to the company’s co-founder and chairman Paul Wedgwood, who I managed to grab a chat with at a recent preview event, the rocky launch of 2011’s Brink was a big factor in that extended development period.
Brink was plagued by lag and connection issues upon launch, and though Wedgwood says the shooter built up a decent following once the problems were resolved, the studio’s determined not to make the same mistakes again. Hence the time they’re taking with Dirty Bomb.
”Definitely that played a big part in it,” said Wedgwood. ”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.”
”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 (Splash Damage worked with Id on Enemy Territory, Quake Wars, and Doom 3) the ‘when it’s ready’ mentality. That’s why we’ve taken so long.”
Brink, which remains the solitary mark against Splash Damage’s otherwise impressive record, is still clearly something of a sore topic for Wedgwood and his team.
”Talking of Brink, once we’d patched it up people gave it really great reviews,” he explained. ”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.
Dirty Bomb’s closed beta is out now on Steam. For more on the game, check out our full interview with Paul Wedgwood and our recent preview.
