AusGamers: You’re really laser-focused on PC, which I think is absolutely great. No auto-aim or controller support, less iron sights, but there’s one thing left that some have considered to be a console-tailored feature, and that’s the two weapon limitation. What’s the design philosophy behind that?

Rich Jolly: I think the design philosophy is more that we don’t want to give too many weapons to the characters, because we wanted them to fulfill distinct roles, so there had to be a big distinction between the different ones you’re playing. So if every merc had loads of weapons, it kind of dilutes them a little bit, so they become far more specialist.

Obviously, you’re taking three in, in the match here, so you’ve got three different choices for three different situations. So if you want to play area denial for a certain objective, then you might want to switch to Nader because she’s got her grenade launcher, or maybe even Stoker, with the napalm grenade.

So I think putting too many weapons in there would dilute them a little more, and I really wanted to focus on individuality, and them be distinct playstyles in themselves, and pretty much defined by their weapons.



AusGamers: The studio’s history is so seeded in the modding community, but with Dirty Bomb being built as a free-to-play service, it seems to me that that would negate the abilities of community modding to a large degree.

Rich: It’s definitely not something we’re ruling out at all. Traditionally, we came from the mod scene, and we always try to give back. With both Enemy Territory games we put out SDKs, so it’s not unlikely.

It’s hard to promise, because obviously, you’re right, a free-to-play game does make things a lot more complicated, like the cheating side of things, but if we can do it, we will.

AusGamers: Obviously the priority has to be getting the game to a polished state for launch, and being able to edit it is a big auxiliary thing there, but you were to integrate such support, what kind of ways might you go about that? Would it be limited to read-only API’s or could you actually allow players to run their own servers within the system?

Rich: To be honest, I’d be guessing, to give you an answer now. We’ve been looking into it quite a lot and we will continue to, but I don’t really want to promise anything yet, because it would just end up letting people down if we don’t manage to get there.

AusGamers: The team has been working on id Software’s id tech game engines for so long, and now you’ve moved to Unreal. So what drove the decision to pick Unreal specifically, and I guess, would you have liked to have continued on with id tech if the licensing terms had been workable?

Rich: [laughs] Do you want the official or the unofficial answer? I probably have to give you the official answer [laughs].

No, Unreal is a brilliant engine to be honest. One thing we spent a long time with, when we moved to it, is actually trying to get the feeling of the old engines back in there, and hopefully you’ll noticed that the game doesn’t feel like that out-of-the-box Unreal Engine.

Because we came from that hardcore id background, like I said, we spent maybe six months upfront, just trying to get the feel more or less exactly the same. So the movement speed, the shooting. Because that was always the thing that we loved about the id engine was that kind of tactile response, so we tried to replicate that, and we ended up rewriting some of Unreal -- just because it was our favourite method -- rather than just using Unreal out of the box.

AusGamers: That was exactly my followup question, that all of those id engines had an inherent reputation for that really low-latency, grounded feel that people don’t really know how to explain, but it just feels good.

Rich: Exactly, it’s really hard to explain, even from a technical perspective. Even Dann, our lead programmer who was playing for a bit then, he’s obsessive about feel. So he’s been in there fine-tuning everything. It’s interesting to go and compare it against other games in the genre. It feels pretty solid from my perspective -- I’m quite happy with how it has turned out.



AusGamers: On the publishing side of things, how did the partnership with Nexon come about? Who sort of approached who with that?

Rich: I think it was a bit of both. We were out there looking for a partner that was good at free-to-play, because for us, we’d only worked in boxed products before., so we wanted to make sure that we partnered with someone that knew free-to-play best, and really, Nexon was pretty much the industry leader when it comes to free-to-play.

They’re great guys and it’s a really good relationship. I can’t really compare it to any other relationship we’ve had before, because we’re way more collaborative in every sense, and it’s been really refreshing to do that. It’s the same as we’ve been with the players, we’ve been way more collaborative. Our fans have been playing the game from so early on, that we’ve been able to evolve quite a lot from doing that, and that’s been quite refreshing.

We’ve pushed just block-out grey-box levels of the maps out to the community, and our player-base have just been helping us test that from an early perspective. Traditionally, with a boxed product, you have the maybe the kind of late beta release or the demo build, but this was like a true alpha that we put out to them, and they were playing just grey box maps, and we’d never done that before.

It’s been a really good approach for us to actually get it in the hands of people. Now you’re starting to see a lot more of that stuff with Early Access games on Steam, but we were doing that almost two years ago I think.

It’s been refreshing and we’ve been able to collect loads of data, on performance and where people are dying, and tweaking certain things in the map, and the great thing is, because you’re not slamming loads of artwork into the map straight away, you can make gameplay adjustments just from the block-out, and then once people are happy with it, then you can add more detail.

So it really helps, and traditionally you don’t get to go that way with games, you have to present your most polished game, and often even a beta isn’t really a beta in a traditional sense. So we’ve been able to shape the game a lot more by working with our fans.

AusGamers: Was free-to-play an intention for the game right from the start, or did that concept evolve after development began?

Rich: I think it was pretty much the direction from day one. If you remember, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory technical was free-to-play, because it was totally free [laughs], and that was great because it opened the game up to a massive audience. I think “had we only monetised it!” [laughs], but back then, free-to-play wasn’t even really a thing -- maybe in Asia it was just starting to take off.

I think what really helps there with the free-to-play side of things is that it just opens up the game to way more players. There’s no paid barrier to entry, literally anyone can pick it up and play it. I think that’s good for us as well, because it puts more importance and pressure on us to actually make the game good out of the gates. Because with a traditional retail box, you’ve paid your money up front, so you just need to make sure that people don’t get intial buyers remorse. Whereas free-to-play is very different and it’s interesting.

We’ve enjoyed it, and we’ve learned so much with this shift to free-to-play, and as I said before, there’s the approach of using way more data than we ever had before. Before it was always a kind of finger in the air guesses about whether certain weapons were more powerful than others, but here, we have so many statistics and so much data that it’s actually been really, really valuable.



AusGamers: When Paul [Wedgewood, CEO and co-founder] took us on the studio tour this morning, he was so excited to show off your new digs and it was surprisingly vast. Has the team expanded quite significantly, before considering multiple projects, even comparing the amount of people that worked on Brink, versus working on Dirty Bomb.

Rich: Like Paul said, when we started, there was three of us, in his house, and that was in 2001, when I basically moved down from university, and… Paul mentioned all of this this morning didn’t he? So then after Brink, that’s when we moved to working on multiple projects at the same time. Before that, we’d only ever been working on one game at a time.

That came with its growing pains, certainly, but now I think we’re working on three or four at the same time. So it’s actually worked out pretty good, because if you think about the development cycle, you have different types of people on the team needed for different parts of the project. What we try and do now is stagger the projects, so they’re all kind of working in step of each other

So like, concept artists are usually most useful right at the start of the project, so we can have them moving onto the new project while the others are finishing it out, and that works with a bunch of other disciplines as well.

We’ve brought in a bunch of smart guys: Griff Jenkins, who’s our head of production, he was managing FIFA for quite a long time over at EA, and he helped us build that methodology and a bit more professionalism. I think one of the things, and something Paul always says, is to try and hire people that are better than us, because then we’ll learn from them. So that’s very much been our mantra.

AusGamers: With the multiple project teams, do you see any kind of competitiveness or envy between the groups, like if some are working on licensed projects versus those with more creative freedom?

Rich: Not really, to be honest. We try to mix people across projects as well, so they get to work on multiple projects during their lifetime. Largely we let people work on what they’re most passionate about, which seems like the best way to do things. Obviously, there’s sometimes a little bit of give and take there. RAD Soldiers was our previous iOS game, and I got to do a lot of the design for that, which I really enjoyed doing, and we brought in a bunch of the artists to help with some stuff, and they really enjoyed doing that as well.

I guess that’s half the thing about being an indie -- we’re a big indie now, but we’re technically still an indie [laughs] -- is that we change job roles quite a lot, and I think it’s good. It keeps things fresh, and keeps things very different. I’ve changed job roles so many times, and maybe that’s a luxury of being one of the founders, but even a lot of the people in the studio, if they find there’s a disciple that they really want to work in, we’ll try and be quite flexible and accommodating in allowing that.

AusGamers: Some of the game’s obvious inspirations are Team Fortress 2, and MOBAs like League of Legends, which are both successful eSports games. It seems like Dirty Bomb is in a good position to become an eSports pillar. Will you be putting any tournament functionality into the game to accommodate that kind of play?

Rich: We’ll certainly be looking at tournament stuff, yeah. We came from an eSports background as a studio, Paul and I used to play in competing clans against each other in Team Fortress 1 leagues, in Quake.

AusGamers: Who won?

Rich: There’s a funny story. There was a map that his team made, called Aztec, and we were playing them in the finals of the Barry’s World Team Fortress League, and we beat them on their own map [laughs]. We basically did the scout rush, capped the flag, then everyone went heavy and just defended. We still joke about that.

But I loved those clan days, and to get that feel back into the game is… I think just that level of coordination, and the fact that you’d go and practice for so long, there’s nothing else that’s made us feel that same way, so we’ve always pushed that element in.



As for whether we going to come out the door saying we’re the next eSports game? No, we’re not. I think we almost made that mistake with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, where we put out a pro mod and no one played it, they made their own. So we’re going to be listening to the players and let them tell us what they think needs to go in. Because they’ll no better than us; they’ll play it more than we do.

So that’s very much the plan. Just listen to the players and see what they want.

AusGamers: Ok, fantastic. Thanks so much for your time today.

Rich: No worries. Thank you.