“They were absolutely wrong. They were absolutely right.”

That’s Ed Stern, lead writer of Dirty Bomb, ending a very specific anecdote about player feedback for Splash Damage’s first hit, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Actually, the anecdote is too good not to tell.

“Player feedback” is a really nice way of saying that there were a lot of players complaining about just how overpowered the Thompson submachine gun was, at one point, in Enemy Territory. This was a point of contention for Splash Damage as they knew that both the Allied Thompson and the Axis MP40 SMGs had the same stats. Like, exactly the same stats in terms of accuracy, spread and damage: all that essential stopping-power stuff. Considering they created both guns, it seems like they’d be an authority on the matter.



In these weapon stats, Splash Damage had objective evidence that the complaining players were wrong. And yet, when the developer looked at the all-important telemetry data of kills with a Thompson versus kills with an MP40, something was indeed amiss. Allied players were netting a disproportionate number of kills when compared to their SMG-wielding Axis foes.

Eventually, Splash Damage discovered the cause of the disparate statistics: the Thompson sounded better than the MP40. “[Allied players] were getting more kills with it because it had bassier audio,” explained Stern. “It sounded more powerful. So [Allied players] felt more confident with it; they went for more headshots and they were getting more kills.”

Fast-forward to today and Splash Damage has clearly taken this lesson to heart in how it approaches fast-paced team shooter Dirty Bomb. You can have a read of my preview for the skinny on how the game plays, but this article is focused on exploring how Splash Damage is approaching the development of its latest splash into team-based shooters.

After the rocky launch of Brink (which, admittedly, I really enjoyed), Splash Damage was keen to look at different ways to create games. The first culmination of this was RAD Soldiers, an iOS game released the year after Brink. The second was to return to its developer-for-hire roots by creating the asymmetrical multiplayer component of Batman: Arkham Origins. Today, Dirty Bomb is the focus and extends the free-to-play learnings of RAD Soldiers into the PC-exclusive space.



The benefits, at least on paper, are already clear to studio co-founder and chief marketing officer Richard Jolly. “There’s a certain amount of freedom that the PC gives you that other platforms don’t,” Jolly explains. “There’s no need to have to go through massive submission to get the platform holders to approve your update, which often takes so long. For a free-to-play game, you can’t really do that. You want to be hotfixing the day a problem comes up, rather than having to wait for a two-week cycle. It’s been refreshing, again, to get back to those quick iteration times, whereas before, you had to be far more calculated in your approach of how you do things.”

For Jolly, this experience was reminiscent of the studio’s mod-forging origin that first showed what Splash Damage had to offer the gaming world. “I almost harken it back to when we were a mod team, originally,” Jolly recalls. “Where you’d pull out the game at a super-early stage. Actually, we did the same thing back then [for Enemy Territory]. We put out an alpha version of our mod and our players were just basically giving us feedback and refining it as we went.”

This is a stark contrast to the normal process for releasing a retail title. “It’s a very different way to work, if you think about the traditional boxed mentality,” says Jolly. "You have maybe one open beta, which is pretty much the final game, and then you’ll do one, two or three updates, maybe a DLC if you’re lucky, and then you walk away from the game. With a live game or a free-to-play game, you’ve got the chance to work on that game for years to come, and it’s refreshing. It’s quite good for me because I’m the fucking worst feature-creep guy in the world, anyway. You think back to some of the games we’ve put out on shelves, and there’s always some features that we’ve had to cut at the last minute, and it’s always soul-destroying to know that players will never see that stuff.”

The good news is that some of those features will appear in Dirty Bomb, albeit no specifics were mentioned. What was mentioned, though, was the potential for Dirty Bomb longevity, should the player base embrace it in the way that Splash Damage hopes. In the past, Splash Damage has had partnerships with the likes of Demonware and Agora to run Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Brink, respectively. Unfortunately for Splash Damage and the Quake Wars / Brink community, Demonware was bought by Activison and brought in-house to run the back-end for Call of Duty games, while Agora was purchased by Major League Gaming.



For Splash Damage, this meant the prospect of courting a third partnership could lead to the same result: a lack of support for current and future titles down the track. For Jolly, the solution was straightforward. “We formed an online services company back in 2012,” he reveals. “We split off and basically all of our network ninjas started a company called Fireteam, and that pretty much powers all of the online services. So that does all of the matchmaking, that runs all of our store.

“We kept losing these companies, so we decided we should try and do it ourselves, because we’ve got 10 years’ experience, back [when we started Fireteam], for multiplayer and networking, and not many people had consistently just made multiplayer games," he continues. "Arnout [van Meer], our co-founder, who heads up Fireteam now, him and a bunch of really smart programmers basically built the systems that power our back-end. It powers RAD Soldiers. It powers Batman: Arkham Origins that we did with Warner Bros. It powers all of Dirty Bomb, of course. I can’t tell you some of the other new stuff it powers yet, but we’re working with a bunch of high-profile studios now.”

This led to a discussion about what would happen if Dirty Bomb isn’t the financial success that Splash Damage hopes it will be down the track. “Obviously, there are still financial constraints there if the game’s not making money,” Jolly says truthfully. “{And if so] then it doesn’t make sense to keep it afloat. But at the same time, maybe that enables us to walk away from the game in a different sense –- and this is all hypothetical –- where you could open-source part of it and let the community carry on developing it themselves.”

This is in reference to the possibility of mod tools for Dirty Bomb. It’s something we asked Jolly about in our interview last year, and it was a topic I was keen to know more about. In terms of Splash Damage’s plans for mod-tool integration in Dirty Bomb, this is what Jolly had to say: “I wouldn’t go as detailed as we did with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and allow people to run their own servers, because that stuff gets more complicated. But there are things like Valve Steamworks where UGC [user-generated content] has been amazing in maintaining games like DotA 2 and TF2.. If we were able to push into that realm, I think that’d be great for our game.



"I guess it would get that kind of Splash Damage community feel back again," he adds. "It’s something we definitely want to do. It’s on our list, we just need to get to that stage of the roadmap where we’ve got time to make it, because there are always other features that are more important. I really do hope we get to it.”

For Dirty Bomb, the community may not yet have mod tools, but they have been integral in helping balance the game. Splash Damage has taken the same approach to getting player feedback early for Dirty Bomb that it did with the Enemy Territory mod. The developer released an alpha version of the game, which helped to shape the current closed beta that’s available in pre-release form on Steam.

Player feedback has been constructive from an early stage –- a mixture of pros and cons -– but the willingness of players to help test the logic of a complaint is the kind of stuff that makes me proud to be a PC gamer. “It’s the difference between [players] saying, ‘This shotgun is completely balked, it’s ruined,’ and, ‘It felt like something was off with the damage, so I staged this experiment where me and a buddy got together in a server and we stood in a certain spot and fired shotguns at each other and took screenshots of the pellet impact',” says Stern.

That was a true anecdote, apparently. “They designed a QA experiment and tested the hypothesis,” Stern contines. “We cannot thank those players enough. This game has been tested exponentially [more] than any other game, because we nailed a business model and a production schedule that allows us to do so. We owe those guys a lot. Hopefully, hugs, kisses and kudos will suffice. We couldn’t have balanced that on paper; we needed their experience.”



On top of this, the Splash Damage interviewees were open about what works and what’s still a work in progress. For Stern, the lobby UI in its current form isn’t doing a great job of communicating which characters perform which roles. “Now, to be absolutely honest, we’ve backed off the idea of classes because we’re trying to sell you Mercs,” Stern says, sternly. “Honestly, we probably need to bring it back a bit and go, ‘Oh, and they’re an engineer’. Currently with the UI we’ve got, we’re not doing a great job of telling players, ‘This character is really good at this, not so great at that’. [For instance,] Proxy is a glass cannon: shotgun; really fast; moves fantastically; can do triple jumps with a certain augment; really, really mobile; very little health. Do not get into extended long-range duels [playing as] that character. We’re still working on that because it’s a live game. It’s not like we’re never touching that system again. Frankly, we should have done a better job of that. We are in the process of fixing that.”

For Neil Alphonso, lead game designer, he’s waiting to see the community response to specific systems before potentially addressing issues with new features in the future. “We’ve talked about introducing drafting in the future so people can only take certain characters in and there are rounds of picking,” Alphonso explains in response to the three-Merc-per-game limit. “I think it’s something we’ll have to watch because the players will show us very quickly if that’s broken. We hope it isn’t. We want there to be variety. We want different roles. We want the different Mercs in there.”

Even though the core player count for Dirty Bomb is 5v5, this can be boosted to as high as 8v8, albeit without any scaling to the map. Alphonso used MOBAs as a source of comparison for why the lower player count is ideal for Dirty Bomb. “It’s a level of coordination and communication for me, really,” reasoned Alphonso. “I’ll reference MOBAs again, those don’t have huge team counts. It’s all about the need to communicate a lot, and I think it just makes everything feel more meaningful. You can play 8v8 on our game, as well. I have to admit that I personally think it gets too frantic. [The map is the] exact same size, just significantly higher number of players. There isn’t as much team work, you can’t really predict what the enemy is doing; it’s not as tactical.”



In my experience of playing the Dirty Bomb closed beta since interviewing the developers, Alphonso’s comments certainly ring true. The 5v5 Australian servers are usually empty, while the 7v7 or 8v8 variants are the most popular. Comparing my experience of 5v5 at the Splash Damage event with 8v8 in the public domain is quite diverse. Even though there was a mixture of casual and pro players at the event, Dirty Bomb definitely felt better balanced for 5v5, with greater communication between players, instead of the full-team rush/camp tactics that dominate my experiences with higher player counts.

Even though the lead game designer isn’t a fan of higher player counts, they’re part of the game because the community clearly enjoys them. In this respect, Splash Damage shows that it wants Dirty Bomb to survive well into the future, with a sizeable and engaged player base that knows it will be respected when it comes to feedback.

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Nathan Lawrence can be found fragging n00bs in a variety of digital battlefields, but most commonly the ones from the franchise with a capital ‘B’. He loves games with a strong narrative component, and believes in a gaming world where cutscenes are no longer necessary. In his lack of spare time, Nathan can be found working on a variety of wacky script ideas, and dreams of freeing cinemagoers from unnecessary sequels and pointless remakes by writing films with never-before-seen twists and turns. But mostly he’s all about the fragging of n00bs.

Recent articles by Nathan:

• AusGamers Exclusive: Wyrmwood Director Pushing for Wyrmwood Videogame
  
• Dirty Bomb Hands-on Preview – A Stand-Out Explosion Amid the Boom of Accessible Shooters
  
• Tech Review: Turtle Beach Ear Force Stealth 500X

Find him on Twitter - @nachosjustic PSN - SaintRasputin XBL – NachosJustice and Steam - uber_chimera.