Linus Tech Tips coverage of PAX 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital,
Intel, and Steel Series. Hey guys, I'm here with Alistair from Splash Damage
and Chris from Nexon. And I'm going to get them to give me a brief overview and
a little bit more specifics about the game. Uh, so Extraction is a team-
based, objective based multiplayer shooter. It's freetoplay, free to win.
It's set in uh London in about kind of 2018, 2020. It's been irdiated. The
streets are empty and teams of mercenaries are kind of roaming the
streets fulfilling contracts. And the contracts generally revolve around uh
securing uh data cores. So there are shadowy kind of backers out there who
are either uh want secrets buried or want secrets, you know, recovered and
they hire these teams of mercenaries or rather they kind of hire you to go out
there and put together these teams of mercenaries to go out there and take them back. So and that's that's
represented by uh a really fantastic objective based team-based gameplay. So
about that objective based, team based gameplay. Um how do you progress through
a level and how many objectives are you expecting to run into in an average
level in this game? So it really differs uh kind of map by map. That's one of the
things we're most excited by is every map is a different experience. So right now you guys have played Camden. You
probably played about half of that map. There's also a map set all over London.
So Victoria, White Chapel, Canary Warf, Waterloo, Batisy. Um uh and each map has
a different set of objectives. So this one uh as I say the half that you played
involved, you know, uh planting a charge and uh uh you know, hacking a terminal.
Others involve escorting a kind of EV and extraction vehicle through the streets. Uh you know, erecting or
destroying barricades. Um so every map's
a different tactical challenge. Uh requires kind of, you know, a different uh understanding of the map, different
teamwork. Different team makeups will will do kind of, you know, better or
worse or require different strategy. So it's really uh exciting to see how the
dynamic changes kind of uh map to map. Speaking of different team makeups,
there's different classes in this game. Can you go over those and explain how
they can augment the different gameplay on defense and offense? Sure. Well, one
of the things actually that we've we've got away from is is class-based stuff. So, um, and that's that's allowed us a
lot of freedom to come with some fantastic characters. So, really this is a character-driven game. So, the
characters still have roles, but um, it's not rigidly adhering to kind of
class structure. So, uh, that gives us a few really big wins. So, for example, in
some of some games, you know, you might come to a point where there's an enemy bomb you have to disarm and you get
there, you you wipe the enemy team and then you're out of luck because you're
the wrong class and you have to sort of stand there. Um, we didn't want that.
So, all of our classes can, you know, they can hack, they can disarm, they can plant bombs. They've got different
strengths and weaknesses. So, for example, Proxy, who you might play today, uh, she's got an engineering
background. So, her character is, um, particularly fast at hacking,
particularly fast at disarming and planting, but everyone can have a go. Everyone can try it. And uh that's part
of the strengths and weaknesses of each character along with you know the weapons they have and the special
abilities they have whether it's Vaseline's heartbeat sensor or whether
it's Arty's air strike. So there's no
rigid adherence to classes. Um it also means that in the kind of full game you
won't have to you don't have to have a team that that always consists of there
has to be one medic in the team, there has to be one engineer in the team. No, you just bring in five of your favorite
characters or you know whatever they may be. Uh the other thing it gives us is it
frees us up to come up with some really creative kind of character combinations
because if we want a guy uh because you don't have to have a medic and he
doesn't always have to have shock paddles and always have to have uh uh medkits. You know, you might have a guy
who can whatever, I don't know, revive guys at a distance but doesn't have any
healing packs and uses a scout sniper rifle or something. You know what? You
couldn't really fit him into a class uh before. You couldn't really pigeon hole them. Um so it lets us create kind of
crazy characters like that if we want to. So, it's um it's really let us be
very creative and come up with the most exciting characters that we uh we can in
terms of how they work on on offense and defense. Um, one of the other really fun
things about both the characters and the maps is how much uh mastery there is to be had. It's really important to us that
this is a game that has depth and can be played, you know, really competitively at a high level, but at the same time be
really easy and fun to pick up. And one of the things that's been great about packs over the last four days is that,
you know, people have come to it completely fresh and they've been, you know, having a blast. There's lots of
whooping and hollering and high five and everyone's having a a really good time. They're able to pick out very quickly.
Now, he definitely has a point with everyone getting psyched and a lot of the communication and high level play
and all that kind of stuff. My friends and I played in the tournament here and
one thing we noticed is that it it you can fall behind. Definitely you can fall
behind. Say you're on the attacking team, but as long as you're able to group back up and get to back together
on one of those spawn waves, you as long as you have the right communication,
even if you were doing poorly before, you can come back together, solve that
objective, hack whatever point you have to do, plant whatever bomb, and still get out there. Now, this is probably
more for him and sorry for maybe bringing this up, but coming splash
damage coming from creating Brink. As a Brink player, what would someone expect
to change when they come to this game? I think one of the biggest changes is this
move into to a character-based system. So, we're going to have a a ton of
characters. So, we got about uh you saw five today. Um we probably got about
2025 ready to go back at the office. So I guess one way to think about it is
almost um almost that kind of League of Legends or Dota type experience where
you bring a character who has uh you know there's a lot to learn about that
character, a lot to master. They have their own strengths and weaknesses. Understanding uh which mixture of
characters makes for the best team is really important. So that's uh that's a
big change um for us and it's something that people seem to be really connected
uh uh you know really connecting with and getting really excited about. Um so
that's probably one of the biggest changes. The other thing is after Brink
we created uh a kind of sister company almost called fire team to handle all of
our online services. So we wanted to make sure we had you know smooth lagfree
connections great matchmaking all of that stuff was handled uh uh really
well. So we were kind of looked at other solutions and none of them were quite
right for us. So we created fire team and not only did they handle all of that
but one of the reasons that the game's in uh you know even though it's alpha now it's people are having a really good
fun with it. People are saying it's really polished and we've got some great feedback. Um one of the reasons uh it is
in that state is because um we have a tool called Echo which gathers uh a kind
of metrics and telemetry from the games. So what we mean by that is every kind of
gunshot, every footstep, every cricket back to the face from proxy um is
recorded even from these matches out there and we use that to balance the
maps, to balance the characters, to balance the weapons. Um and on top of
that, we've had um fans able to play the game for a while now. So we started to
let fans in a kind of inner circle of sort of VIPs. Um they've been playing
since 12 1212 and they've been giving us uh forum feedback and they've also been
um of course gathering you know helping us gather these stats definitely. Um so
balance is incredibly important for us. You know we want this to make we want to
make sure this is uh a really uh you know competitive game that you can you
can play at high levels if you want to. We also want to make sure it's really fair. Um Venice is important for a
couple of reasons. So I think I said at the top you know this is a free-to-play game. It's also a freeto-in game. We
really want to avoid I say we it's Nex on and splash damage. We're not
interested in pay to win. You know, we know that that uh a lot of players uh
you know aren't interested in that. They want a balanced playing field. They just want to have fun. So, you know, we
haven't even got a storefront in the game yet. We've just been focusing on making a really fun core experience that
people can get into. And you know, we've got ideas about how we can monetize it, but it's all still, you know, early
right now. Definitely. And talking bouncing back to the polished comment
you had. Like I said, I have already played this game more than once and for
a alpha or even pre-alpha game, it is very polished. which I do have to echo
that comment that you previously said. Now, to give a throw out to Nexon as
well, the the free-to-play and free to win motion, that's actually very cool
because this is a really polished, good-looking, wellplaying game that will
be free to play. A lot of free-to-play games, especially shooters that people
run into are not usually that polished on average are not usually that polished
or not that wellought out. This is a really well thoughtout game. So, how
exactly is the shop going to work? Well, we haven't really made any decisions at
all about how the shop will work. Uh, like he said, they haven't even
programmed in a storefront into a build yet because, you know, with with Nexon,
we've always tried to make our games free to play, free to win. And with
this, you know, we took our time looking for the right title, and we wanted to
make sure that, you know, freeto play has changed a lot, especially in the
last couple years. And I think players
are expecting higher quality games, whether they're free or not, than they
used to. We wanted to make sure that we had a true AAA game. And we looked at a
lot of different titles. Likewise, Splash Damage looked at a lot of
different publishers. And uh eventually when the two met, we were like, this is
a match made in heaven. I mean, we were always really impressed with their with
their pedigree for giving quality multiplayer shooter experiences. And I
think I can speak for them saying they were impressed with our pedigree for
making free-to-play games. So it was just a good fit. And um so right now I
mean while we are of course looking at at microtransaction options, we're more
concerned with making the best game we can make. Cool. And then the players
will enjoy it. And if the players enjoy it, they'll want to pay. Yeah. You know,
and that but we want to make it a great experience for whether you're a free
player or a paid player. we want you both to be able to have a great time
playing the game. That's a great like preemptive statement because they're
basically saying you won't have to invest anything in this game if you
don't want to or don't need to. So once you grow an attachment to the game, you
can deck out your character, you can get skins for different things, I'm assuming. Whatever comes down the line,
I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there. I hope I didn't break anything. Um, so if you're interested in a
free-to-play shooter that's well polished and might have some customization options down the future,
you should definitely check it out. If you like our content on this, if you
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