Extraction by Splash Damage - Objective based shooter fun! - PAX 2013
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,383 words · ~11 min read
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Linus Tech Tips coverage of PAX 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital,
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Intel, and Steel Series. Hey guys, I'm here with Alistair from Splash Damage
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and Chris from Nexon. And I'm going to get them to give me a brief overview and
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a little bit more specifics about the game. Uh, so Extraction is a team-
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based, objective based multiplayer shooter. It's freetoplay, free to win.
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It's set in uh London in about kind of 2018, 2020. It's been irdiated. The
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streets are empty and teams of mercenaries are kind of roaming the
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streets fulfilling contracts. And the contracts generally revolve around uh
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securing uh data cores. So there are shadowy kind of backers out there who
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are either uh want secrets buried or want secrets, you know, recovered and
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they hire these teams of mercenaries or rather they kind of hire you to go out
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there and put together these teams of mercenaries to go out there and take them back. So and that's that's
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represented by uh a really fantastic objective based team-based gameplay. So
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about that objective based, team based gameplay. Um how do you progress through
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a level and how many objectives are you expecting to run into in an average
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level in this game? So it really differs uh kind of map by map. That's one of the
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things we're most excited by is every map is a different experience. So right now you guys have played Camden. You
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probably played about half of that map. There's also a map set all over London.
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So Victoria, White Chapel, Canary Warf, Waterloo, Batisy. Um uh and each map has
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a different set of objectives. So this one uh as I say the half that you played
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involved, you know, uh planting a charge and uh uh you know, hacking a terminal.
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Others involve escorting a kind of EV and extraction vehicle through the streets. Uh you know, erecting or
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destroying barricades. Um so every map's
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a different tactical challenge. Uh requires kind of, you know, a different uh understanding of the map, different
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teamwork. Different team makeups will will do kind of, you know, better or
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worse or require different strategy. So it's really uh exciting to see how the
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dynamic changes kind of uh map to map. Speaking of different team makeups,
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there's different classes in this game. Can you go over those and explain how
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they can augment the different gameplay on defense and offense? Sure. Well, one
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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
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lot of freedom to come with some fantastic characters. So, really this is a character-driven game. So, the
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characters still have roles, but um, it's not rigidly adhering to kind of
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class structure. So, uh, that gives us a few really big wins. So, for example, in
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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
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there, you you wipe the enemy team and then you're out of luck because you're
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the wrong class and you have to sort of stand there. Um, we didn't want that.
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So, all of our classes can, you know, they can hack, they can disarm, they can plant bombs. They've got different
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strengths and weaknesses. So, for example, Proxy, who you might play today, uh, she's got an engineering
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background. So, her character is, um, particularly fast at hacking,
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particularly fast at disarming and planting, but everyone can have a go. Everyone can try it. And uh that's part
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of the strengths and weaknesses of each character along with you know the weapons they have and the special
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abilities they have whether it's Vaseline's heartbeat sensor or whether
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it's Arty's air strike. So there's no
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rigid adherence to classes. Um it also means that in the kind of full game you
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won't have to you don't have to have a team that that always consists of there
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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
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characters or you know whatever they may be. Uh the other thing it gives us is it
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frees us up to come up with some really creative kind of character combinations
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because if we want a guy uh because you don't have to have a medic and he
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doesn't always have to have shock paddles and always have to have uh uh medkits. You know, you might have a guy
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who can whatever, I don't know, revive guys at a distance but doesn't have any
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healing packs and uses a scout sniper rifle or something. You know what? You
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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
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crazy characters like that if we want to. So, it's um it's really let us be
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very creative and come up with the most exciting characters that we uh we can in
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terms of how they work on on offense and defense. Um, one of the other really fun
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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
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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
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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,
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you know, people have come to it completely fresh and they've been, you know, having a blast. There's lots of
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whooping and hollering and high five and everyone's having a a really good time. They're able to pick out very quickly.
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Now, he definitely has a point with everyone getting psyched and a lot of the communication and high level play
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and all that kind of stuff. My friends and I played in the tournament here and
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one thing we noticed is that it it you can fall behind. Definitely you can fall
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behind. Say you're on the attacking team, but as long as you're able to group back up and get to back together
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on one of those spawn waves, you as long as you have the right communication,
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even if you were doing poorly before, you can come back together, solve that
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objective, hack whatever point you have to do, plant whatever bomb, and still get out there. Now, this is probably
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more for him and sorry for maybe bringing this up, but coming splash
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damage coming from creating Brink. As a Brink player, what would someone expect
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to change when they come to this game? I think one of the biggest changes is this
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move into to a character-based system. So, we're going to have a a ton of
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characters. So, we got about uh you saw five today. Um we probably got about
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2025 ready to go back at the office. So I guess one way to think about it is
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almost um almost that kind of League of Legends or Dota type experience where
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you bring a character who has uh you know there's a lot to learn about that
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character, a lot to master. They have their own strengths and weaknesses. Understanding uh which mixture of
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characters makes for the best team is really important. So that's uh that's a
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big change um for us and it's something that people seem to be really connected
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uh uh you know really connecting with and getting really excited about. Um so
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that's probably one of the biggest changes. The other thing is after Brink
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we created uh a kind of sister company almost called fire team to handle all of
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our online services. So we wanted to make sure we had you know smooth lagfree
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connections great matchmaking all of that stuff was handled uh uh really
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well. So we were kind of looked at other solutions and none of them were quite
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right for us. So we created fire team and not only did they handle all of that
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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
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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
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in that state is because um we have a tool called Echo which gathers uh a kind
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of metrics and telemetry from the games. So what we mean by that is every kind of
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gunshot, every footstep, every cricket back to the face from proxy um is
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recorded even from these matches out there and we use that to balance the
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maps, to balance the characters, to balance the weapons. Um and on top of
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that, we've had um fans able to play the game for a while now. So we started to
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let fans in a kind of inner circle of sort of VIPs. Um they've been playing
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since 12 1212 and they've been giving us uh forum feedback and they've also been
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um of course gathering you know helping us gather these stats definitely. Um so
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balance is incredibly important for us. You know we want this to make we want to
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make sure this is uh a really uh you know competitive game that you can you
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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
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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
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really want to avoid I say we it's Nex on and splash damage. We're not
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interested in pay to win. You know, we know that that uh a lot of players uh
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you know aren't interested in that. They want a balanced playing field. They just want to have fun. So, you know, we
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haven't even got a storefront in the game yet. We've just been focusing on making a really fun core experience that
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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
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right now. Definitely. And talking bouncing back to the polished comment
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you had. Like I said, I have already played this game more than once and for
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a alpha or even pre-alpha game, it is very polished. which I do have to echo
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that comment that you previously said. Now, to give a throw out to Nexon as
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well, the the free-to-play and free to win motion, that's actually very cool
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because this is a really polished, good-looking, wellplaying game that will
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be free to play. A lot of free-to-play games, especially shooters that people
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run into are not usually that polished on average are not usually that polished
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or not that wellought out. This is a really well thoughtout game. So, how
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exactly is the shop going to work? Well, we haven't really made any decisions at
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all about how the shop will work. Uh, like he said, they haven't even
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programmed in a storefront into a build yet because, you know, with with Nexon,
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we've always tried to make our games free to play, free to win. And with
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this, you know, we took our time looking for the right title, and we wanted to
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make sure that, you know, freeto play has changed a lot, especially in the
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last couple years. And I think players
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are expecting higher quality games, whether they're free or not, than they
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used to. We wanted to make sure that we had a true AAA game. And we looked at a
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lot of different titles. Likewise, Splash Damage looked at a lot of
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different publishers. And uh eventually when the two met, we were like, this is
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a match made in heaven. I mean, we were always really impressed with their with
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their pedigree for giving quality multiplayer shooter experiences. And I
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think I can speak for them saying they were impressed with our pedigree for
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making free-to-play games. So it was just a good fit. And um so right now I
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mean while we are of course looking at at microtransaction options, we're more
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concerned with making the best game we can make. Cool. And then the players
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will enjoy it. And if the players enjoy it, they'll want to pay. Yeah. You know,
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and that but we want to make it a great experience for whether you're a free
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player or a paid player. we want you both to be able to have a great time
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playing the game. That's a great like preemptive statement because they're
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basically saying you won't have to invest anything in this game if you
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don't want to or don't need to. So once you grow an attachment to the game, you
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can deck out your character, you can get skins for different things, I'm assuming. Whatever comes down the line,
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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
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free-to-play shooter that's well polished and might have some customization options down the future,
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you should definitely check it out. If you like our content on this, if you
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