Interview with John Gibson about Red Orchestra and Tripwire

[FrieChamp]

http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/ ... .19923.htm

Interesting read, it isn't really about the MOD itself, rather about the development and the team behind it, their role in the MSU contest and the company they founded from the money and license they won.

He also talks about MOD development in general:

What happens – and I learned this on other mods – you release a buggy alpha, no matter how good your ideas are, no matter how original they are, no matter how fun your concept is, if your execution is poor, you’ve left a dirty taste in the mouths of every fan that will ever try your game again. So many mods are doing this.

Whereas people like Erik Johnson from Valve preach that the only way to create a succesful MOD is to release many iterations of your MOD on the way to completion.

I'm wondering what you guys think about that

[Pericolos0]

I agree with both, make sure your first released version is pretty solid and continue building it up in iterations

[JAL]

What happens – and I learned this on other mods – you release a buggy alpha, no matter how good your ideas are, no matter how original they are, no matter how fun your concept is, if your execution is poor, you’ve left a dirty taste in the mouths of every fan that will ever try your game again. So many mods are doing this.

That applies for about every HL2 mod I've tried so far

[Hourences]

Lots of versions Yes

Lots of public versions No

If you release something do it right and relase a solid creation not some buggy crappy prototype. If you want to release updates later on fine but the first release should be really good.

You got one shot at convincing the player to stick to your mod. If the first time he tried it it was gay he wont try it a second time and certainly not a 10th time.

[Schmung]

People are too ambitious, they release an alpha/beta with god knows how many features in there, but don't bother refinining anything. Implement one element of gameplay at a time, make sure it's fun and then push on.

HEre's our mod, it has DM, CTF, Round Based this that, grappling hooks, 30 different weapons and 4 maps.

Great. Except 8 of the weapons are useless, 3 are too good, CTF doesn't even work, 2 of the maps aren't done and the grappling hook will randomly kill you for no reason.

Why not just get DM and 10 of the weapons working, make sure that works and that it's fun and build from there.

[Thrik]

I'm not convinced that you're right, Hourences. There seems to be a strong "We must look professional and perfect!" mentality amongst modders at the moment, which is a shame as pretty much none of these gain even a slight bit of popularity.

If you look at any successful mod, and this includes CS:S, DOD:S, Natural Selection and Garry's Mod, they all had many versions - a good portion of which were public betas. Their popularity grew as they made the most successful elements in the game better and better, however with the exception of NS they were all completely barebone mods and were "buggy prototypes" generally created around just one initial concept.

So, no, getting it right and releasing a perfect and polished mod on your first release isn't important to players. Releasing a fun game is. All the flash and glory can come later once you've actually proven your worth. Sadly most modders right now try to do this the other way around and fall flat onto their faces.

Not to say that a mod team who really know what they're doing couldn't potentially work for ages on a mod and then release it in one big shitstorm as Insurgency is presumably aiming to. I guess we'll soon see whether or not it'll work.

[Zacker]

I personally belive strongly in that mod teams should release early and often. That is how I want it myself, I want to see a mod early on despite many flaws.

After having tried it with Sands of War I have learned that many others don't feel that way though. There are quite a bunch of players who want even first public release to be pretty solid.

[Pericolos0]

I'm not convinced that you're right, Hourences. There seems to be a strong "We must look professional and perfect!" mentality amongst modders at the moment, which is a shame as pretty much none of these gain even a slight bit of popularity.

If you look at any successful mod, and this includes CS:S, DOD:S, Natural Selection and Garry's Mod, they all had many versions - a good portion of which were public betas. Their popularity grew as they made the most successful elements in the game better and better, however with the exception of NS they were all completely barebone mods and were "buggy prototypes" generally created around just one initial concept.

So, no, getting it right and releasing a perfect and polished mod on your first release isn't important to players. Releasing a fun game is. All the flash and glory can come later once you've actually proven your worth. Sadly most modders right now try to do this the other way around and fall flat onto their faces.

Not to say that a mod team who really know what they're doing couldn't potentially work for ages on a mod and then release it in one big shitstorm as Insurgency is presumably aiming to. I guess we'll soon see whether or not it'll work.

I think natural selection is a perfect example of what hourences means. You cannot rely anymore on just releasing buggy alphas and expect it to become a big mod because the ammount of mods have just grown so much. The garrysmod and cs successtories are not something you can rely on anymore as a mod developer because they are such incredibly rare occurances.

It's easy for eric johnson to say to do it in the ultra iterative way because there will bound to be one gem jumping out of the 1000's of other mods. Which is a win-win situation for valve ($$$).

John Gibson however, speaks from the perspective of a mod developer and realises that if you want to make sure your mod is a succes, make a full proper game and work out teh gameplay with internal playtests.

Insurgency is taking the middle road, we will release a full working version with the most important gameplay elements in, but it will still be far from what we initially wanted the mod to be. We won't release a "demo" like dystopia has done, but a proper beta, and then more betas will follow just like it should be with mods.

[Fletch]

I'm inclined to agree somehwat with Peri. There's a middle ground between "releasing crap" and "releasing a perfectly polished gem." If you're going to do many iterative releases, the first one needs to 1) be fun and 2) provide a direction of where it's going.

Take a look at CS. for those of you that remember Beta 1 (which I think might only be like 5 people here), it was crap. It was Mansion and Assault, one basic player model that was basically copied with a T and CT skin (that looked pretty much the same), bad lag, and the most unintuitive guy/ammo buy in history. you had to buy your gun, then buy the correct ammo type to go with it. So if you don't know which gun uses .30 cal and which uses 9mm, you had to just play around with it. BUT!! It was fun. Mansion turned into a giant rush towards to middle for the AWPs left after the round. The shotgun was like a railgun from across the level. It hooked people. Then you got an update every month or so, and pretty soon the community was able to pitch in enough assets to build up the entire thing into something great.

[Algor]

mods have the luxury of being able to release at any time, and saying "oops" and patching it up, or adding more content later. with most retail games, this is generally not possible (unless if you are a game like CS:S). i think mods may want to try to take advantage of this to some degree, of course with finding the blend of polish and a quick release to test the waters.

having worked on RO, i cannot even comment on the article, because it makes me gib.

[kleinluka]

Hey algor. do you know ShadowM8? he works with me now Told me som fun stories about RO

[wacko]

I will have to agree with Algor on this one, even more so when reading this interview is that MODs really do have an advantage and I think that’s why Erik pushes the release often methodology is that MODs can usually quickly patch things. They really do not have to worry about customer downtime or even customers at all. They can do what they want, when they want to. What kind of makes me not really give a shit about RO is they still seem to live in that set of ideals even after reading this article. That they can really just do whatever they want. It does not really seem to me that they have the whole process down and the amount of time and ideas, it really takes to make a good game. They just still kind of sit in that MOD world where they can move as slowly as they want, they can release when they want…. I do not think RO will be that major and the only reason I could see them getting sales is because they have a product inside a product that already has a big name; that being steam.

On top of that if we look back to how MODs have generally done in the retail world, they are really going against the odds. I think that only 3 or 4 MODs have made it big as a retail game and a trend among them was they were all good as MODs as well. RO does not have that huge of a following and like many of the other MODs that have gone to retail(Gunman Chronicles) they generally fail.

Furthermore I am kind of disappointed that they did not go with a new idea or a new “game” because to me just hacking up your mod as a retail game is just fucking lame when you have a full engine license at your disposal and one that is not very cheap either.

[Zacker]

They really do not have to worry about customer downtime or even customers at all. They can do what they want, when they want to.

Try doing this with a mod, then you will see that it's not like that. We do indeed have to worry about the players.

[Hourences]

I'm not convinced that you're right, Hourences. There seems to be a strong "We must look professional and perfect!" mentality amongst modders at the moment, which is a shame as pretty much none of these gain even a slight bit of popularity.

If you look at any successful mod, and this includes CS:S, DOD:S, Natural Selection and Garry's Mod, they all had many versions - a good portion of which were public betas. Their popularity grew as they made the most successful elements in the game better and better, however with the exception of NS they were all completely barebone mods and were "buggy prototypes" generally created around just one initial concept.

Im sure some mods pulled it off the majority cannot. It also has zero to do with trying to be pro, its just wiser if you want to have more impact.

And it was easier in the old days to do that, due to less mods around. Now just about anyone starts a mod..

You got hundreds of mods and levels out there, people can choose so they wont stick if something crashes or is really sucky and needs urgent fixing...theyll just move on to the next level or mod

And it seriously depends on the type of mod too. Everyone in this thread seems to think only about multiplayer team games such as CS clones while theres a whole range of mods

Singleplay mods NEED to be right on first release.

There is no one except a small fan group who will play trough an entire singleplay campaignb again just because some guy released a gameplay polish patch or some map fix.

[Defrag]

From a purely personal perspective:

I agree that everyone is too precious about mod stuff now, but it's just the way things are unfortunately. There's a lot of mods and games competing for people's time and first impressions are very important.

Example:

I played dystopia a handful of times and felt it had potential, but it was so rough and lacking in many areas that I never came back. A mod has to hit me between the eyes and grab my attention for me to play it more than a few times, and I suspect a lot of people feel the same. I'm not going to spend my time waiting for a mod to fix its failings if it's really rough -- I'll just play a full game instead. BF2 or dystopia? It's not a tough choice for me.

I'll probably check back in mod every couple of months at best unless it really makes a big impression or a lot of other people start playing it.

With FF, I personally feel we have to get it pretty much 90% right on the first release, as people have preconceptions & expectations about the mod we're making (most people know what TF is and many have played previous incarnations, so a half-assed first release will kill a lot of interest). If we were making a mod based on a brand new concept, we'd probably be less precious about releasing stuff (and the mod itself) but I feel things have changed. People's expectations have changed. Maybe all of the mods out there are simply contributing to the problem? If we make people expect the earth for free (i.e. a flawlessly executed mod), then they will probably believe they're entitled to it, and anything less than that will be ignored.

The whole "we have to be professional" stuff has gone too far in many quarters ('studio' name for a mod? Please!) but on the whole I disagree that most mod teams are 'trying to be pro' in the sense that they want to end up selling their mod or starting up a proper games development company. It's definitely the case in some quarters, but on the whole I believe it's just a "monkey-see, monkey-do" scenario.