Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of pax 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel and steelseries 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 so extraction is a team-based objective-based multiplayer shooter it's free-to-play you free to win it's set in London in the back kind of 20 18 20 20 it's been irradiated the streets are empty and teams of our mercenaries are kind of roaming the streets fulfilling contracts and the contracts generally revolve around securing data cause so there are shadowy kind of backers out there who are either one secrets buried on secrets you know recovered and they hire these teams of Mercer ease or rather they kind of high you to go out there put together these teams of nurseries to go out there and take them back so that's that's represented by a really fantastic objective based team based gameplay so I both that objective based team based gameplay 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 kind of map by map that's why things were most excited by is every map is a different experience so right now you guys are play Camden what do you play about half of that map there's also a map set all over London so Victoria Whitechapel Canary Wharf Waterloo Battersea and each map has a different set of objectives so it's one say the hoff that you made involved you know planting a charge and you know hacking a terminal others involve escorting a kind of EV and extraction vehicle through the streets erecting you're destroying barricades so every maps of different tactical challenge requires got to be a different understanding of the map different teamwork different team makeups will do kind of you know better or worse or require different strategy so it's really exciting to see how other dynamic changes kind of a 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 got away from is class white stuff so and that's that allowed us a lot of freedoms cover some fantastic characters so really this is a character driven game so the character still have roles but it's not widget Lee adhering to kind of class structure so 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 Baum you after disarm and you get there you wipe the enemy team and then you're out of luck because you're the wrong class and you have to still stand there we didn't want that so all of our classes can I can hack that can disarm they can plot bombs they've got different strengths and weaknesses so for example proxy who might play today she's got an engineering background so her character is so particularly fast the hacking particular bastard disarming and planting but everyone can have a go everyone controller and there that's why the strengths and weaknesses of each character along with you know the weapons they have the special abilities they have whether it's Vasily's heartbeat sensor or whether it's a Artie's airstrike so there's no rigid adherence to classes it also means that in the kind of ball game you won't have to you don't have to have a team that always consists of that's me one medic in the team that's been one engineering a team no you just bring in five of your favorite characters or you know whatever they may be the only thing it gives us is it frees us up to come up some really creative kind of character combinations because if we want a guy because you don't have to have a medical it doesn't always have to have shock paddles and always have to have med kits you know you might have a guy who can whatever i revived guys at a distance but doesn't have any healing backs and uses a scout sniper rifle or something you know what he could really fit him into a class before he could really pigeonholing so lets us great kind of crazy characters like that if we want to you know it's um it's really let us be very creative and come up with the most exciting characters that we we can in terms of how they work on offense and defense one of the other really fun things about both the characters and the maps is how much mastery there is to be had is really important to us that this is a game that has debt and can be played in a really competitively a high level but at same time be really easy and fun to pick up one of things that's been great about pax over the last four days is that you know people who come to it completely French and they've been having a blast there's lots of whooping and hollering and high-five anyone's having a really good time they were 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 I kind of stuff my friends and I played in the tournament here and one thing we noticed is that it you can fall behind definitely you can fall behind say you're on the attacking team but as long as you able to group back up and get you back together on one of those spawn waves you as you have the great communication even if you were doing poorly before you can come back together solve that objective hack whatever pointing out to do plant whatever bomb and still get out there now this is probably more for him and sorry for maybe bring 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 when the biggest changes is moving to a character based system so we can have a ton of character so we've got about you saw five today we've already got about 20 25 ready to go back at the office so I guess one way to think about it is almost almost a kind of league of legends or dota type experience we bring a character who has you know there's a lot to learn about that character a lot to master they have their own strengths and weaknesses understanding which mixture of characters makes for the best team it's really important so that's art that's a big change for us and its own that people seem to be really connected in a really connecting with and getting really excited about um that's wearing one of the biggest changes the other thing is after brink we created a kind of sister company almost got fire team handle all of our online services so wanted to make sure we had no smooth blackberry connections great matchmaking all that's was handled really well so where it kind of looked other solutions and none were quite right for us so he created fire team and not Lee do they handle all of that but when the reasons that the games in you know it's alpha now is people having a really good fun with it people are saying it's really polished and we've got some great feedback on the reasons it isn't that state is because we have a tool called echo which gathers a kind of metrics and telemetry for the games so what you mean by that is every kind of gunshot every footstep every cricket back to the face from proxy is recorded even from these matches out there and we use that to balance the maps develop the characters to balance the weapons and on top of that we've had fans able to play the game for a while now so we started to let fans in a kind of inner circle I've sort of VIPs they've been playing since 12 12 12 and they've been giving us foreign feedback and they've also been of course gathering you know helping us gather these stats so balance is incredibly important for us you know we want this to make want to make sure this is a really competitive game that you can even play at high levels if you want to you also want to make sure it's really fair and Venice it's important for a couple of reasons so I think I said at the top you know this is a free to play your game is also a free to win game we really want to avoid let's say we it's nexon and splash damage we're not interested in paid to win you know we know that that a lot of players you know on interest in that they want a balanced playing feel they just wanna have fun so you know haven't even got a storefront in the game yet just refocus will make a really fun core experience that people can get into I know we've got ideas about how it can monetize it but it's all still you know early right now definitely and talking bouncing back to the Polish comment you had like i said i have already played this game more than once and for alpha or even pre alpha game it is very polished i do have to echo that comment that you previously said now to give a throw it 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 well playing 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 polish are not that well thought out this is a really well thought out game so how exactly is the shop going to work we haven't really made any decisions at all about how the shop will work like he said they haven't even programmed in a storefront into a build yet because you know we're with next on 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 free-to-play has changed a lot especially in the last couple years yeah 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 Triple A game and we looked at a lot of different titles likewise Splash Damage looked at a lot of different publishers and 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 so right now I mean well we are of course looking at at micro transaction options we're more concerned with making the best game we can make and then the players will enjoy it and if their players enjoy it they'll want to pay you know and that but we want to make it a great experience for whether you're a free player or paid player we want you both to be able to have a great time playing the game that's a great like pre-emptive 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 so if you're interested in a free-to-play shooter that's well polished and might have some customisation options down the future you should definitely check it out if you like our content on this you like any of our packs content be sure to subscribe to Linus tech tips