 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, free to win. It's set in London in about 2018, 2020. It's been irradiated, the streets are empty and teams of mercenaries are roaming the streets fulfilling contracts. And the contracts generally revolve around securing data cores. So there are shadowy backers out there who either want secrets buried or want secrets recovered. And they hire these teams of mercenaries, or rather they hire you, to go out there and put together these teams of mercenaries to go out there and take them back. So that's represented by a really fantastic, objective-based, team-based gameplay. So about 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 one of the things we're most excited by is every map is a different experience. So right now you guys are playing Camden. We've only played about half of that map. There's also maps set all over London. So Victoria, Whitechapel, Canary Wharf, Waterloo, Battersea. And each map has a different set of objectives. So this one, I'd say the half that you played involved, you know, planting a charge and hacking a terminal. Others involved escorting a kind of EV and extraction vehicle through the streets, you know, erecting or destroying barricades. So every map's a different tactical challenge. It requires kind of a different understanding of the map, different teamwork, different team make-ups. We'll do kind of, you know, better or worse, so require a different strategy. So it's really exciting to see how the dynamic changes kind of map to map. Speaking of different team make-ups, there's different classes in this game. Can you go over those and explain how they can augment the different gameplay on D4? Can you go over the different gameplay on D4 and offense? Sure. Well, one of the things actually that we've got away from is class-based stuff. So that's allowed us a lot of freedom to cover some fantastic characters. So really this is a character-driven game. So the characters still have roles, but it's not rigidly adhering to kind of class structure. So that gives us a few really big wins. So for example, in 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 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. We didn't want that, so all of our classes 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, she's got an engineering background. So her character is particularly fast at hacking, particularly fast at disarming and planting. But everyone can have a go, everyone can try it, and 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 Vasily's Heartbeat Sensor or whether it's Arty's Airstrike. So there's no rigid adherence to classes. It also means that in the kind of pool game, you don't have to have a team 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. 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, because you don't have to have a medic, and he doesn't always have to have shock panels, and always have to have medkits, you know, you might have a guy who can, whatever, revive guys at a distance, but doesn't have any healing packs, and uses a scout sniper rifle or something, you know, you couldn't really fit him into a class before, you couldn't really pigeonhole him. So it lets us create kind of crazy characters like that if we want to, you know, it's really let us be very creative and come up with the most exciting characters that 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. 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 Pax 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 really good time, they're able to pick up 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 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 back together on one of those spawn waves, as long as you have the great 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 moving to a character-based system. So we're going to have a ton of characters. So we've got about, you saw five today, we've probably got about 20, 25 ready to go back at the office. So I guess one way to think about it is almost that kind of League of Legends or Dota type experience where you 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 is really important. So that's a big change for us. And it's something that people seem to be really connected, really connecting with and getting really excited about. So that's probably one of the biggest changes. The other thing is after Brink, we created a kind of sister company almost called Fireteam to handle all of our online services. So we wanted to make sure we had, you know, smooth, lag-free connections, great matchmaking, all that stuff was handled really well. So we kind of looked at other solutions and none of them were quite right for us, so we created Fireteam. And not only do they handle all of that, but one of the reasons that the game's in, you know, even though it's alpha now, people are having a really good fun with it, people are saying it's really polished and we've got some great feedback. One of the reasons it is in that state is because we have a tool called Echo which gathers a kind of metrics and telemetry for the games. So what we 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, to balance 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 of sort of VIPs. They've been playing since 12, 12, 12 and they've been giving us forum feedback and they've also been, of course, helping us gather these stats. So balance is incredibly important for us, you know, we want to make sure this is a really, you know, competitive game that you can play at high levels if you want to. We also want to make sure it's really fair. 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 free-to-win game. We really want to avoid, and I say we, it's next on and splash damage. We're not interested in pay-to-win, you know, we know that a lot of players, 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 polish comment you had, I, like I said, I have already played this game more than once. And for an 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 out to Nexon as well, 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 polished, or 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, 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, free-to-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 eventually, when the two met, we were like, this is a match made in heaven. I mean, we were always really impressed 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 microtransaction options. We're more concerned with making the best game we can make. And then the players will enjoy it. And if the players enjoy it, they'll want to pay, you know? 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. 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 like any of our PAX content, be sure to subscribe to Line of Tech Tips.