Dirty Bomb makers Splash Damage are constructing to an “aggressive launch cadence” since splitting from writer Nexon earlier this 12 months, the place “a scarcity of help” held the sport again from rising sooner.
Speaking to us final week, Splash Damage’s advertising director Jeremy Greiner defined that the sport’s staff has tripled in dimension because of the studio’s new owner, Leyou – a hen meat firm.
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Back in February, Splash Damage introduced it had purchased again the total rights to its free-to-play shooter Dirty Bomb. In the previous two months, we have began to see the impact of the deal: the studio has launched two new maps, a brand new mercenary, and switched out the outdated anti-cheat system to 1 that’s rather more efficient at blocking hackers.
Splash Damage’s Greiner defined to us that the buyback was pushed by two issues: Dirty Bomb’s growth had turn out to be “stale” at Nexon, and the cash from Splash Damage’s new proprietor meant it may afford to put money into the sport itself.
“There wasn’t a lot of support for the game from either side and with the Leyou acquisition impending” – and the funding capital it will deliver – “that really freed up Splash Damage to negotiate with Nexon to take back the rights for Dirty Bomb, to try and give it a second breath of life and really put resources, money, and time behind it.”
While work has been constant on Dirty Bomb since its launch in 2015, Greiner explains it wasn’t at all times seen to gamers. “Last year, the team made a big commitment to squash a lot of bugs and increase performance, so that came at the cost of new content as well, which in the public’s eye exacerbated the issue of lack of progress.”
That is now previously.
Since the buyback in February, Splash Damage’s latest spate of latest hires means Dirty Bomb now has greater than 60 folks engaged on it full-time. But the proof of the sport’s safer future is not within the numbers – it is within the content material launched in the previous couple of months.
A brand new map, Dockyard, was launched in May, after which in June, Splash Damage launched Turtle and Vault, a brand new mercenary and a brand new map, respectively. “[Before that] we hadn’t shipped a brand new merc in over a 12 months, and a brand new map in the same time period,” Greiner says. “And we have another pretty aggressive update coming around Gamescom as well.”
Separate to new maps and mercenaries, the staff is engaged on a brand new characteristic that ought to make the sport extra welcoming to new gamers (and outdated ones, too): “The team is committed to shipping casual matchmaking this summer,” Greiner says.
“The game has needed casual matchmaking for a long time. For a high-skilled shooter like Dirty Bomb, having people go onto a server browser and having level ones up against level 30s is basically throwing fresh meat to the wolves,” he continues. “That’s not a good experience for a new player. Right now, we have an internal test happening and we’re hoping to have an external one very very soon.”
There are new development techniques within the works, too, and the staff goes by means of what has already been launched to see what will be improved. With the discharge of Vault in June, Splash Damage took one other map, Dome, out of map rotation “for a full refit” based mostly on what gamers have been saying for the previous 12 months. That ought to then be re-released later this 12 months.
While Dirty Bomb has already been out for 2 years, with this new development of updates and a launch on Steam in China due later this 12 months, we might be witnessing an enormous a turning level for the sport in the end.
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