Tag Archives: Paul Wedgwood

Anyone on the edge of their seats on possible Brink DLC plans may want to move back an inch or two: developer Splash Damage is saying nowt.

More »

Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood has told VG247 that super-shooter Brink will reward selfless players in co-op games.

More »

Brink is downright fucking awesome. We know because we saw it at a pre-E3 Bethesda event outside Paris last week.

The demo was split into two, showing us one part of the story as Security and one as Resistance, with the game’s impressive scale of customisation shown off in-between.

Needless to say, “downright fucking awesome”.

After the demo was shown, we spoke to Splash Damage CEO  Paul Wedgwood. His interview took place a day after we chatted with Brink writer Ed Stern. You can get his talk here.

[Interview by Johnny Cullen]

More »

Splash Damage CEO Paul Wedgwood has admitted that RAGE is quite possibly “one of the best-looking games” he’s ever seen.

More »

Splash Damage CEO Paul Wedgwood has said if you’re worried about any bias the studio may give to a specific platform, then you should have no worries: the game won’t be “superior or inferior” on consoles or PC.

More »

Brink head Paul Wedgwood has singled out PS3′s technology as a main worry for the project, describing its workings as “alien”.

“I would say that the biggest challenge is that transition from being a pure PC studio to a multiplatform one,” he told Eurogamer in an interview.

“To me as a game director there are some things that are just alien, like PlayStation 3 technology and job systems, that I find it really difficult to get my head around.”

Developer Splash Damage was born in the FPS mod scene, meaning Wedgwood’s home is well and truly on the desktop.

“Luckily it’s not my job to understand job systems: we just hire really talented people to solve it instead,” Wedgwood added.

“We have Dean Calver who was lead programmer on Heavenly Sword as lead programmer on Brink.”

Full thing through there. Via PS3Center.

Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood has said that PC-only projects simply cannot attract enough money from publishers to create triple-A results.

“About two or three years ago we realised that we really wouldn’t survive if we only made PC games, since purely making PC games was incompatible with our goal of making triple-A games,” said the developer, demoing current project Brink yesterday at the EG Expo in Leeds.

“You just can’t get the publisher budget to ever [use] an orchestra in London, and then go and record at Abbey Road and get the best voice actors if you’re only going to release on the PC, where there isn’t the sales to justify that kind of work.”

Wedgwood added: “Because we needed to make that transition, I started playing console games,” and that he now plays “a lot more time playing console stuff” than PC games.

Wedgwood’s background is from the PC mod scene. He told the Expo audience that he originally resisted console gaming because he considered himself to be “hardcore PC guy,” but “loved it” and got “more and more into it”.

For the record, Brink looks properly, properly awesome. Hopefully we’ll be able to show it to you soon. It’s out for PC, 360 and PS3 next spring.

Brink’s single-player will be comparible in size – and quality, from what we saw of it today – to the biggest names in the action business, Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood said in his EG Expo session this afternoon.

When asked how long the game’s story would be, the developer said: “In terms of unique gameplay, we’re still kind of nailing exactly what that’s going to be, but it’s certainly going to compete with other big triple A shooters, so if you think of things like Halo, Call of Duty, Gears, that sort of thing: it’ll be along the same lines.”

Wedgwood added that the shooter will have much replay value and backstory.

“A big goal for us is to make the game really, really playable. In the same way you have a racing game, you go through the story mode but there’s still a hell of a lot more to still unlock and play and Achievements and things to do,” he said.

“We’re doing that a lot with our environment design… At the centre of the map I just played through there’s a huge ship called Hope, which is an old chemical ship, and there’s a whole backstory to that ship. And the more you play that map and the more you play through the environments you become more aware of its backstory and everything that’s going on.

“There’s a definite a reward for exploration rather than just playing through the game once.”

Brink’s out for PC, PS3 and 360 next spring.

Splash Damage head Paul Wedgwood may be an expert at PC FPS, but his experiences of sorting out console control for multi-platformer Brink left him bloodied.

“I went out and played with some of the pro clans, in games like Halo 2 and stuff, and they just kicked my ass,” he said, talking in a VG247 interview. “Absolutely annihilated me.”

He added: “I could see that that skill they had achieved on an analog controller was similar to the skill we’d achieved as mouse-and-keyboard players.”

Splash Damage had to create a proprietary control method for Brink called SMART, in order marry PC, 360 and PS3 interfaces.

“It’s the idea that it’s not on autopilot,” he said. “It’s not 1,000 entities placed telling the game what you can and can’t do.

“It’s just simply a fluid, platformer-style interface that involves real-time traces out across the environment that figure out what you could do if you’re near something.”

Hit the link for the full chat. The game’s out early next year, published by Bethesda.

Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood’s explained the thinking behind the title of his upcoming shooter Brink, saying the name is supposed to signify the “critical moment just prior to catastrophe or success”.

“You know, the reason I love the name ‘Brink’ is because – well, the literal definition of the term is ‘the edge of a precipice,’” he told us, speaking in an interview published today.

“It has good connotations in that sense. But actually, the definition that comes to mind for most people is ‘the brink of disaster.’ Because what Brink really means is that critical moment just prior to catastrophe or success.”

The Splash Damage shooter is set on the Ark, an artificial city floating at sea on the brink of a civil war.

“It’s kind of the perfect description of what it is,” added Wedgwood.

The game’s out on PC, PS3 and 360 early next year.

Interview by Nathan Grayson.

Splash Damage’s Paul Wedgwood is living the dream. The UK developer’s working on a massive shooter project for Bethesda in a new, wholly-created IP in Brink, and has been given the opportunity to cherry-pick some of the biggest names in game-making to do so (“Our lead character artist is the guy who created Shepard in Mass Effect”). He’s a lucky guy.

But you make your own luck. Paul’s becoming more visible now the game’s approaching its early 2010 launch. VG247′s Nathan Grayson caught up with the Brit in Texas recently and manage to make him say “cocks”. No lie. Get the full chat after the break.

More »

Splash Damage owner Paul Wedgwood has told VG247 that post-release DLC support is a company trait likely to impact Brink.

“Splash Damage have a reputation for always doing post-launch support, and Bethesda are exactly the same,” said the exec.

“If you look at the amount of downloadable content there is for Fallout 3, I think it’s fair to assume that it’s something that would happen.”

Wedgwood remained noncommittal on the subject, though, saying the FPS is still too early to have a definite post-launch plan.

“Right now, because we’re pre-alpha, it’s just too far off in the distance to make any kind of commitments or anything, but absolutely: it’s something we want to stick with,” he added.

Bethesda-funded sci-fi shooter Brink is currently slated for a spring 2010 release. It’ll be shown at GamesCom next week.

Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood said at Game Horizon this week that he’s got “rules of engagement” about how he runs the company. We’re assuming he was holding a riding crop when he delivered his speech.

“Our rules of engagement for the business were don’t work on movie licenses, don’t work on ports, don’t do work for hire, and find a big brother to nurture us in those early years,” he said.

“That’s how you get focus,” Wedgwood added. “We made a decision to shamelessly pursue critical acclaim for our games and we do that by focusing all our effort on making sure the stuff we do is better than the stuff we did.”

Splash Damage is currently hard at work on Bethesda’s Brink, due out early next year. More on Gama.

Splash Damage studio director Paul Wedgwood has said that the fact some developers’ bonuses are dependent on a MetaCritic average is “ridiculous” and he feels the percentage scoring system on games reviews needs to be looked at.

“Personally I think it’s ridiculous,” Wedgwood told GI when asked about an instance where a dev team was require to get 9′s rather than 8′s.

“In the film industry, four stars is an amazing score. I think it’s a really good idea for a developer to go to a publisher and demand that they get an additional bonus for achieving a certain review score, but it shouldn’t affect their royalties or anything else. If you have a high-selling game, you have a high-selling game.

“We know that some websites score quite high and some quite low, but in general, all websites tend to score between 60 and 100. There’s never a 37. It’s as if that whole section doesn’t exist, so zero starts at 60, so three stars, and goes up to five. It’s just not really an accurate enough measure.

“I think that if anything, the games press should take the pressure off themselves, and just go across to star ratings, which for films is nothing more than a recommendation that you buy it, watch it when you get the chance, or rush out and see it straight away, and it’s your personal recommendation,” suggested Wedgwood. ”

It’s not a ‘score’. If that was all you did, nobody would hate you guys for it.

“Out of ten is a good start,” he went on. “Percentiles put too much pressure on a journalist to justify an exact score. It puts too much pressure on the developer to try and identify these criteria that lead to very specific point increases or decreases, which is not at all what the developer should be focusing on.”

More through the link.

By Mike Bowden

Speaking to Edge, Splash Damage founder Paul Wedgwood has claimed the Halo 3′s online play is an antiquated beast, and that depth is lacking from console gaming in general.

“Arguably, and this is not to dismiss what people have achieved in the past, but Halo 3 multiplayer is really Quake 3 from 1999,” he said.

“Even Call of Duty 4 is just Counter-Strike on the PC from 2001.”

Wedgwood claimed that deep shooters and strategy games had never successfully been published on consoles at all.

“There’s an amazing amount of depth that could be present on consoles, but it isn’t there because real-time strategy games have never been successful on consoles, deep first-person shooters have never been on the consoles, and so on,” he added.

Wedgwood’s currently working on a yet-to-be-announced Bethesda project.

Thanks, StrategyInformer.

Speaking with GI at Develop last week, Paul Wedgwood, the man behind Splash Damage, said that the idea of the UK games industry receiving tax breaks is “a complete pile of toss.”

“I absolutely love game development in the UK,” he said.

“I just don’t like all this rubbish about us needing charitable handouts to be successful as an industry, it’s a complete pile of toss. It isn’t why we’re suffering as an industry and I don’t think it’s going to solve it.”

His comments come after a flurry of recent ELSPA and Tiga lobbying activity on the subject of tax breaks as a developer aid. Wedgwood himself believes the problem rests with the publishers themselves.

“It is difficult to recruit if you pay crap money, and the UK as a whole was paying rubbish money,” he said.

“The money is there, the publishers have it, they can afford to pay staff in the UK exactly what they pay in the US, they’ve just got away with not having to.”

Full interview through the link.

By Mike Bowden

Speaking exclusive to VG247 at Develop in Brighton yesterday, Splash Damage owner and creative boss Paul Wedgwood confirmed that the company’s Bethesda-funded game will be a multi-format affair.

“We’re about six months in and we have the basics up and running on the PS3, and 360′s pretty straightforward,” said the exec.

“We haven’t announced the platforms we’re working on at the moment, but certainly our development approach is to dip our fingers into everything and just experiment. That’s really the place that we’re in. We’re in a research and development phase. We have the engine running in all kinds of forms on all kinds of platforms and we’re just trying to work out what’s appropriate and what works and what doesn’t work.”

Wedgwood refused to be drawn into specifics, saying Bethesda would handle the press.

“Bethesda aren’t going to announce exactly what the project is until later in the year,” he said.

Wedgwood did, however, say that Splash Damage is traditionally seen as a PC, multiplayer-heavy developer, so the change to multi-format development has been a significant shift for the firm.

“The big change is that we were previously a pure multiplayer combat developer, exclusively for the PC, so the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars you see on other platforms at the moment was developed by other developers.

“We’ve now made the transition to being a cross-platform, or multi-platform developer. We are creating something entirely original and new, building a brand new universe and dipping out toes into next generation console development as well. It’s proving to be pretty good fun. Frankly, I was scared witless.”

The game is seen by both Bethesda and Wedgwood as very much a triple A project. Wedgwood told us the firm’s ramping up to a 20,000 square foot office to deal with the title.

Announcement soon, hopefully.

Speaking exclusively to VG247 at Develop in Brighton yesterday, Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood said that the firm’s upcoming, Bethesda-funded game would be seen on a par with Fallout 3 in terms of importance, and that the developer was striving to match its sugar-daddy’s RPG in terms of quality.

“I think Bethesda would be unhappy if we weren’t actively trying to kick their arse,” he said.

Fallout 3′s level of anticipation is the target, he said.

“Yeah absolutely,” Wedgwood added, when asked if the unannounced game would be seen on a par with the Bethesda action sequel. “I think that because of our mod-making routes may temper their expectations, but the fact is that Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has sold well, and it debuted at number one in both [the US and UK], and we’ve had loads of good reviews and scores. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t aim even higher the next time round.”

No date or specific detail has been given on the project as yet.

Talking to videogaming247 ahead of GDC in San Francisco today, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars developer Splash Damage has confirmed that it’s now working on a brand new IP – an action project leading on PC – and that it will be as “deep, or deeper” than last year’s id franchise-shooter.

The studio is currently negotiating a deal with an unspecified publisher on the new title.

Start of work on the game is responsible for the studio’s recently announced recruitment drive.

“We want to demonstrate that we can do something completely new,” said Splash Damage owner Paul Wedgwood, adding that ongoing attempts to make Enemy Territory: Quake Wars easier on new players had informed the entire approach to the new game, with “a third” of the company’s efforts going into making an interface to help out newbies.

“Accessibility is the key,” he said. “The new game will be as deep, or deeper, than Enemy Territory, but easier to get into.”

Wedgwood said that the PC remained the key focus for prototyping and development at Splash Damage. While Texan developer Nerve Software handling the company’s console versions for Quake Wars, the console side of the new project will be handled internally at Splash Damage.

“The PC is really strong,” he said. “But you have to develop specifically for the PC, because back-porting from consoles just doesn’t work… You miss vital elements.”

Extolling the virtues of PC gaming, Splash Damage’s business development manager Steve Gaffney added that the company saw “no downside” to Valve’s approach to PC delivery, and argued that Steam and the recent Steamworks announcement was the best thing to have happened to PC gaming.

“There are basically three formats,” Gaffney said. “PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Steam.”