Robin Walker Interview
The guys get a chance to talk to Robin Walker while visiting the Valve offices.
— The PF Staff
PlanetFortress: Is TFC turning out to be the game you wanted when you first started working on Quake TF?
Robin Walker: Yeah, I think so. While we were happy with the final version of QTF, we could have kept going on with it. TFC added a bunch of features that the Quake SDK just didn't allow us to do. Basically making it friendlier to people – and I don't mean dumbing it down or anything, but giving it an easier interface for doing things. For example, you couldn't be a Quake 1 TF player without having masses of complicated configs.
TFC has done away with all of that, and now you can jump in there and do everything the guys who know the bindings are doing. They might have a better system just because it's customized to their personal style, but you don't fall behind to a huge extent. It also allows us to explain the goals of each map a lot better, so a player isn't yelling for help. Instead, he can read the simple txt in game from the map author himself, laying out all the goals.
We are always very critical about how approachable it is now, but I think it's doing well, especially when
compared to QTF. When we went back for that TF Reunion Game, I was trying to figure out how to do stuff all over again. Yelling, "I can't remember the commands!" and stuff like that... Trying to build a sentry, and then having to go through all the multiple steps we had working on all that.
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PlanetFortress: Do you feel that the classes have achieved a good balance, or is there still constant tweaking?
Robin: It's pretty good, I'm not sure that you can ever reach a perfect class balance. For now, we’re pretty happy with it. But we reserve the right to tweak something if we think it's not fair. Like the recent changes to the Pyro - that worked out well. And as we add other features the class balance is likely to be affected as well, so we may need to deal with those issues as they come along.
PlanetFortress: I heard that you’re going to set up a server data system or something to collect information on that.
Robin: Yes, we have this data gathering system in development which server operators will be able to run. At the end of a map, it tells us a chunk of data about what happened in the game. For instance a map can be broken up in to a few zones, and we can find out what shots were fired in the zone, what weapons people used, how they died, where, how often, etc.
After we get that back here, we can take a look at it and see that on a given map there might be a section that no one is ever in. This will give us much better data about how the maps are being played. And the better we understand how our current maps are being played, the better we will become at making new ones.
And the better our maps are, the better the gameplay. So it should be good all around.
PlanetFortress: Who will be able to setup and send in the data?
Robin: Right now it's just designed for TFC. We'll roll it out for 2fort first to see how it goes. If that works out, we'll expand it to other areas.
PlanetFortress: The new TFC Models, are you excited about them?
Yeah! You guys have seen them already (smiles around the room). I think that when you start toggling between the new and the old models in game, you can really see the difference. They are higher quality with a higher texture resolution and poly counts. We hope that everyone will like them as much as we do.
[Editors Note:] If you haven't checked it out already, you can read our full feature on the new TFC models (with pics of each one) and answers to the most common questions that have been asked.
PlanetFortress: What are two things you'd like to change about the TF Community?
Robin: Quadruple the size!
Doug Lombardi: Then send us 5 bucks!
Robin: Tell your friends about it!
PlanetFortress: Are you a post apocalyptic Aussie loaner?
Robin: What the heck?!
PlanetFortress: Answer the question and no dodging!
Robin: Umm, were not in a post apocalyptic world yet, and I think that if we were, and a nuclear bomb had gone off, I would go out and try to make as many friends as possible. A loner is probably not a good thing to be. What the hell kind of interview question is that? Where'd that come from?
Doug: That's what you get when you say no TF2 questions.
PlanetFortress: Take your pick. [grin]
PlanetFortress: What are you going to do about all the TFC Box art with all the new models? [Note: This was our attempt to catch them off guard for the 2nd question in a row, give up and talk about TF2. We'll get 'em next time.]
Robin: (to Doug) They want to know if we'll roll out new boxes for TFC. I'm sure that we'll use any new models for any new promotional things that come out.
PlanetFortress: Any chance for the QTF Sniper's flare to make a return?
Robin: Probably not, TFC is just brighter overall. TF was very dark in some areas, so this flare came in quite handy. With TFC we don't have so many dark areas, and dynamic lights would really hit up the frame rates.
PlanetFortress: Yeah, and then there was the QTF bug when too many were thrown, it would crash.
Robin: Yeah, we wouldn't have that sort of problem, just that it would be too much of an unneeded strain, without giving the gameplay all that much. I can't think of any maps we've shipped for TFC that would benefit from the flare all that much good, and we've made it a point to be that way.
PlanetFortress: What's the best part of your day?
DieHard: (reminiscing of his Soul Caliber defeat) Well, we found that out.
Doug: When he reads the email that says I won't be in today.
Robin: Probably the play tests right now, that's for sure. We do play tests all the time, and sometimes it’s more fun than others. But, when something new is coming down the pipe, like right now, it’s easily the most fun part of my day.
PlanetFortress: Do you feel like you’re at work here still?
Robin: Oh, we’re definitely at work. A lot less play goes one here than when we were doing this from home in Australia. It is a job and I have to do lots of stuff that I don't like to do, like interviews and stuff :)
PlanetFortress: That's all I really have without asking TF2 questions [grin]
Robin: You beat me down with that Aussie Loner one :)
PlanetFortress: You were talking earlier about how your still supporting the community, by keeping more and more updates. As you guys get closer to TF2, do you see yourselves scaling that back at all?
Robin: No, definitely not. Actually our reaction to us spending more and more time on TF2 has been hiring new people to keep TFC evolving. For example, we hired Eric Smith who was Valedictorian at DigiPen, the local games coding college here in Washington. We don't see any time that we'll stop producing stuff for TFC, CS, or Half-Life.
PlanetFortress: Would it ever be a possibility to port TFC, CS over to TF2?
Robin: Yeah, it's a possibility.
[Editor's Note:] Just from the reaction, it seemed like even though it may have been mentioned before, it hasn't been thought about a whole lot.
PlanetFortress: Regarding the cheats that have come and gone and caused a lot of problems, the most recent being the speed cheat. I know that you can modify the code and eventually they'll change it, and keep giving you new challenges, is it going to get to the point where you guys are going to have to run something almost like a virus check to see if they are running anything in the background, to check for proxies and the like?
Robin: We’re getting smarter about our cheat prevention stuff. We’re learning all the time. Every one we fix just makes us smarter. So far, everything that we've really concentrated on, we've been able nail down. So, we’re pretty optimistic. There have been a few that have been there for a while that are kind of tricky, but we have good ideas on how to stop them. I think one thing that sets us apart from most of the other online games is that we consider these important as an error that's causing everyone out there to crash on startup. Cheats are probably the number one way to destroy the community. We really, really want to remove them and so we do everything we can to stop them.
They are always going to come out, though, and we'll keep fixing them. Eventually they'll get tired. After all, we’re getting paid to solve these problems, but they're not getting paid to make them.
PlanetFortress: So are there contracts out there for bug fixes and cheat fixers, or is it all done in house?
Robin: We talk a lot to our outside people, but we maintain our own source code. We talked to a couple of high profile cheater guys who released some stuff, and we said ‘hey would you like to work out some of our problems instead of working on cheats? Try and find things before anyone else finds them?’ They liked that way much better so now they help us out.
PlanetFortress: Do you guys plan on working with any more specific mods to do what you did with Counter-Strike and send off a product similar to Counter-Strike so you could maybe buy Front Line Force at a shop?
Robin: Sure, we’re always looking for any interesting mods out there. We always tell them that if they have any questions, they should never hesitate to ask. If you ask around, you'll find that we swap email and code with many, many mods out there. A lot of them are surprised when they say, "Hey, how come you've never helped out our mod?" and we say, "Well, did you ever ask for help? :)"
If a developer needs a hand with a certain part, we'll help them out. But we don't write the mod for them, we just want to keep them moving forward.
Any mod that shows up could be boxed up, sure, we'll look into doing that. But sometimes it’s other things that work out to be more helpful in getting them that extra mile. We gave Front Line Force a TFC map that we were working on that we thought would go well with their mod. Doug has helped with the PR for some of them. And we do that with any mod out there that we think is pretty good.
PlanetFortress: Do you think by packaging a mod, that it made people more aware of it? Traditionally, mods are a hardcore thing.
Robin: Yeah, definitely. We grew something like 3 times the size of all the other guys put together over Christmas.
Doug: And the day Counter-Strike and Gunman were available in a box we saw write ups in the New York Times, Red Herring, USA Today and all sorts of places unlike before.
Robin: That was probably the initial battle when we started doing the first Mod Expo; trying to get the press to realize that mods are important. The first day we actually got a review of TFC, we were really excited that print magazines were starting to consider mods for full reviews. Now you see lots and lots of mods getting reviewed along with the retail products. It’s pretty recent that people started to treat mods like professional products.
Doug: Plus a lot of mods are not only in contention for things like place's "Game of the Year" but we’re starting to see them win.
Robin: Yeah, I think people are starting to realize that some of these mods are better than some of the games out there that professionals are making.
Thanks to Robin (and Doug who tossed in his thoughts as well) for the interview. -- Be sure to check
out the rest of the content that we have written up as a result of PlanetFortress' Trip to Valve Software.
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