Deus Ex: Breach: Experimenting Within the Boundaries of a AAA Franchise

[Music] hi everybody thanks for being here my name is Blaire Watson I'm the producer of the Deus Ex Life team at a DOS Montreux and today I'll be talking to you about the process we went through to create bridge which was originally a game mode for deus ex mankind divided and has since become a standalone free-to-play game so I'm gonna start with a quick question how many of you here have played at least one death sex game alright mine can divided right and how many of you here I've given a try to breach yeah les hands alright so for those of you who haven't I'll start by quickly explaining what bridge is so bridge is a game mode for Deus Ex mankind divided in

bridge you're not Adam Jensen the main protagonist of mankind divided you are a hacker who uses VR device to infiltrate the server's of mega-corporations your goal is to steal their secrets and to do so you need to find and download the data that's even inside the levels the server's of those mega-corporations ro states in a super secure facility that we call the palisade blade and the AI which runs this facility is doing everything it can to stop you bridge is an asynchronous online experience it's an arcade twist on the DES X gameplay pillars with a little boat based competitive aspect and some light free-to-play mechanics so our launch trailer was actually more than five minutes long so I'm gonna spare you that but to give you a better idea if you've never played it I will show you our latest trailer which was actually out

two weeks ago and sums up the major updates we've been making to the game since its launch for westgate Winston

[Music] [Music] to tell you about how we created breach I need to start by telling you about the life team and our initial mandate the DES ex-life team was created I this

module at the beginning of 2014 with the mandate of taking care of all the additional content for mankind divided in order to let the core team focus a hundred percent of their energy on crafting the main game that means that any bonus mission any additional content item packed narrative DLCs the post-launch contents and post-lunch operations were to be handled by the live team the mandate of the team was also to expand the data section universe and experiment outside of the traditional single-player story driven experience and as part of that of that mandate we were supposed to deliver challenge maps which would be an additional bonus content available day one for every player the pillars of those challenge maps were first that they had to teach the gameplay mechanics of mankind invited to the players and allowed them to practice and master

those mechanics outside of the story driven campaign then we're supposed to bring added replay value to the game while always delivering a true Deus Ex experience the constraints we had to work with were that we didn't have a lot of resources we were a very small team and we had a lot to do because again the challenge maps were only a portion of the the additional content we were making for mankind divided we also didn't have a lot of time we actually started conception one year before the initially initially planned ship date of the game and we also didn't have a lot of money our budget was pretty tight so we couldn't compensate neither the size of the team or tight schedule with for instance outsourcing some part of the work the

base idea for those challenge maps was to reuse existing environments from the VR tutorial mode of the main game and implement new objectives for these maps so for instance there was a shooting range in that viewer tutorial and we could have implemented challenges like shoot all the targets under 30 seconds destroy as many targets as possible using only augmentations do as many headshots as possible cetera so as I note here if you have played mankind divided and are wondering where the hell were those VR tutorials well they didn't make it to the final game so how did we go from these VR challenges to a full-on competitive mode with more than a hundred levels well what gave birth to the bridge concept is probably a combination of five factors so first of all the team wasn't particularly excited by the idea

both on the actual implementation side of it but most of all we didn't think it was gonna be really fun for players then there was also inside the studio a recurring topic of wanting to make a hacking focused game it had been around since the development of human Revolution and several concepts were pitched over the years but non made it past initial concept stage and since part of the Mandate of the life team was to explore and expand the Deus Ex universe we wanted to use the incredibly rich lore at our disposal and for and put more narrative meat around the bone we very much liked the fantasy of being a super skilled hacker and the idea of putting at the forefront those corrupt mega corporations that are always in the background of deus ex games another factor which played a major role in the

birth of breach with all our level designers were new to Deus Ex so they were ramping up on the engine and on the level design rules of the franchise by playing around in what we call gyms where they were building gameplay scenarios using only gray blocks and messing around with them and not paying any attention to the physical constraints or the invent environmental credibility we realized that the very simple and modular environment of the VR tutorials would allow them to keep that freedom even when they were going to build real levels for the game which is not the case when you create a classical tell sex narrative mission where the credibility of the space and the sari or the credibility of the space puts a plays a major role puts a lot of constraints on the level design but we

still wanted the visual to be carrying some of the narrative everything in the art direction of deus ex human revolution and mankind divided is their own purpose everything carries a very heavy symbolic and we wanted that to be true of bridge to the added bonus was that actually in the first month of the existence of the team nobody was really looking at us all the energy and attention was focused on the main game and we were supposed to be progressively ramping up on the franchise and we were free to experiment on our own without anyone anyone telling us that this was absolutely not what was expected of us I had to that my own background I come from mobile and indie small budget games Deus Ex was my very first triple-a experience and I was used to making a

lot with very little resources so my naivete at the time probably played a big role in allowing the team and even encouraging them to push the creative boundaries and to go for something that really excited them even if it was way more than what we were supposed to deliver so when we came up with the idea for bridge after a brainstorming session we had a little bit more than a month before the first greenlight meeting for the life team where we were supposed to present a whole creative and production plan for all the contents tied to the two datasets mankind divided by these dates we would need to have enough to convince the higher-ups meaning the square-enix management but first of all the Deus Ex executive of the franchise and the studio head that bridge was a better concept than the initially initially

planned challenge maps even though it meant a lot more work and most probably a bigger team than the one originally planned so we did two things first we crafted 50 plus slide presentation of the concept detailing our vision for all the gameplay mechanics the scoring rib and reward systems the level design philosophy the core loop the online features the character building the player fantasy the backstory the ties to the main game the business model the economic loop all of it the presentation detailed the main production milestones for all this and already laid out which features would be present at launch and which ones would be part of the post launch plan it also presented how we envisioned the post launch lifecycle with promotion events content patches and balancing updates the second thing we did was prototyping

the core experience of bridge and especially the gameplay parts that were unique to it compared to the main game so extracting data escaping the map applying modifiers computing the player score etc enough to be able to back up the PowerPoint presentation some concrete hands-on gameplay and prove the base concept was solid and fun even if the deadline was way too tight for us to have a full first playable so here's what the game looked like at that time and I must warn you it might hurt your eyes a little bit this is very old

and you know what it worked yeah I'm not sure that deserves that much but it worked we were allowed to go on with the development of our first playable which we actually delivered a few weeks later after only three months at passed since that very first brainstorm on the concept and I got the green light to add some very much needed key resources to the team which leads me to a short parentless about the team before going back to the development of bridge itself so since the initial mandate of the live

team was essentially to create new content and we weren't supposed to be actually adding features or very few of them to the game the vast majority of the initial roster was composed of artists level designers and narrative designers the theory was that all we had to do would be to take the existing systems features and tools developed by the core team and use them to create new content we would be in charge of creating our own assets and storylines of course but that was making it but bringing bridge into the mix created a big recruitment challenge it meant that we actually needed more game signers Audio designers UI designers as well as a bunch of programmers and not only for gameplay but for all the online side and the massive amount of UI were about to have add still we couldn't go crazy and inflate the team too much because well

it wouldn't make sense budget was and one of the biggest challenge in building the bridge team was to find generalists so we basically had to build a team of Swiss Army knives and in the triple-a industry where people are pushed to be hyper specialized where they invest years into developing very specific expertise this happens to be a very tough thing if you add to that that at that time in the studio we were that weird new team labeled as the DLC team the B team and that everybody just wanted to get on the big triple a core team finding the right people proved to be very difficult but you know what actually I firmly believe that this all played a major role on making the team a success with everybody having a lot of ownership on the content and not only on

breach but also all the DLCs and the other stuff we made from I kind of I did the people who joined us chose to do it and since there was not many of us everybody had a big role to play and I had the opportunity to be a real part of the creative process and since we were a small team well we could all fit in a single room together to show our work to each other to play our game together and exchange feedback and ideas in a very fluid manner and this is very quickly created a solid bond and a sense of belonging and I truly believe that we made a better game for it the small size of the team also allowed us a lot to have a lot of interaction between the designers and programmers and that was a blessing because given the very tight schedule we were on we basically did the conception pre-production and the production at the same time so some features were actually still being

designed at the same time as they were implemented by the Prague's and with a bigger team it could have been way more problematic don't get me wrong I'm not saying it's ideal and that there wasn't any problem and though this is not the ideal way to do it but for us in a sense it can work so back to our main subject of course there are things that set immediately breach apart from the core single experience first we throw the player in a lately different visual environment then we introduce them to the concept of data extraction which is unique to bridge and of course in breach you're not Adam Jensen but a Ripper a hacker from 2029 finally the presence of leaderboards introduces a competitive element which doesn't exist at all in the single player but still at its core bridge

respects the fundamental pillars of deus ex apart from a very few very optional exceptions all the maps can be played using whatever play style the player prefers from full-on goose ghosting to blasting your way through the level and everything in between or even playing without ever using a single augmentation breach allows players to approach the challenges any way they like and of course there are always plenty of different paths to get to your objective but very early during the development process we made the conscious choice to throw the players out of their comfort zone to offer them the opportunity to try something new to discover that maybe they might actually enjoy things that they had that never tried in the main campaign and we used several different devices to gently but firmly push them in that direction for starters each of the corporations

that you infiltrate in breach as its own gameplay personality so for instance the turbos corporation is your classic deus ex tight layout filled with mixed defenses of human oh its cameras and lasers and of course a lot of air vents Steiner Beasley on the other hand confronts the player to wide open areas swarming with guards and turrets while the versalife levels are all about verticality platforming puzzles and haze hazards of course you could apply the same exact gameplay style to all of these maps and still be able to beat them but if you are embracing the competitive aspect of preach then you will have to be versatile and adapt the way play we also created and implemented the concept of what we call AI evolutions every action that the player performs is recorded and

taken into account to move one of the three AI meters damage defense and delay for instance offensive actions against the defenses of the map will increase the damage meter and the game will react to it by making the enemies have better weapons there more damages or gain some resistance to some type of damages once this has happened enough times the player has two choices using pretty rare items that we call nuke viruses to downgrade Dai evolution because it's now pretty hardcore or simply opted for a less aggressive play style staying out of combat of course true to the Deus Ex philosophy the same principle applies to actions or oriented toward stealth or hacking the way we handle the equipment available for the player also plays a

big role in to bringing them out of their comfort zone everybody starts breach with the same basic loadout but one of the main differences with the single player is that there is no loot inside the levels enemies vanish once they have been elevated eliminated so there is no corpse to look for neutral instead all the equipment needed by the player the weapons the ammunitions the healing items Sarah or I found in randomized booster packs the players are either awarded or that they can purchase with the credit credits that they gain from extracting the data the randomness factor is very important because it means that there is a very good chance you won't get your favorite weapon before a while and even if you get it the rarity system which is another feature unique to breach might cause you to get very powerful say sniper rifle well when your favorite

weapon that you've used in the single-player campaign is a shotgun but if you get a very rare class a sniper rifle super-powerful it might make you think twice before you just stick on using your old classy super weak shotgun but different enemies have different weaknesses or resistances and there again players also have to adapt and get out of their comfort zone to try out new weapons and strategies the leaderboards are also a way for us to give an incentive to players to try new things each of the breach level has two leaderboards score and time obviously someone cheated they're aiming for the top of the time leaderboard means trying to complete your main objective and escape the map in the minimum amount of time possible which means ignoring site objectives not

losing any time getting into fights with the AIS not exploring for any hidden data and finding the best augmentation combination possible to exploit every shortcut in the map thus being on top of the time leaderboard has a very good chance to mean that your score will totally suck well on the other end if you take your time in the map if you chain XP heavy actions if you hack everything if you take down or kill everyone if you destroy every robotic defense and find every single bit of data your score has a very good chance to be on the higher hand putting you in a better position on the on the score leaderboard but make you fail down on the time leaderboard for the anecdote the time leader what was really wasn't really part of the initial concept but when we started playing the game on the

floor we realized that the speedrunning aspect it was bringing to the table sex gameplay it was probably one of the most exciting and unique features of bridge it is also so one the one that has generated the most emergent gameplay both in user testing and on the floor and there is nothing more satisfying than the look on the level level designers face when they see your name on the leaderboard of a map that they've designed next to a time lower than they thought was possible to achieve we actually made one exception to the golden rule of freedom of play style and some of the maps in breach require that the players reach their data objective without being detected forcing them to play stealth these maps are always on a promo path in the overall progression but completionists will have to defeat them if they want to be 100% of the levels and I admit this

was completely arbitrary decision because we are kind of biased toward stealth for some reason we thought it would also be really cool to have some heavy platforming navigation in some of the levels mainly in the versalife maps but since all the three C's were inherited from the main game which has next to no platforming mechanics solving all the ledge grab and jumping related bugs with kind of super low priority for the core team which is totally understandable so for a very long time while our user tests suffered very badly from the frustration this was causing to players who pretty much looked like this yep that's it but the right side of this is that it

actually pushed us to develop one of the coolest bridge Pacific augmentations which is the multi jump and it ended up solving a lot of our lettre issues another area where we try to bite off more than we could chew was the AI and especially its behavior related to data towers originally the design was that downloading data would attract da-ice attention and that the player would have to stay near the tower while the data was downloaded which meant that they would have to either fight the incoming ai's or find a way to stay near but undetected if they were going for stealth unfortunately that meant some heavy work on the AI side and since the team didn't have a dedicated AI programmer we never managed to get a satisfying result and not for lack of trying so after long debates and with a lot of

regrets we dropped this part of the design but the funny thing is that we discovered it actually made the game way better it made it way more dynamic and fast paced which was a really good thing and it played really well into our already established bias towards speedrunning another fundamental pillar of a dead sex game is the choice and consequences and without the whole social aspect of the single-player we had to transcribe this into gameplay features so for instance we created modifiers that we call patches patches are applied to a map and modified rules making the map harder in exchange for score bonus some patches have a direct effect on the player or the AI like for instance draining the players life every second or giving a region to the enemies while other patches are additional and can be failed like for

instance if the player sustains any damage during the level or uses any weapon other than a pistol failing those patches won't make the player fail the level but they won't get the score bonus tied to it and since the patches are consumed on use players might want to be careful on when to use them and of course the meaner the patch used by the player the bigger the bonuses and if you're feeling extra confident about your skill on a particular level where you can even stack patches for a bigger bonus we also made a major modification to the augmentation tree system by adding a memory space cost to each egg this means that even if the player has gained enough practice kits to unlock all of the available limitations the limited memory space available prevents them from equipping all the eggs at the same time and since once a level has

started the ark tree is locked players must make a conscious choice before entering a level on which Oggs didn't want to take with them of course this choice should be different depending on the actual map they're trying to beat and if they are going for score or for time and of course based on their play style the inventory system a big classic of those eggs was also revisited with the choice and consequences in mind in bridge the players actually have two inventories the reserve which is basically a stash with infinite space where all the items found in booster packs go and the loadout which contains everything the player as hack access to while breaching a level the loadout reuses the main games inventory system but with heavily limited available space so that here

again players are faced with a strategic choice about what to bring with them inside the levels depending on their play style or the of Defense's they can expect to facing there we also created items which give you bonuses as long as they are present in your loadout this means that you have to trade space in exchange for that bonus and that space would be otherwise used for weapons or a munitions or healing items and of course the bigger the bonus the more space you have to sacrifice for it now let's talk visual so at first glance the art direction of breach can feel completely disconnected from the visual style of both human Revolution and my kind of iDEN but it's actually far from being the case so first came the fuchsia so for those of you who haven't played with human Revolution or mankind divided who have

played them sorry I don't know if you've noticed but there is no fuchsia or a pink or purple in the game it is the forbidden color of the deus ex art bible with one exception it is worn by eliza kiss on one of the major characters of the game who it turns out isn't real sorry for any spoiler eliza is an AI so it made immediate sense to us to make it the base color of bridge the color of data when we submitted this idea to Johnathon Schaech belle pet the executive director of the franchise he immediately embraced it and gave us his benediction to use the forbidden color so once we had the fuchsia came the corporation's so for various reasons among which giving as much freedom

possible to the level designers and working with modules to get production costs under control we wanted to keep the art style very simple but we needed it to convey the narrative especially the real-world backstory of the various corporations that you infiltrate in the VR world so while the base building blocks are the same in every level with a white outer shell flat inner blocks and fuchsia magma we played with the shapes and the lighting to give each server a very different mood and we created specific landmarks which both help conveyed a narrative and serve as orientation device for the player so for instance in the Disick's universe the steiner Beasley corporation is a German corporation which manufactures weapons so in the VR world

of bridge their servers are foundry like rooms with pixelated magma and orange fog in the air and in the ceiling of the town pipe map a giant grinder grinder rotates in an infinite loop breaking down the data magma into data shards then of course once we had the corporation we had to populate the world and we started with the Reapers in Avatar and among our production constraints we had to work with Adam Jensen we had to reuse him as much as we could in terms of gameplay of course but also in terms of animation overall build down to his geometry and especially his arms because we didn't have any rigor any scalar or any animator on the team so the challenge was to turn that constraint into a design element which

ended up with that dual material look the solid black arms which are the original models and the more abstract looking gold triangles which were both a way to have it stand out against the mostly black and white environments and a nod to human revolutions collector's edition key art and once the logic of the VR world had been laid out this the enemy's was only a matter of figuring out how that world would generate them so as for almost everything else we inherited most of the enemies from mankind divided his casts so drones the sentry boats to turrets etc but the Yuma knowit's that we call the Sentinels they stood out as they were the only human like in bridge among the mostly mechanical other enemy types and in the

context of being inside the machine it kind of felt out of place and that's a key notion in the DES ex franchise that everything has to feel logical that everything has to be credible and to belong with the rest so we came up with the idea that while the rest of the defense went defenses were logical defense systems in the context of breach which n is a machine using machine like units to defend itself the Sentinels were a response to the presence of the Ripper it's the AI from the palisade that is trying to come up with something to match the new threat that the Reapers are so we try to have a humanoid that felt like an approximation and average and we got inspired by the point clouds that you can see in a connects infrared field in motion you can tell it's human but in a static frame it's only abstract

data which felt like how the AI would perceive the reapers once we had that down all we had to do is making sure that the Sentinels building blocks came from the same rule set that defined all of the other elements of the world so the black cubes and the Y triangular played a plating and voila so in the first iteration of the bridge concept the narrative layer was extremely thin there was the backstory of the bridge the references to those X corporations and the symbolism of the style and we had planned to plan to hide pieces of informations inside the data downloaded in the level players would stumble across the species more or less randomly and get insights on characters and factions from the main game but we realized fairly quickly that we couldn't

be making a des X game even a game mode without a stronger narrative layer because this X is a story heavy franchise and and the breach was already weird enough in itself without taking the risk to alienate our core story driven players from the beginning but we also didn't have the resources or the budget to tell stories in the traditional way to make cutscenes to record voiceovers to handle branching conversations then we discovered that the core team had developed a text messenger system for the main game and since having text-based interaction with people totally made sense in the context of reach which takes place inside a computer we decided to use it as a foundation for our storytelling so this is how we came up with the darknet files which are self-contained conspiracies

that you get to investigate by infiltrating specific servers in search of data shards along the way contacts help you decrypt or make sense of the data ask you for help or send you to attack designated servers to disrupt the real world security systems of a corporation while they physically infiltrated each conversation with context as branching choices and the system carries over your relationships their status with your contacts from one case to another so for instance if you've been a dick with a contact in the versalife case when you will need these contacts help in the Steiner visited case well they will have to ask you for a higher price in exchange for their services at the end of each darknet file when the player has solved the case a pikas news broadcast is shown to them making the link between what they did in the world and the impact it had on the real world project integrity

representative assures us that every home Jaipur is in fact being built and that their city of the future is well on track to accommodate the more than 100,000 augmentive people protected to live there in the information to the contrary the claim is the product of doctors called the rippers in an effort to discredit the corporation I do not know about you folks but I prefer to trust the people in suits over these mysterious Reapers will not even reveal their names or just how they came across

their information this is a lousy person reporting to you live from Vikas the darknet files are a perfect example of a feature built on top of something developed for the main game that we repurposed for our own needs and to which we added a few breach on a specifics all the writing was done inside the team but in close collaboration with mijita Morrow the executive narrative director of the TEDx franchise who is also the keeper of the Lord the darknet files turned out to be one of the most appreciated features of breach in user testing and one of the hooks that allowed us to get the story driven players to give a chance to the mode while they would probably have ignored it otherwise the newscast at the end are also a very simple and efficient way to tie in the world of breach and the

rippers to the world of mankind divided and of Adam Jensen we actually managed to do quite a few of these science integrating references to the bridge in the single-player experiments this ad for instance seen in mankind divided shows the palisade blade which is the physical facility that that's hosting the server is that the Ripper is infiltrate in bridge in the single-player campaign also Jensen has to go inside the VR world to steal some information and the environment that is used is actually a modified map from bridge but our biggest time was logically one of the live teams productions system rift our first narrative dlc from mankind divided explains how the bridge came to be and of course it's all Johnston's fault and it introduces players to shadow child fan a famous hacker who turns out to be the one who's guiding you inside bridge

now let's talk about the more sensitive stuff shall we so it's not uncommon today to have micro transactions in the multiplayer live modes of games on all platforms and in premium games as it is a completely different experience that you add on top of the game it doesn't impact the main experience and being your life team exploring alternative revenue revenue models was part of our initial mandate but we were all very aware of the fact that players would already have spent $60 or if you're based in Canada like us 82 by mankind divided and that it would be extremely unfair to put up any kind of payroll it was also very clear to us that any real money spent had to be completely

optional and shouldn't be turning the game in to pay to win we also had one big disadvantage Deus Ex is mainly a first-person game even if the cover system and the takedown switch the camera to third-person and breach is not a pvp real-time multiplayer so the interests of vanity items which are the most accepted form of microtransactions was vastly limited in the end our monetize features can be broken down into three categories first we have accelerators or using money to obtain faster or something you could have otherwise obtained by simply playing the game a little longer then we have the cool weird stuff like our premium weapons which are not more powerful than other s or a great weapons that are you can obtain in regular booster packs that you can purchase with the in-game currency

they just have a unique skin and unique gameplay features and believe me some are really weirder than powerful like our no scoped rifle which is a very powerful sniper rifle except its scope is obstructed so you can't use it and you can only do hipfire with the sniper rifle finally vanity items like our unique skins for the Reaper avatar we still went for them even considering the previously mentioned factories of the first-person game but we did bet on getting some interest in them from streamers so when I say that we were careful with the monetization I'm really not joking we had pretty heated debates about what was crossing the line or not

and when in doubt we always defaulted to not going with something that could be perceived even a tiny bit borderline in the end we probably wasted a lot of energy on this for nothing no matter how careful how respectful we try to be in our economic design what we really didn't force see was that our player base was absolutely not ready for this and while the critical reception for breach from the press was really good and we didn't hide the monetization from them the simple presence of real money transactions in the game created an unforeseen outrage among our players and it completely overshadowed everything else things would probably have been different if breach had been released right away as a standalone Deus Ex

universe free-to-play game but as a game mode offered as a bonus alongside a full priced game the monetization was a deal-breaker for a big majority of the players of Montana fighting and this for me is where the experiment the experimentation found its limits I am extremely proud of the work the team has done with bridge and I truly believe that we have proved we could take the core DNA of the franchise and make something extremely innovative and different without betraying it the only issue is that the business model was not ready to be experimented with so to wrap up here are a few takeaways from the breach experimentation I would like to

share with you first I firmly believe it is absolutely possible to innovate an experiment within an already established franchise without betraying it if you know exactly what your core pillars are especially in the mind of your players and you are able to think of new ways to express those pillars then you don't have to reinvent the wheel and rethink all your core mechanics by using them as building blocks that you twist a little bit and present in the different way to your players you can create a whole new experience but the way you deliver and communicate about that new experience matters and no where are the limits of your fan base and what they are ready to accept or not again I think if bridge had been a standalone free-to-play game from the beginning the wrapped reception from our players would

have been very different so this concludes my presentation today before taking questions if you have any I would like to give a big shout out to my team part of which you can see in this very cheesy hard shaped picture I would like to thank them for these three pretty awesome years that we spent together making a pretty awesome game thank you if you have any questions I think there are mics there just go and ask away hi how did you manage the switch from being a game-mode on a plumbing game to the free-to-play what has many big

challenges like with the team or a system absolutely not because the free-to-play standalone version of bridge is actually a collection of everything we had made so far for the game and we release it on Steam only so it was really easy to do and we didn't touch at all the economic model or anything we just wanted to give the opportunity to players who didn't buy my kind of idea to play bridge so with the community reception of Breed the micro transactions not being very positive how did you see that carry over to some of the behaviors within it like you see certain noticeable groups of players still engage with the micro transactions but that you know could be grouped separately so we have the most active

like we still have a community of players who became very active and human like recorded tons of videos and how to's and post on the forums all the time a tiny community MSA and they don't engage a lot in with the micro transactions but it's not a surprise because again we were so careful in the economic design I mean you really want you need to want to give us your money to do it I mean there's really no other thing thanks so I counted about 30 people are inside of the live ops team yeah I just wanted to ask exactly how many of those were level designers and gameplay programmers and sort of the guys that are making the musical content so I'm not gonna get into very specific numbers because I don't think I have the right to but so what you have to understand is that that picture is both the breach

team and the team that was making the dlcs some of those those people were both were working on on both like our programmers for instance but the level designers and the artists were separated into people working on bridge and people working on DLCs and so on breach we had two main level designers who made kind of a majority of the levels with a bit more people chiming and as far as gameplay programmers well the programming team for the whole life team was about eight programmers okay thank you I just have one more question as well based around so I realized you've released the game now as a standalone yeah originally it was kind of a menu option of inside of the main game yes no wonder whether you had many metrics on

people getting kind of lost about that so I know some people were confused about what breach was but the fact that it was kind of in that first section of the first splash screen so the thing is I don't have metrics about if the people were lost about it I know that about 30% of the players of mankind divided have played bridge that's the one thing I know the the menu to when you're inside mine kind of is men menu it says enter the bridge I think the the submenu I think if you go in there and you just watch the cinematic then you kind of understand what it's about I don't know maybe not in user testing nobody ever told us that they were lost about it this is just okay thanks very informative tool thank you hello I have

a question about the avatar vanity items you said you had some doubts while introducing them but I saw in the latest update you also introduced some new ones so I would like to ask people from perspective how successful you say you would say they are are they where they are well they are part of the things that sell the most because they cool I think in the dukkha looking and people like collecting stuff but still again the overall performance of the monetization of breach is really low so it's not super significant to say that something is more successful than another with tiny numbers like that okay thank you welcome do we have another yes so you said that there's a DLC team and a breach team so is DLC paid yes hey DLC so is there a possibility that you take all the

bundles and just make it a paid DLC on top of breach so that breach remains free and that everything that you want to add is just one or two or three payments as DLC and then you don't have micro transactions and then you just avoid the whole problem and you can totally monetize it as as just three options that's probably something we should have considered honestly with now seeing it I would say that we'd have been very probably better for our players and better perceived we didn't do it like that and it's probably too late to change anything about this one of the things you guys couldn't have caught in process if you need to get out of jail free card as that ESPN wrote a scathing destruction destruction piece about micro transaction economies on

steam that disseminated infinitely broadly and raised to the anger level about micro transactions to so much that steam had a valve had to respond and yeah yeah there was there were timing issues we had very angry youtubers come at us with a very loud voice saying not so true stuff it's and and we did a lot of concept testing and user research and we really asked the questions to to fans of their sex about the monetization stuff because we wanted to be careful about it and again it wasn't forcing well the reaction at release was nothing like we had anticipated we thought there would be a bit of backlash but not that amount well thank you everybody and don't

forget to fill out your surveys i've been has been asked to remind that of you fill out your surveys