GI: What advice would you give young up and coming modders who want to emulate what you’ve achieved?
Gibson: This is something that I’m amazed that other people haven’t learned yet, but it’s killing the mod scene. They gotta stop releasing stuff before it’s ready for the public to see. It’s so hard because you work on a mod for a year, year and a half. It’s very unthanking work when the public hasn’t seen it yet. It’s very hard to be motivated. It’s difficult because you want to show the world want you’re doing.
What happens – and I learned this on other mods – you release a buggy alpha, no matter how good your ideas are, no matter how original they are, no matter how fun your concept is, if your execution is poor, you’ve left a dirty taste in the mouths of every fan that will ever try your game again. So many mods are doing this.
I’ve recently started downloading a bunch of Half-Life 2 mods because I’m heavily into the scene, and I was amazed that even some of the more popular ones were terribly unpolished. As hard as it is, they need to buckle down, take another four or five months, and get the thing up to a beta before they release it to the public. Because then what’s going to happen is if they’ve got an original concept, all of their fans aren’t going to be run off by their buggy, incomplete and semifunctional gameplay.
We waited very long to release Red Orchestra. Even as complete as Red Orchestra was when we released it, two and a half years later we still hear people say on forums when we’re talking about the retail game, “Oh, I tried the first beta of Red Orchestra and it was really buggy and I never tried it again.” Even though a year and a half development happened after that, all of those bugs are squashed, the game became very polished, that still bites us in the rear. So that’s my one piece of advice to modders. Please listen to that. Please do not release a buggy, partially finished alpha because you’re only hurting yourself and you’re hurting your team by doing that.
