Feature: 'Into The Transmission: Randy Pitchford On Gearbox’s ...Gamasutra, CA - Apr 25, 2006... feature, Gearbox President and Director Randy Pitchford kindly sits down with Gamasutra to relay the history of the Texas-based company (Brothers In Arms, Halo ...

Gearbox prez, Randy Pitchford, was intereveiwed recently by gamercc.com. A few highlights:

"[Earned in Blood] is actually both bigger and better than we originally had planned."

"I've seen the Call of Duty 2 stuff and look forward to playing it, but what we're doing is a far step ahead of that."

Q: "When will Gearbox do something else besides war themed games?"
A: "Yes! We're working on some new things, but are not ready to announce them at this time."

Our Brothers in Arms news channels turns up a transcript of a chat conversation in which Randy Pitchford discusses Earned in Blood and Road to Hill 30. Not much new information there, but the conversation can be read over at Evil Avatar. Give it a read!

Randy Pitchford hopped on the forums to clear a few things up about the Brothers in Arms patch that popped up on a few download sites last night.

[quote=Randy Pitchford]Someone got their wires crossed somewhere when we were testing the auto-update system with Ubisoft and the patch was placed on a public access server. This normally would've been fine as the location and nature of the update was not communicated publicly. But, some other person (who must be an incredibly hardcore fan) must have been pinging random URL's on the Ubi server until they found this update.

It's been taken down now and the news sites we have noticed that have referenced the update have been notified.

Note that there is very likely going to be an update that appears near the retail launch of the PC game. The update will make a few things nicer for people who play on-line. The version number of the update will be something larger than 1.01. We'll release details for that update very soon.

Thanks![/quote]

Brothers in Arms and Gearbox are making the news in the Canadian Press. The CP is publishing an overview of BiA with COL Antal leading the charge.

"We wrapped up PC production last week" said Reichert, a Gearbox employee on the GBX forums. He's already playing the game from home. Maybe we'll get our hands on the PC version in the next few weeks.

Reichert is also answering other PC questions.

About PC downloadable content:

[quote=Reichert]I can't comment on future additions, but we have an auto-update system that could accomodate such things more readily than the XBox version. [/quote]

About PC vs XBOX:

[quote=Reichert]- Increased texture resolution across the board
- Anisotropic filtering options, up to 16x (or whatever your card supports)
- An option for true reflections in water
- Configurable draw distance for grass
- Projected character shadows

All of these are optional, and will have to be adjusted to suit your hardware. [/quote]

Also,

[quote=]The MP game is consistent with the XBox version, with the addition of team chat. You can also chat it up in the lobby with everyone before a match. [/quote]

About a PC dedicated server:

[quote=Reichert]The nature of the multiplayer does not demand a dedicated server.[/quote]

Shacknews has interviewed Hellface (a.k.a. Matt Armstrong - the man behind BiA's multiplayer). Give it a read.

[quote=Matt Armstrong]Assaulting is cool, teamwork wins, and if you ask the question "Where am I getting shot from?" It means you just got your ass flanked.[/quote]

Just found some background info on the VE3D forums on why UBI is releasing the game when they are. There's not much meat to the comments, but it will do for now.

[quote=Randy Pitchford]Just to clear something up...

BiA was developed as a multi-platform game. The PC version is not a port of the Xbox version and vice-versa.

In Europe, for example, all platforms will be released at the same time.

In North America, Ubi wanted to release the Xbox version earlier for some market related reason which I think will lead to more customers and more money for Ubisoft and Gearbox to use to make our next games even more awesome.

The PC version will appear in North America within a week or two of the Xbox version - the same time all versions are launched in Europe.[/quote]

What about the PS2 job, Randy?

The new Gearbox Software website hosts a short interview with Randy Pitchford. Not much new info for the hardcore fan, but Pitchford does discuss some of the roots of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30.

Randy Pitchford gaves us a status update on the BiA demo on the GBX forums. Here's a summary:

[quote=Randy Pitchford]Every resource spent on a demo means that the game would either take more time to complete or would have less quality when it was completed (or both).

These are unacceptable trade-offs to us. So, here we are. There will be a demo. We will release it when we can. If it's ready before the final game reaches shelves - great. You can try before you buy. If it's not ready before the final game reaches shelves, you can always wait until the demo is ready before you buy. That's your choice as a customer.

We made the decision that was best for the game because we feel that is the best decision for our customers and for us.[/quote]

The other day Randy Pitchford asked the community to guess how many lines of code went into the development of Brothers in Arms. The answer:

*** about 1,700,000 lines of C code
*** about 200,000 lines of script code

Randy went on to say that script code "is really a set of game code that we can eventually expose to end users if/when we do SDK/Mod kit stuff. Script code is game code that is segregated from the engine proper. So, "script" code is not the same as a scripted sequence in the game. Script code is used for everything from user interface menus to multiplayer game code. Much of the game code is in script".

I wonder how many lines of code other games have.

Macologist has an interview with Fred Echols, a Quality Assurance Engineer at Gearbox Software. A nice introduction to Fred and his job. Recall in an IRC interview with Gearbox Software, president Randy Pitchford stated that they are looking for a developer to make a Mac version of Brothers in Arms. This interview focuses on Fred, not a Mac version of BiA. Update: Looks like someone ran some Q/A on this article.

We've got a new feature here that you are going to love. You can be sure to be notified of the latest Brothers in Arms news updates by using checking out our Monitored weblinks located in the sidebar of this page. Our site is scanning all the Brothers in Arms sites in our weblinks database and reporting back any changes to each webpage. If the webpage has changed, we mark that as an update and place a timestamp on it. You can then see when a website was last updated.

It seems that some people are concerned about character deaths in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. When a character dies, say in Mission 1, that character will return in Mission 2 (unless the character is scripted to die). Your men will still be around in the later missions, provided they aren't supposed to die in the script. This concerns some gamers as they claim that makes the game unrealistic.

[quote=Randy Pitchford]When you lose a man, you don't have him for that chapter. But, we didn't want you to be completely out of luck for subsequent chapters AND we didn't want to create an infinte number of characters to fill in the blanks.[/quote]

Randy Pitchford went on to write about other aspects of BiA gameplay in this forum post.