Last I checked it was coming out early next year.
I am pretty stoked about this game. Many multiplayer shooters dont have much mobility. I feel that most of the time you can die really easily if someone gets the drop on you.
There were only two games that I felt gave you mobility and options, once you were under fire: Shadowrun and Unreal Championship 2. You had tons of options and they were really fun. Unfortunately they didn't catch on and get really popular. I think if you give people lots of options, the typical mass market shooter fan will think it's too complicated and not play it. I hope Brink catches on cause it seems awesome on many fronts.
Last I checked it was coming out early next year.
I am pretty stoked about this game. Many multiplayer shooters dont have much mobility. I feel that most of the time you can die really easily if someone gets the drop on you.
There were only two games that I felt gave you mobility and options, once you were under fire: Shadowrun and Unreal Championship 2. You had tons of options and they were really fun. Unfortunately they didn't catch on and get really popular. I think if you give people lots of options, the typical mass market shooter fan will think it's too complicated and not play it. I hope Brink catches on cause it seems awesome on many fronts.
Definitely.
It's like..."oh big guy spamming grenades at me? Let me just hop this fence and flank his ass then!"
That's what I liked about Shadowrun. "Oh no, I'm about to die! TELEPORT" God, that game was awesome.
Man, EVERYONE is going to be a skinny operative running around in this game aren't they? You know what that means. I'll have be the fattest, slowest, most heavily armed character of all time and weed out all the people who can't play a fast sneaky class
Man, EVERYONE is going to be a skinny operative running around in this game aren't they? You know what that means. I'll have be the fattest, slowest, most heavily armed character of all time and weed out all the people who can't play a fast sneaky class
I have a feeling there will be a lot more mediums around when the game hits its strides.
Yeah, I read somewhere that light class is the most mobile, but they can't anything larger than a SMG. That was a while ago, maybe things have changed.
Basically as I remember it weapons are divided into Light/Medium/Heavy just as characters are. So a Light character can take a light weapon as primary and light weapon as secondary, a medium can take a medium or light weapon as a primary and a light weapon as a secondary, and a heavy can take heavy weapons or light or medium as a primary, and light or medium as a secondary.
The light/medium/heavy characters, light/medium/heavy weapons and then four different combat roles should mean plenty of options to find a playstyle that fits you like a glove.
(I'm just assuming that you don't need to be a Light dude to play the sneaky class)
You mentioned there that the different body types have access to different weapons; do the different classes also have access to different weapons?
Again, this is something that Richard Ham and I argued about a lot because we’ve made class based games for years and I ran a Quake Team Fortress clan for two or three years and we were the UK Team Fortress league winners for two years in a row so I was a pretty obsessed class based gamer, playing an engineer in almost every tournament we played, doing the same job for two years. I found it very compelling and I believed, as it turns out wrongly, that the weapon you carried was an integral part of your class, so engineers should by default have a shotgun and use EMP grenades, medics would have some sort of concussion grenades and a fast firing assault rifles, soldiers should have a rocket launcher or some sort of high powered, arcing projectile explosive and I was very stuck in my ways until Richard Ham said to me one day “Why can’t you carry any weapon you like?” and I said that it’s because of sniping. He asked what I meant and I said “Well it’s the operative that snipes” but he said “Well not always, sometimes they sneak around, use disguises and get behind enemy lines”. I said that snipers are supposed to be sneaky guys and he said “Why would they be? They could just be in basic cover and take people out” so when you really think about it, it was arbitrary that we always connected certain weapons with certain classes and we’ve done away with that notion now. If you want to be a big body type engineer with a minigun then you can be. If you want to be a big body operative then you can be; it’s down to you. Same as If you wanted to be a medic with a shotgun, we don’t really control that.
So how in-depth is the character customisation? We’ve seen things like body tattoos, etc?
Well there’s two things: there’s the things that affect your gameplay, like the three body types, like the heavy guy who can take more bullets but has limited mobility and the skinny guy who can jump higher and vault over higher things. Those elements are the one that affect your gameplay. And then we have all the cosmetic stuff, that completely change the aspects of your character that is just about expressing your personality on the battlefield. You know people will see you like this, and you can see yourself in the cutscenes at the beginning of every mission because we update the character, and all your friends will all be in the cutscene like that as well! I think the customisation is quite deep for a shooter. But yeah, we put in all that stuff like the tattoos and the crazy haircuts, but one thing we knew from the beginning was that we wanted to make sure the art style was not going to be diluted in the customisation. Having 50 different jackets or whatever, and all of them from jacket 45 to 46 looking different, creates problems. So what we did was, we defined 10 archetypes that all show a different personality in the story, so we have ten strong characters per faction, and then you can mix-and-match everything, so you can make a million different characters from these ten good-looking guys.
That sounds pretty good. If you look at one of the character customizing bits in one the videos, say this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m2b-j1Yu8M&feature=fvw
at about 2:30, you can see there at more than 6 slots. So that is at least 60 different combinations of pieces, and I don't know how many different colors you can go with.
MyInsideGamer: One thing we’ve not heard a lot about is melee—with the current fad seeming to be fancy cinematic finishing moves, will there be any in Brink?
Neil Alphonso: People don’t normally ask that question, that’s good. It’s a pretty complex system and it’s a lot of fun actually. For one, you can slide into people using SMART and then knock them over. There are these states of knocked over, but not dead. You can be knocked over and incapacitated which means you need a medic to come help you up, but then people can come finish you off. So we have a melee finishing move when people are like that and you get a lot of experience for that. You can also just shoot them, but you hardly get any experience doing that and it actually takes a lot of ammo to do it. Basically we want you to go up and make that personal. We have other things like with the spy character, they have the ability to blow themselves up when they’re dead so if you’re going to finish them off and you hear a *beep**beep**beep**beep* your reaction will be “oh shit…”
Brink has a bit of melee. You can dive into a dude and knock him down, if you do it right you can knock him out and do a melee finishing move! Sweet!
I like it because what it’s doing is quietly opening up the FPS. The reason great FPS players often resemble disturbing, living aimbots is because aiming and shooting is, for the most part, all you can do within the game. Without forcing players to use a single extra button, SMART makes tactical retreats a more plausible option, the slide move gives a boost to daring, aggressive attacks, and the whole thing makes for level design that allows unexpected angles of attack. In short, you can get cunning. Plus it looks cool. That too.
As a medic, I stood at the entrance to a killzone, literally throwing health-boosting syringes to soldiers as they ran past. When one of my boys went down, I went sprinting in after them, slid all the way over to him and got him back on his feet. Very cool.
As an engineer on a team tasked with escorting a security bot, I found that despite the level seeming quite claustrophobic, it was actually big enough that I could circle all the way round to a walkway above where three members of the enemy team were guarding the broken down bot, oblivious to my presence. I gunned them down, vaulted the railing along the walkway, then promptly blew myself up trying to disarm a mine in front of the bot. Epic win! Epic fail. Cool.
On a more mundane note, holy shit is Brink ever polished. You only get half a sense of how satisfying it is to move and shoot in the videos Splash Damage has released, and every item of clothing, facial feature and weapon mod in the character customisation is something you’d be proud to wear.
Now, this next bit wasn’t a detail I noticed it while playing (instead being informed of it afterwards by senior game designer Ed Stern), but when your characters shout their automated barks (“I need a medic”, “I’m going to set the charges”) over the radio, the bark is accompanied by the sounds occuring in the area directly around them. You know, as if that character were really speaking into a radio. I fear the brain of whichever developer came up with this stuff. See also: your gun is that much louder when you’re aiming down iron sights, because it’s that much closer to your ears. I bet that designer has a special, much more efficient way of tying his shoelaces.
I wonder if the barks are accompanied by HUD notifications like Shadowrun did. That was an awesome system in that game. Im surprised more companies have not copied that feature.
I like it because what it’s doing is quietly opening up the FPS. The reason great FPS players often resemble disturbing, living aimbots is because aiming and shooting is, for the most part, all you can do within the game. Without forcing players to use a single extra button, SMART makes tactical retreats a more plausible option, the slide move gives a boost to daring, aggressive attacks, and the whole thing makes for level design that allows unexpected angles of attack. In short, you can get cunning. Plus it looks cool. That too.
As a medic, I stood at the entrance to a killzone, literally throwing health-boosting syringes to soldiers as they ran past. When one of my boys went down, I went sprinting in after them, slid all the way over to him and got him back on his feet. Very cool.
As an engineer on a team tasked with escorting a security bot, I found that despite the level seeming quite claustrophobic, it was actually big enough that I could circle all the way round to a walkway above where three members of the enemy team were guarding the broken down bot, oblivious to my presence. I gunned them down, vaulted the railing along the walkway, then promptly blew myself up trying to disarm a mine in front of the bot. Epic win! Epic fail. Cool.
On a more mundane note, holy shit is Brink ever polished. You only get half a sense of how satisfying it is to move and shoot in the videos Splash Damage has released, and every item of clothing, facial feature and weapon mod in the character customisation is something you’d be proud to wear.
Now, this next bit wasn’t a detail I noticed it while playing (instead being informed of it afterwards by senior game designer Ed Stern), but when your characters shout their automated barks (“I need a medic”, “I’m going to set the charges”) over the radio, the bark is accompanied by the sounds occuring in the area directly around them. You know, as if that character were really speaking into a radio. I fear the brain of whichever developer came up with this stuff. See also: your gun is that much louder when you’re aiming down iron sights, because it’s that much closer to your ears. I bet that designer has a special, much more efficient way of tying his shoelaces.
I think I'm finally sold on this game.
Same, reading that preview has me a lot more interested in this game than the initial footage I saw did.
Might look up some more recent gameplay vids if they're around.
There are some videos around, but a lot of them use footage from the same event, mixed with the trailer, mixed with an interview. Which is fine, but I like seeing new stuff. Hard to find.
The devs are thinking of a lot of little things-- guns being louder in iron sights mode, the resistance guns being worn out for example, that will really add to immersion. And SMART really reminds me of Action Half-life and The Specialists HL mod, which is wonderful.
Nice thing that I am not sure if anyone mentioned. In the character creator thing, what you see isn't "high quality model for the character creator" like in a lot of games, it's the exact model that will be seen in game.
This game bleeds style. I know SD has patted themselves on the back a lot about the art style, but man.... it really shows the work that they have done. They even somehow make a bunch of containers look interesting.
Between the art assets they have shown, and their pedigree for shooters....
[Richard Ham] When you turn on Brink, there’s not an option to play single-player or multi-player, you don’t choose that. Instead you choose to pick off where you left off in the story, and right before you start there’s one little screen that comes up which asks, do you really want to play privately or publicly? Do you want to open your doors to the outside world, or do you want to keep this private? You make that one simple choice, and that means you’re either playing by yourself, with close friends or with people you invite, and having this kind of private party where you are all working together in the traditional co-op way (up to eight people), trying to complete all these objectives.
If you choose to instead make it public, that means you’re still getting that same great story… but it’s like playing a single-player game where the enemy is played by human players, and a match can switch back and forth.
This sounds really interesting. I hope Brink is a trendsetter with this concept.
the bots will take over when people drop out. That's cool, especially because the bots are supposed to be really convincing.
Posts
I am pretty stoked about this game. Many multiplayer shooters dont have much mobility. I feel that most of the time you can die really easily if someone gets the drop on you.
There were only two games that I felt gave you mobility and options, once you were under fire: Shadowrun and Unreal Championship 2. You had tons of options and they were really fun. Unfortunately they didn't catch on and get really popular. I think if you give people lots of options, the typical mass market shooter fan will think it's too complicated and not play it. I hope Brink catches on cause it seems awesome on many fronts.
Definitely.
It's like..."oh big guy spamming grenades at me? Let me just hop this fence and flank his ass then!"
That's what I liked about Shadowrun. "Oh no, I'm about to die! TELEPORT" God, that game was awesome.
I have a feeling there will be a lot more mediums around when the game hits its strides.
(I'm just assuming that you don't need to be a Light dude to play the sneaky class)
There is going to be a ton of freedom in this game, this is great.
This game is gonna rock so motherfucking hard.
I agree. It certainly has the pedigree behind it. And maybe launching at the time it will, it wont get pushed aside by other big titles.
It turns out im going to own two copies of this game. One for PC one for 360, since a lot of my new 360 friends are begging me to get it on 360.
Gears 3 will eclipse it easily for me at least, but Brink will keep me happy until the holidays.
Collective thoughts from RPS contributors/Readers
No speakers at work.
NXT Gamer interviews Olivier Leonardi
That sounds pretty good. If you look at one of the character customizing bits in one the videos, say this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m2b-j1Yu8M&feature=fvw
at about 2:30, you can see there at more than 6 slots. So that is at least 60 different combinations of pieces, and I don't know how many different colors you can go with.
Lots of questions, but here is a new one!
Brink has a bit of melee. You can dive into a dude and knock him down, if you do it right you can knock him out and do a melee finishing move! Sweet!
And operatives can blow up when they die!
So record yourself laughing once, and play it everytime you're on the brink of death?
Brunked: Brink Impressions
Some choice quotes
I think I'm finally sold on this game.
It was a genius multiplayer game. It really was. Freedom of movement in games like it and Tribes are the kinds of things i look for in a shooter.
Brink is so bought. I can't wait.
Same, reading that preview has me a lot more interested in this game than the initial footage I saw did.
Might look up some more recent gameplay vids if they're around.
The devs are thinking of a lot of little things-- guns being louder in iron sights mode, the resistance guns being worn out for example, that will really add to immersion. And SMART really reminds me of Action Half-life and The Specialists HL mod, which is wonderful.
Between the art assets they have shown, and their pedigree for shooters....
Its looking like an early nominee for my GOTY.
This sounds really interesting. I hope Brink is a trendsetter with this concept.
the bots will take over when people drop out. That's cool, especially because the bots are supposed to be really convincing.
Ive seen some that have convinced me that they wandered in off the short bus without their handlers.
So typical XBL users..?
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.