Comments on: Splash Damage’s Brink: This Is How It Is

By: krakken

krakken — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:02:46 +0000

Indeed

By: The Lone Wanderer

The Lone Wanderer — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:51:47 +0000

So is this going to be like LOTR: Conquest, or something like a multiplayer/single-player RPG?

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:35:45 +0000

Great response, well worth the read.

By: Ataris

Ataris — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:56:22 +0000

You know, while the whole ducking thing sounds bad, really, as the community of the game increases, people will probably stop using it and the people who do will immediately be marked for destruction. Or, at least, master players will.

And it will probably have a disadvantage (i.e., you move much slower when doing it that way, versus someone doing it manually could breeze right past the obstacle and have their gun up your –throat– before you could even have pressed the DUCK button.

I still really want the game.

They already have PLAY buttons, except you have to watch someone else’s avatar. This way, you could watch your OWN avatar live its life while you ate popcorn and listened to your favorite music.

By: Brink - ZOMG!

Brink - ZOMG! — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:13:43 +0000

I heard that it will be released 26th March in europe and 18th May in America. I saw it here: http://vgreleases.com/Xbox360/ReleaseDate-335891.aspx#

By: C00kieM0nst3r

C00kieM0nst3r — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:36:57 +0000

Maybe it’s because the Art director is french…

might have this kind of influences

By: JayeRandom

JayeRandom — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:39:33 +0000

Is it just me, or do these screenshots look like the work of French SF comic book artists?

By: Singapore Web Design

Singapore Web Design — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:45:41 +0000

Trailer is awesome, 3D graphics looks real.

By: Rinox

Rinox — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:24:43 +0000

Oh ok, thanks for the explanation. Like Vinraith guessed, years of PC gaming have already made me master the infamous jumpcrouch autopilot, so I must have never noticed.

By: Fumarole

Fumarole — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:51:10 +0000

Think of entering a vent. You auto-duck when entering and auto-rise when exiting, assuming you were standing before entering.

By: Lan

Lan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:40:06 +0000

While I can agree that oftentimes games implement a large amount of extra nonsense that has you jumping through hoops and what not, then touts the “depth” of the game because somehow pressing an 8-button sequence to climb on top of a box makes you feel like you are “really there” or something, I don’t think that this superfluousness is always a bad thing. Having what is, in essence, a completely unnecessary mechanic of a game, say travel in a MMO, still adds to the game experience. It might not necessarily be in the form of depth, but it keeps the game from turning into a glorified Dragon’s Lair, where you are basically just watching a movie and pressing a button at the right time. That is where most people take issue with automating or “dumbing down” the gameplay, because they feel that the control scheme, or whatever else is the issue at hand, adds to the entire experience of the game.

Almost any FPS is a perfect example of this. There are portions of many FPSes where the player is forced to randomly interact with the terrain by jumping, climbing around on things, running at the right time, etc., to get to the next area, not really engaging in anything but random displays of coordination for the sake of prolonging the game. Removing that would undoubtedly make the game much quicker-paced and the action would be much more consistent, yet at the same time, you would kill the experience of the game, because then it ceases to be a kind of all-in-one experience and turns into a movie theatre arcade game or something where an alien pops up and you shoot it in the face. Those extra idiosyncracies are what make the game

In the case of Brink, since it is catering to console gamers, it is wholly understandable that they want to implement a system that allows people to eliminate what is otherwise a completely awkward experience when controlling an FPS with two analog sticks. By removing that frustration, I believe the gameplay is probably enhanced and nothing is lost. However, when that translates to the PC, that is where I see a problem. Now there’s just a system for people to be, in my opinion, lazy. Splash Damage claims that you can opt to control things on your own, and that you’ll be that much better off for it, and if that’s how it pans out then that will be nice. But a large portion of the skill involved in a FPS is the ability to maneuver through the game world, or use terrain to your advantage. You can be incredible at aiming and thinking on your toes, but if you spend 25 seconds with your face in a corner trying to crouch jump onto a crate, or end up backpedaling into a wall while trying to escape a firefight, you’re dead. So if you give randomgamer_x the ability to not have to learn anything but “look up and hit ‘ T’ ” or whatever, and get rid of any need to know the timing or positioning involved, you’re removing a sizeable amount of what everyone else has had to master to be successful in the game.

All that being said, everything is conjecture at this point, so the interaction system could possibly have absolutely no effect on how I enjoy the game. It looks to be extremely interesting and hopefully everything will come together in a way that can appeal to both crowds, because personally I’d love to have more people get in on great games that might otherwise be killed by the lack of a community because it was too niche.

By: Vinraith

Vinraith — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:55:19 +0000

If you don’t crouch in L4D on your own, the game crouches you automatically after a brief pause. It’s pretty silly, actually. If you just play like a normal gamer you don’t even notice.