By Alec Meer on November 30th, 2009 at 8:36 pm.
Cryptic, gravitas-laden teasers are of little use – genuinely seeing a game in action is all that matters when it comes to trailertime. So, it’s relief to be able to show you goodly human beans just what Splash Damage’s upcoming hybrid single/multiplayer shooter Brink really looks like. This video focuses specifically on the (optional) auto-jump/climb system they call SMART. It’s caused a bit of a fuss as Some Gentlemen have expressed that it must mean the game has been stupidised in the name of consolebox success, and similarly snobbish knee-jerk assertions. Maybe it will. But have you played it yet? No, you haven’t. So maybe it won’t. Gotcha!
This walkthrough vid tries to both explain and justify SMART’s existence. Does it help, Some Gentlemen? Oh, and it also does a sterling job of demonstrating that the uber-shiny screens we’ve seen to date really are very close to the real thing…
That’s Game Director Paul Wedgewood speaking, by the way, in an exclusive whatchamacallit for G4.
I’m very keen to play the thing as, despite having seen it played first-hand, I still feel as though I have only the faintest sense of how it all works. A little bit Enemy Territory, a little Unreal Tournament assault mode, a little bit APB… Hopefully these frail human hands of mine will be able to typespeak more about Brink to you soon.
30/11/2009 at 20:45 Feet says:
Iiiiinteresting.
I will continue to watch with interest, just like I watched Quake Wars with much interest. Ultimately I was disappointed with QW, but any studio that managed to make such a wonderful game as Wolf: Enemy Territory (which got over 250 hours of my teenage life, over several years) will always get my interest and time. ;)
30/11/2009 at 20:49 skalpadda says:
Hm, as long as you still have to indicate what it is you want to do, I can’t see it as a problem in any way. Not having to have separate keybinds for slide/climb/jump over/vault/whatever actually seems like a rather nice idea. Just hope it works well so that you don’t end up trying to do something which the game interprets as something else, since that would get annoying fast.
30/11/2009 at 20:50 Psychopomp says:
Thank god none of the G4 talking heads said anything.
R.I.P. TechTV
Also, loving the art style
30/11/2009 at 20:57 Ballisticsfood says:
That seems less like a consolisation move and more like a choice to make the game a lot more fluid. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out, certainly.
30/11/2009 at 21:06 skalpadda says:
Thinking about it, it seems like a good way to get a lot of different moves into a game without having to dumb it down or over-complicate things for the sake of consoles.
30/11/2009 at 21:06 subversus says:
finally! I think that this should go by default in all FPS games. I find it awkward when a trained hardened space marine can’t jump over the fence which is not really high or go in some narrow space between crates. Mirror Edge tried but failed really hatrd.
30/11/2009 at 21:07 subversus says:
hard*
30/11/2009 at 23:25 Velvet Fist, Iron Glove says:
Well, yes, it was very difficult in Mirror’s Edge for the space marines to scale the knee-high walls. But Faith had no trouble.
30/11/2009 at 21:07 Tinus says:
That looks excellent! Getting rid of the player-is-a-walking-fridge movement system is something I hope a lot of games will strive for. the character customisation also looks promising.
30/11/2009 at 21:07 zornbringer says:
geeee. didnt you notice the end? wasnt it suppose to release in spring 2010? now it says fall 2010!
what i like is the leveldesign. what the have to remove is the headbob and the weaponbob. reminds me very much to mirrors edge and i got motion sickness off of that game.
looking forward to brink though. mw2 and stuff doesnt interest me very much.
30/11/2009 at 21:10 Marcin says:
So a sort of Assassin’s Creed pseudo-parkour, except in first person and with added direction-sensing.
The only problem I can see is that, say, that security beam is invisible – so how do you, the player, know that pointing downwards there will make you slide? Or the upwards to climb – what if you’re just looking up scanning for enemies? There’s quite a few times in AC where this doesn’t work as intuitively as you’d think, and it could be disastrous in a multi-shooter …
I see the potential, but how it plays in mah actual hands will have to be the ultimate judge, naturally. :)
01/12/2009 at 00:19 duel says:
30/11/2009 at 21:11 Toyoch says:
Oh great, please dumb down the controls for us keyboard-owners some more.
Also unlockable weapons and outfits? *Yawns* My god, why didn’t someone else think of th..oh wait
30/11/2009 at 21:35 TotalBiscuit says:
Yeah let’s throw away good ideas because they’re not new and shiny anymore!
30/11/2009 at 21:37 Larington says:
Wait, what?
They’ve moved a bunch of extra key button usage over to context sensing mouse movement, I don’t see how thats such a big deal (Long as it works of course).
01/12/2009 at 01:14 Shalrath says:
You think that will work with a consoles JOYSTICK movement easier? If anything it’s reverse consolization – quick mouse movement will suit that far better than ponderous controller analog sticks.
01/12/2009 at 02:57 DK says:
“Wait, what?
They’ve moved a bunch of extra key button usage over to context sensing mouse movement, I don’t see how thats such a big deal (Long as it works of course).”
Having to angle the mouse up to jump is an issue, since that also force you to AIM up. I don’t want to aim up – maybe I want to jump up without having to loose my target and pray the game registers what I actually want to do.
Besides, if they want to prove it’s not a consolization move – make the gameplay vid on a PC, not a console.
30/11/2009 at 21:13 Jon says:
An interesting trailer, but it has given me one worry: The head-bob. It’s probably there to make you feel more like you’re moving, but for me the shakiness of the camera there almost gives me motion sickness. Anybody else, or is this just me?
30/11/2009 at 21:39 Spoon says:
That was the first thing I thought when they went to the ingame parts. It’s a little too much bob for my tastes. Love the idea though.
30/11/2009 at 21:44 Benjamin Finkel says:
It was like the player character was jiggling his gun up and down for the laughs.
Ben
30/11/2009 at 22:34 Tei says:
Is terrible to me too. Like the dude with the weapon has parkinson.
01/12/2009 at 16:49 Aubrey says:
Fixed Already:
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showpost.php?p=202408&postcount=10
30/11/2009 at 21:18 An Innocuous Coin says:
Personally, I like the idea. If I had a nickel for everytime I died in TF2 or L4D due to being caught on a knee-high rail…
…well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d have quite a few nickels, let me tell you.
30/11/2009 at 21:22 MrTambourineMan says:
Wow, looks a lot better than I’d imagined. Can’t wait…
30/11/2009 at 21:24 MrTambourineMan says:
…but then again, we’ll have Shotgunity by that time O.o
30/11/2009 at 21:28 the wiseass says:
So will this be another consolized bastardisation of a PC game?
By looking that that trailer it sure seems so and this is a little bit worrisome. The “smart” system is sure as hell targeted at the console player, where the game does most of the stuff for you instead of the other way around (something that got really on my nerves on the otherwise excellent Arkham Asylum).
I dunno, but I’m not impressed by this. I guess I’m a little bit jaded…
30/11/2009 at 21:37 Senethro says:
So what would you prefer? Cut the feature and all it allows? Change it to a silly key combination?
Did it annoy you when grenades and melee weapons no longer had their own weapon slot and could be done while holding any weapon?
Interface improvements aren’t bad just because they work on consoles.
30/11/2009 at 22:06 TotalBiscuit says:
I’m sorry but this is alarmist platform-warrior nonsense. This is an advance, in terms of multiplayer FPS. There have been very few games which have managed to break the restrictive mold of the bunny-hopping style of movement and that’s a very bad thing. A more natural form of movement is undoubtedly a good thing, but that freedom must also be tempered with usability. There are a few mods which used similar mechanics, Action Quake/Half-Life, The Specialists for instance, these games had some cool stunts and complex moves you could do, yet only used one or two keys to do it. It seems to me that this Smart movement system is the natural evolution of this concept.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine a little while ago. He and I are both very much into fighting games, mostly on console since that’s where they live, but we play a lot of Street Fighter 4 on PC. His argument, which I agree with, is that fighting games are as much a test of your strategic skills as they are of your reflexes. He believes that a character’s arsenal of moves should be as easy to pull off as possible, so it becomes a case of out-thinking and out-playing your opponent, rather than memorising complex button combos and buying increasingly better input devices to ensure the reliable entry of said combos. Now I think we can all agree that more complex movement in competitive FPS can be a good thing, but we seem to disagree on how it should be implemented. To me, this is an ideal system. It is simple, yet powerful and requires thought on the part of the user. If it works as shown, then what you get is a far more dynamic and kinetic game where you can continue to concentrate on moving and shooting, not on remembering button combos to pull off that ledge grab or slide.
30/11/2009 at 22:26 pkt-zer0 says:
@Senethro: “Look up/down + push SMART” seems to be the silly key combination to me, as opposed to having separate crouch/jump buttons.
30/11/2009 at 22:31 the wiseass says:
Easy there guys, I’m absolutely not a “platform-warrior”. I’ve just been expressing my concerns because you see it IS a problem, when a game practically plays itself. While I enjoyed playing the Batman game, it was very often a matter of pressing a button and then waiting a couple of seconds for the animation to finish (almost like watching a short video clip). If you enjoy having the controls take form you like this, fine, I don’t.
See, we are talking two different things here. I’m not advocating button combos, just posing the question about what really is so difficult to press “space” in order to jump? Because honestly, freedom of movement (jumping when I decide to) is something that is essential for a good FPS (maybe not so much with other genres). The “smart” system in itself is nothing new, it has been done in zelda (64), prince of persia and numerous other games.
It is just that if you really look at it, it is clearly geared towards console players simply because movement and aiming are difficult things to do on a gamepad at the same time. On the other hand, pressing “w” and occasionally “space” while aiming with your mouse is not very difficult at all.
Interface improvements are fine but not when they take away your freedom. That is all I’m saying.</q>
30/11/2009 at 23:01 Senethro says:
Maybe I’m being thick, but how do you use crouch or jump buttons to let the game know when you want to crouch or when you want to slide? When you want to jump and when you want to grab?
Using this mouselook + SMART seems nice and intuitive because YOU GO WHERE YOU LOOK. Thats easy, right?
*clutches towercase to chest* b-b-b-but…. consoles…unclean! UN-PC!!!
You say you’re not a platform warrior but you’re still expressing yourself in terms of problems and concerns with the underlying assumptions that co-development with consoles is always bad and even stealing good features from other genres is bad.
30/11/2009 at 23:31 Funky Badger says:
I think you’re very wrong on Batman – the combat system was wonderfully “easy to learn, difficult to master”, it was all about timing, and planning, and movement and positioning. So just like real fighting, with a bit less hurt.
The absolute best system I’ve played (since IK+, obv).
30/11/2009 at 23:32 Velvet Fist, Iron Glove says:
“Going where you look” is the fundamental problem. Most of the time in FPS’s I want to go one direction, while looking (and shooting) in another, very often jumping obstacles at the same time.
I thought Mirror’s Edge’s combination of one button for “up” (jump, mantle, wallrun, vault), and one for “down” (crouch, slide, roll) worked really well (on both the console and the PC) without removing player control, and would like to see more FPS’s adopt similar controls.
01/12/2009 at 00:12 Psychopomp says:
You don’t have to use SMART
No really, you can use a whole bunch of binds if you want to
30/11/2009 at 21:34 Cynic says:
He should stop waving that gun around like a feather duster on a spring.
30/11/2009 at 21:54 DeliriumWartner says:
This is said as a fully paid-up Blighty, but no person with an English accent should ever be allowed to said the words “bad ass” unless it’s said ironically. Ever.
30/11/2009 at 23:06 Thiefsie says:
word.
01/12/2009 at 00:46 RagingLion says:
I third this motion. I find badass to be this totally weird word. It means nothing to me as a Brit, yet it gets used constantly if you’re an American so it has meaning over there. Therefore it’s just trying to convey a message to the American audience but it really does grate when you here an english voice saying it.
01/12/2009 at 13:06 Vandelay says:
Obviously he means that you get to play as a naughty donkey.
30/11/2009 at 22:17 Mihai says:
Wow. They finally did it. One f*cking button movement. We’ll click click click into stupidity.
30/11/2009 at 23:02 Senethro says:
Tell us how it should be done then. One button for each limb? Remember that flash game where you used OP and QW to work a guys legs?
01/12/2009 at 10:15 TotalBiscuit says:
Like Diablo 2 and Torchlight, those other dumbed down kiddie console games? Am I right guys?
30/11/2009 at 22:26 Dominic White says:
Rampant PC purist paranoia right up in this thread.
I’ve been playing PC games since CGA was the standard. Once we moved into the realm of first person action, we seem to have settled on the idea that the player is a six foot rectangle with no flexibility. That knee-high barrier in front of you? Hit it at a full run, and you’ll skid, frictionless away from it. Try to jump at it, and unless you clear the full height, you’ll just slide back down it as if it were a hundred foot tall teflon barrier. And that’s how it’s always been since 3d games added a jump button. Why? because that’s PC gaming. And we don’t like change, even if it’s changing something that has been retardedly broken and goofy-looking for well over a decade now.
Doesn’t help that we’ve got a whole legion of purists here whos opinions are so set in stone that nothing is allowed to change, no matter how obviously positive the change may be. What Has Been Must Forever Be, huh? And clearly anything that looks like change is the fault of those diabolical consoles, what with them and their… controllers with six analogue axes and a hojillion buttons and sometimes even motion sensing which are CLEARLY inferior to the mighty two-axis, 3-ish button mouse! Yeah!
You guys are acting like console games are still using the NES controller.
Enough with the fucking paranoia already.
30/11/2009 at 22:33 Mihai says:
I think you’re missing the point. Mirror’s Edge dealt pretty well with complex player movement in 1′st person, right? That was great, since it required some degree of skill, while this SMART system (btw, really sad acronym) only requires the player to point to something and then it will deal with the obstacles by itself. That’s retarded.
30/11/2009 at 22:36 Dominic White says:
Because Mirrors Edge was a game all about efficiently navigating tight environments within a time limit, and that was ALL it was. The gunplay was crap, because you spent 95% of your time trying to worry about whether you’re going to run into a knee-high barrier that’d stop your inertia and kill you dead.
The SMART button here is so that you can focus on actually shooting dudes, rather than your elite special forces guy being stopped dead by something a 10-year-old could navigate while chewing gum and playing a handheld videogame at the same time.
30/11/2009 at 22:41 Mihai says:
But, wait… you CAN do all that by yourself if you manage to use a mouse and keyboard. :)
30/11/2009 at 22:50 Ballisticsfood says:
But would doing that with the mouse and keyboard result in both you and others around you seeing your player vaulting a barrier or merely clutching his knees to his chest while mysteriously rising four feet off the floor and clearing said barrier with the power of his spacebar powered limbs?
30/11/2009 at 22:57 Dominic White says:
What does mouse and keyboard have to do with it, anyway? As a tangential argument, I’d like to put forward Xen in Half-Life, which apparently everyone has had a good whine about at some point, because ‘Platforming doesn’t work in first-person!’. Oh, how the mighty mouse and keyboard have failed!
And then you look at the Metroid Prime series, starting on the Gamecube. You know, the one with the funny Fisher Price controller with the big colourful buttons? Yeah, you could pull off acrobatics and precision leaping in that like in pretty much nothing else at the time.
But hey, consoles!… Argh, my brain hurts even trying to make sense of these non-arguments. The point is that we have a button here that automatically lets your character naturally navigate stuff that, as has been mentioned by others, you’d have to leap ridiculously over before, and if you so much as landed one inch too short, and caught your pinky toe on the obstacle you’re trying to clear, you’d sink straight back down to the ground as if you were trying to vault over the empire state building.
It’s not a ‘Hurr console kiddie’ button. It’s a ‘Stop making my supposedly elite commando act like a fucking moron’ button.
30/11/2009 at 23:42 Snarboo says:
Your comparison to Metroid Prime falls flat when you consider that you didn’t have a smart button that jumped for you. Every jump had to be executed by the player. Metroid Prime’s controls were fairly standard for an FPS game, they were just mapped efficiently to the Gamecube controller. What made Metroid Prime a joy to play was that it had very precise controls. There’s no reason that the acrobatics in Brink couldn’t be pulled off with a traditional mouse and keyboard. In fact, I’ve seen it done before.
That said, I don’t believe Brink’s SMART button is in any way watered down. I think it’s kind of brilliant actually, a sort of context sensitive jump button. The fact that it’s completely optional is probably the best part. Hopefully you won’t have to use the SMART button to be able to compete and can play the game with traditional controls just fine.
01/12/2009 at 04:08 Dave L. says:
@Dominic White: But the gunplay in Mirror’s Edge was INTENTIONALLY crap, there wasn’t anything inherent in the control scheme that made gunplay unworkable. DICE saying ‘Man, we can’t seem to make gunplay fun with our parkour system. Oh well, leave it in anyway.’ They were saying ‘We really don’t want people relying on guns and shooting their way through the levels that we’ve spent all this time designing to be run through using our nifty parkour system. Let’s make our player character slow down significantly when carrying a gun, and have shit aim to boot, so people won’t do that.’
01/12/2009 at 16:54 Aubrey says:
Exactly. It’s an issue of focus. Mirror’s Edge was about movement first and foremost, almost closer to a racing game with shooting an ancilliary. Brink is much more about shooting, with movement as an enabler.
Neither is a “wrong” approach, just a different style being attempted.
30/11/2009 at 22:27 Samm2 says:
That looks fun to control. But what happens if you want to slide but shoot upward at ppl above you? That would mess up the direction sensing. I am aware that we couldn’t really do that kind of movement/shooting with the fps that are out right now. But it’s just something to consider.
01/12/2009 at 16:55 Aubrey says:
You can still manually slide any time. SMART only deals with the obstacles themselves.
30/11/2009 at 22:38 ChampionHyena says:
I think this unfortunate gun-wielding gentleman needs to see a doctor about this spinal problem he’s clearly having.
30/11/2009 at 22:38 Jad says:
Wait wait wait. What all this about jumping?
You can’t jump in a real FPS. Unless you consider pressing the run button and dashing across same-level gaps “jumping”, which I don’t. And looking up and down? I’ve heard about this new game “Duke Nukem” which supposedly will have that (unnecessary) feature, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Yessiree, gaming will never get better than this here Doom II.
30/11/2009 at 22:42 ChampionHyena says:
BROKEN-ASS REPLY FUNCTION CAN GO TO HELL.
Was responding to the notes about the view bobbing, of course. Meantime, throwing out the word “consolization” smacks of casting knee-jerk aspersions on multiple-format games wherever possible. Inasmuch as it’s a system that–to my recollection–we’ve never really seen before in a combat-oriented FPS, console or not, I’d advise the naysayers to actually see how it works before drawing the conclusion that streamlined = dumb. And, by virtue of transitive property, dumb = console.
Great and lofty aspirations, I know.
30/11/2009 at 22:56 WilPal says:
I think this is a pretty neat idea.
It doesn’t retract from the gameplay (As in ‘oh you can’t jump this is a crap game lolol’), it adds to it and makes it something a bit different.
I consider it more of a gameplay element than a dodgy ease-of-play idea.
30/11/2009 at 22:57 Thiefsie says:
Is there an option to make my character not look like a douche?
01/12/2009 at 00:49 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
I think any non-douchebag option kind of went out the door when the devs said they weren’t going to bother making female characters.
01/12/2009 at 01:46 Crispy says:
‘Bother’ being almost twice the amount of character art and animation work.
02/12/2009 at 14:52 KindredPhantom says:
ALT+F4
30/11/2009 at 22:59 BensyWensy says:
I aim with the mouse. I like to be able to use the mouse solely for aiming without having to try to jump with it. I didn’t see anything in that video that couldn’t be accomplished with Sprint + jump or spring+crouch.
30/11/2009 at 23:09 Senethro says:
How much aiming do you think you’ll be doing when both your hands are involved in grabbing a ledge? People generally aren’t able to slide backwards while firing, they’re more likely to slide in the direction they’re looking.
Regarding shooting while doing stuff, someone from SD has already commented on this saying that you’ll be able to shoot during SMART manoevures if you’ve got 1 hand free and reload if you’ve got 2 hands free.
01/12/2009 at 03:25 WilPal says:
Attention to detail, i like it!
30/11/2009 at 23:13 Frosty says:
This game looks good and not consolified to me. The control system looks absolutely perfect, fluid and simple. Surely it is better then having idiots bunny hopping round maps? Mind you it probably won’t stop that.
In fact there was only one fault. He said badass. Paul my friend, people with our accent don’t say badass. It’s painful to listen to.
30/11/2009 at 23:18 Lack_26 says:
Is it just me, or do half of those characters in the line-up at the end look French. I know it’s probably a tad racist to say that, I think it’s the long exaggerated faces and look of contempt/arrogance that I associate with the stereotype of the Parisian French.
30/11/2009 at 23:36 Funky Badger says:
Xenophobic more than racist. (Liked how Dragon Age reinforced along these lines as well)
30/11/2009 at 23:45 Senethro says:
Theres actually something in this as I think there was some inspiration from a French comic book.
30/11/2009 at 23:33 Ryx says:
Hooray, another game that brags about customization and then restricts you to male character models.
01/12/2009 at 00:03 Senethro says:
Its a bit sad, isn’t it?
I remember a dev (battlefield I think) once commenting that women characters are trouble because suddenly you use double the RAM than only male characters for their different sounds, animations, textures etc. Eh, you’d think there’d be something they could do.
01/12/2009 at 00:57 Mr. ThreEye says:
Yeah, what’s up with not having bad ass women in the game?
30/11/2009 at 23:40 Guildenstern says:
Yes, a thousand times yes. I’m so sick of watching characters bunny-hop, run into walls and be stopped in their tracks by a knee-high fence.
30/11/2009 at 23:46 Hug_dealer says:
so. ummm. how exactly do i get my guy to slide into a crouched or prone position behind some cover while i fire at the enemy as i move towards the cover that is in another direction.
I can see it being useful when not in combat and you want to move around quickly, but i dont see it helping in combat, probably the exact opposite.
01/12/2009 at 00:00 Senethro says:
You ever see those deathcams on TF2 where you were killed by a doublejumping Scout? Those ones where his knees are bending backwards like hes got an extreme connective tissue disorder?
Because it would look like that. I can’t imagine how you would animate what you’re describing. Its the sort of thing you could just about have gotten away with in the HalfLife era but people will complain about stuff like that these days. Animations and player movement have to be reasonably convincing.
01/12/2009 at 00:18 Psychopomp says:
SMART is optional
You do that by using your binds
FFS
30/11/2009 at 23:49 postmanX3 says:
I’m sure the video didn’t show very much of the system’s capabilities, but was I the only one who got the sense of “This is really nothing special”?
30/11/2009 at 23:52 Hug_dealer says:
i didnt see anything thing special.
What i saw has been accomplished in many games before this. the slide is accomplished by running and hitting prone. the jumping is done by hitting the jumping button, and the grabbing a ledge and pulling yourself up has been done in dozens of a games and is basically like how people jump onto ladders to do get an earlier start, or how any number of characters can jump and hold onto a ledge and then climb up.
Personally i think the destruction of an entire map ala, battlefield bad company 2 is a much better feature.
30/11/2009 at 23:58 HexagonalBolts says:
Interesting trailer, but someone should write up some rules for these damn things
1. Never, ever say ‘cool’
2. NEVER, EVER say ‘Badass’
3. Don’t use the guy with the most annoying voice on the team
12/03/2010 at 22:19 Berzee says:
This.
01/12/2009 at 00:03 Lh'owon says:
Bollocks to those saying this is consolisation, and I’m usually one of the first to criticise a game for using unnecessary console features. Frankly one of the failings of modern shooters is how stuck they are in the old way of navigating the world.
Take for example military shooters – where is the option to raise your body just enough so that your gun can shoot over a wall without exposing more than you need to? As it is the only option is to crouch (can’t shoot over) or stand up (exposing far too much torso). I see no reason whatsoever why that short of thing shouldn’t be made automatic with a button press – it’s not like it takes thought to do in real life.
For me this is an area that needs a great deal of development and could benefit a wide variety of games. Fixed control schemes are very limiting and are starting to feel a bit outdated given the graphical detail of game worlds.
01/12/2009 at 00:11 Dominic White says:
“Take for example military shooters – where is the option to raise your body just enough so that your gun can shoot over a wall without exposing more than you need to?”
Call of Juarez 2 actually does this really nicely. When you crouch down behind an object, your character sinks down as far as required. If you aim up towards the sky, you sink down behind the cover, and as you aim down, you gradually rise up so that you can point your guns JUST over the cover object but without revealing anything more than is required. It works on corners, too. I’d love to see more games adopt the system.
01/12/2009 at 00:33 Psychopomp says:
Aye. Why that didn’t outright replace lean buttons is beyond me.
01/12/2009 at 00:17 Psychopomp says:
Okay, movement in every other FPS that isn’t Mirror’s Edge:
WASD
Spacebar
CTRL/C to crouch
That’s fucking it.
01/12/2009 at 00:20 Hug_dealer says:
odd, i can remember leaning and sliding into cover in ghost recon, oh and go prone. I do remember something odd about operation flashpoint also.
1 button to attempt to do everything is just going to cause problems when you are trying to do multiple things. like get to cover while firing at your enemy. oh it thinks you want to jump the cover because you shooting at the guy above you, instead of having you slide into it.
Have to play it in person to truly know, but so far, it doesnt impress me.
01/12/2009 at 00:24 Anonymousity says:
“It’s caused a bit of a fuss as Some Gentlemen have expressed that it must mean the game has been stupidised in the name of consolebox success, and similarly snobbish knee-jerk assertions. Maybe it will. But have you played it yet? No, you haven’t. So maybe it won’t. Gotcha! ”
If I don’t judge it on what I see in videos and previews, people no longer release demos, and journalists so often don’t speak for me or judge a game in the same way that I do, how should I judge the game? Do I fork out $90+ (aus) for every game I see? Surely there has to be some point at which I’m allowed to form an opinion on something based vaguely on conjecture and gut feeling from witnessing a game. voicing that opinion on a message board is only natural really.
01/12/2009 at 00:26 Thants says:
Is it just me or are the heads on the character-models really distractingly bad? All the people seem to have freakishly small or stretched-out heads.
01/12/2009 at 00:29 Finn says:
… and?
It reminds me of Assassin’s Creed, (which I totally enjoyed for the parkour and not for the story or whatnot); just think of it like this:
WASD
Spacebar to jump
CTRL/C to crouch
SHIFT to do parkour maneuver/vault/slide, etc
That’s fucking it. I don’t see how it’s dumbing down the game for consoles or whatnot; geez, lots of platform warriors these days, give it a rest.
01/12/2009 at 00:37 kyrieee says:
Could be cool, and that’s coming from a Q3 trickjumper
The headbob is awkward though
01/12/2009 at 00:42 reginald says:
am I the only person that isn’t excited as playing as a football team pumped with steriods ? (thats american football, not soccer). I’d love to see some characters that aren’t literally scowling pin-headed masses of meat.
01/12/2009 at 00:53 rocketman71 says:
My god, that bobbing is capable of killing the game by itself.
Only 8 players?. Looks more co-op than DM then.
01/12/2009 at 01:06 Finn says:
Also, the bobbbing… I’ve yet to play a game with head/weapon bobbing that DIDN’T have an option to disable it. So… yeah. That’s basically it. Whiners.
ROUNDHOUSE!
01/12/2009 at 01:07 Zyrxil says:
Holy fuck that’s a lot of bob.
01/12/2009 at 03:01 e n i g m a says:
This is just a portion of the demo displayed at PAX which was very promising for an alpha. I hope multiplayer has a good competition and customization base.
01/12/2009 at 04:33 TariqOne says:
Bravo. Yet another game that completely eliminates the option to play a female character. And one with fully customizable avatars, too. It seems almost like MORE work to eliminate female options.
Note to devs: get your heads out of your asses. Girls play games. Girls buy games. Don’t go out of your way to piss them off.
01/12/2009 at 05:28 born2expire says:
I thought they had women in it?
01/12/2009 at 05:28 born2expire says:
Hmmm I was looking forward to this, seems off and slow. Not surprising though after the dud ET: Quake Wars was.
01/12/2009 at 05:31 Spectre-7 says:
What a strange perspective you have… How on Earth could it be [i]more[/i] work to forgo female options, and how could they be [i]eliminating[/i] something that hasn’t been created yet? Player models aren’t naturally occurring. They don’t just pop out of the ground fully formed, ready to be zipped and shipped. A hard working team of artists is cloistered away in their office constructing and texturing several sets of models to be used as morph targets, along with dozens upon dozens of bits of clothing and equipment that have to integrate with those models seamlessly. Adding a female set would at least double their workload.
This isn’t a developer going out of their way to piss off female players; this is a developer that isn’t going out of their way to please them, assuming female gamers as a whole are so shallow that they’d lose sleep over a lack of gender specific avatars.
01/12/2009 at 05:32 Spectre-7 says:
Blast you, reply button, and double-blast you BBcode!
01/12/2009 at 06:22 Sui says:
“Or go online and play fully, where the entire game is full of… strangers”
Anyone else think there’s something ominous the way he says that? Like he’s had… bad experiences online, or finds the internet a strange and socially challenging place.
01/12/2009 at 06:26 Spacegirl says:
Any1 who talks about some “Consolization” in regards to this system is a fool.
What the hell competitive FPS can you even do crap like this in anyway? Also it is optional and all the things you see there supposedly can be done with specific binds!
So what are you even talking about? Ppl sound like the clown fanboys who post on every IGN page.
I think the system looks kind of neat!
01/12/2009 at 06:38 sulkdodds says:
it is as if he knows that people on the internet could be anyone at all and could wish you ill. maybe they are from your home town. maybe you walk past them every day and never realise it. maybe they’re RIGHT BEHIND YOU.
01/12/2009 at 08:28 iQue says:
idtech4 never looked so good… can’t wait for this
01/12/2009 at 08:58 RGS says:
Looks very good actually.
01/12/2009 at 08:59 Choca says:
I don’t know why they won’t release the footage they showed us at E3 because it made Brink number one on my wait list for 2010.
01/12/2009 at 09:01 Adrian says:
i also see the problem of having to look down to crouch or look up to jump. personally i would enjoy playing a game like this because i like fancy animations but i could never seriously play a shooter like this. i think one key for all jumping/climbing/wallrunning and one for all crouching/sliding/etc. actions would be better than just one for all.
just imagine that screne with the metal detector. imagine on the other side of the detector is an enemy. with 2 seperate buttons you could shoot at the enemy then press the button for climbing up and get on top of the thing and keep shooting fronm up there. ud still see the fancy animation but you wouldn’T have to take the aim off the enemy as much.
plus the time you loose by taking your mouse off the enemy will be gained again by jumping on the detector. the result should equal in zero but you used your environment and you’d see a lot more cool things in a game than usual.
01/12/2009 at 16:42 Aubrey says:
You can shoot and climb, though.
01/12/2009 at 09:23 Schmung says:
Could be interesting. The up/down flick to guide your movement should be familiar to anyone who played The Specialists. Worked fine there and should be fine here as well. I recall seeing somewhere that they still had a manual jump button and that the SMART controls were just for all the parkour stuff? I’d actually be more worried if I was thinking of playing this on console because it’s a lot harder to make those snappy up/down movements with a controller than it is a mouse. Anyways, it sounds very interesting.
01/12/2009 at 16:43 Aubrey says:
Do you have a link to the specialists? I’m afraid I never heard of it but it sounds like there’s a similar genus to the control scheme!
01/12/2009 at 17:25 Schmung says:
http://www.specialistsmod.net/ for you sir.
Controls system basically worked by having an indicator to the left of your aiming reticule. When the dot was in the uppermost section you’d do a high move, lowermost a low move and the middle should be obvious enoguh. In combination with the stunt key and your usual jump/crouch buttons it allowed for all sorts of acrobatic stuff. You’d fairly quickly get into the habit of flicking you view to the desired location and very rapidly re-calibrating your view to aim or whatever. It’s a nice system TBH and something not really done elsewhere. As I said, it’s wonderful with a mouse, but would probably be a nightmare with a controller and I wonder if Brink employs a similar system
01/12/2009 at 09:26 El Stevo says:
Systems like SMART are an important step forward for games. Hopefully they will soon become as ubiquitous as advanced physics.
01/12/2009 at 10:44 MultiVaC says:
The SMART system looks pretty lame to me. It seems like the same same thing was accomplished more a more intuitive and skill based way by the Mirror’s Edge control method.
01/12/2009 at 11:04 Schmung says:
I wouldn’t like to try and headshot a moving target while moving and dealing with Mirrors Edge control system. It’s a nice way of bringing freedom of movement to the fore of the FPS without giving you twenty more buttons when you really want to be concentrating on aiming and suchlike.
01/12/2009 at 10:45 Okami says:
The enter derogatory term of choice here who complain about this beeing “dumbing down for consoletards” are the same kind of people who are responsible for Dragon Quest IX having traditional turn based battles instead of the realm time system seen in the first few trailers.
They’re nothing but bitter, conservative boys who’re adverse to change and see any kind of progress as a challenge to their narrow view of the world. Go play Quake 1 and pat yourself on the back for beeing true pc gamers.
01/12/2009 at 10:45 MultiVaC says:
*accomplished IN a more intuitive…
Why does the edit button keep going away?
01/12/2009 at 10:48 Taillefer says:
I liked the transition from loading screen to game.
01/12/2009 at 11:29 XM says:
I don’t like the gun wobbles as you walk that new games are adopting. They look too fake, I know fixed is very 90s but a subtle movement is best I think. But the game is looking good otherwise.
01/12/2009 at 16:45 Aubrey says:
Old stuff! That gun wobble is now synch’d properly. See: http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/showpost.php?p=202408&postcount=10
01/12/2009 at 23:48 Velvet Fist, Iron Glove says:
You missed the important quote from that post:
01/12/2009 at 11:44 quake1istehbestgameintheworld says:
I like all this possibility of move, but the SMART system seems a little meh. In a fps, you just never look where you go, you look where is the fight. So i don’t see how i can be practical. And the fact all the move we have seen can be donne with just JUMP (Hold JUMP to climb) and crouch (run + crouch for a slide) let me think that this SMART is just here for the marketing.
01/12/2009 at 13:43 Ado says:
I wouldn’t mind this SMART thing in combo with specific keys for the actions too.
I think we need to remember that this SMART system is probably all in aid of helping console players move more freely, as this can all be achieved in PC games already. We don’t mind having a few extra keys to press around our WSAD key set but consoles are limited by the controller.
Personally the single most annoying thing I find when playing on console is the controller, as it sucks in comparision to the KB Mouse combo. I want another game to throw the console gamers and hardcore gamers in the same arena again (like Q3 didfor a little while on DC) just so we can show them how lame they really are.
Thinking the SMART system will probably be like a SMART car, seems like a good idea until you get behind the wheel…
01/12/2009 at 14:09 Kadayi says:
Definitely like the idea of the streamlined context sensitive movement (I liked Mirrors Edge, but it was damn fiddly with M&K at times tbh), feature could potentially become as ubiquitous as primary and secondary weapons are these days.however not so keen on the butt ugly avatars (and apparent lack of females in the future) though. Promising, but that Art style, really?
01/12/2009 at 15:43 Lucas says:
I’m mildly relieved that Brink is delayed until at least next fall. Splash Damage are great developers and more than deserve the time to make it a AAA game. I hope Bethesda’s quality control is better as a publisher than a developer.
01/12/2009 at 16:09 Max says:
I’ve had an idea like this for a while, though I agree with the the other comments that one button for all actions is too simplified. I think that it would make more sense just to have the jump, sprint, and crouch buttons act intelligently with respect to your environment.
Also, what’s he doing shaking that pistol so violently?
04/12/2009 at 08:08 Rei Onryou says:
Assassin’s Creed introduced us to the idea of one-button allowing flowing, uninterrupted traversal of non-uniform environments from a third-person perspective. It proved that one-button does not necessarily remove a player from the game.
Mirror’s Edge introduced us to the idea of flowing, uninterrupted traversal of non-uniform environments from a first-person perspective, with the use of two buttons. The game consisted purely of ways to access and surmount the player’s surroundings, while offering little else. It proved that platform games, which had always previously been an “out-of-body” experience for spatial awareness purposes, could happen in first-person.
Brink is utilising both ideas. It’s just the next logical step in progression. Allowing a greater degree of freedom while not detracting from the core multi-player feature-set that we come to expect.
I had always considered Mirror’s Edge to be a prototype to be looked at for future games and I’m glad that it’s Splash Damage who are attempting it. ET:QW didn’t quite hit the spot (I blame the “necessity” of vehicular combat in FPSes), but W:ET was an unbeatable team-based multi-player game and I hope that they’ll be returning to more of those ideas.
31/12/2009 at 09:12 Riddla says:
I think part of the reason for the look/move SMART system being how it is, is this:
In real life, for example, how hard would it be to chase an enemy up to that detector and without taking your eyes off him for a second, vault up on top of it while still shooting at him and to jump down the other side doing the same?
In the game, as in real life, if you want to achieve flashy acrobatics in the middle of a gunfight, you’re going to have to take your eyes off the prize and expose yourself for the sake of a better vantage point, better cover etc in the heat of a firefight.
I think what SD are trying to do is at least give the feel that you are playing as your character in the story, rather than a faceless infinitely-clonable automaton with no difference except the visual that titles such as Unreal Tournament and Quake spew forth at you.
Looks very exciting, something I’m going to be giving a go for sure. :)
31/12/2009 at 10:44 eyemessiah says:
@: “smart button that jumped for you”
That’s why the only game for REAL PC-GAMING MEN is qwop. I hate those dumb games where you press W and it automatically runs for you!! Stupid console retardation!
@Totalbiscuit’s friend re. SF4
I agree – I’d love it if SF4 had a mode that was slightly slowed down, had more forgiving link timing and no-brainer special inputs – because there is a lot of SF4 that I understand but simply cannot execute. There is a whole level of gameplay that I’d love to be involved in but my reflexes\motor control simply aren’t up to it.
That said I don’t begrudge the hardcore SF4 guys their twitchy reflexy challenges – I love to watch those guys play each other and there aren’t so many highly polished pure arcade games these days.
@ The brink art style – I love it.
Very ugly and french. As much as of a fan of beautiful androgynous anime manwomans as I am, there is something desirable about being really seriously ugly, particularly in a shooter. Shame there are no ugly girls in it! That would have been something.
@ Not being able to perform complex movements without taking your reticule off your opponents forehead.
I’d say this is fair. Certain mechanical FPS conventions might make us feel entitled to be able to headshot the guy in front of us, instantaneously mouselook 180 degrees and headshot the guy behind us – all while running down a flight of stairs – but there isn’t much of a justification for this beyond convention. It might be easy to believe that your fps-avatar is a featureless sphere floating effortlessly a few feet above the ground, able to fire in any direction at a moments notice regardless of motion – but generally speaking he supposed to be, yknow, a guy.
31/12/2009 at 11:21 Tei says:
@eyemessiah
“Very ugly and french. As much as of a fan of beautiful androgynous anime manwomans as I am, there is something desirable about being really seriously ugly, particularly in a shooter. Shame there are no ugly girls in it! That would have been something.”
This is a dificult concept. I have made some research, and I have found that both the latin pulcher and the word neat comes from clean/nothing.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/neat
Maybe the thing, is what adjetives you want to attach to “mans”. If “nice man” is a desirable idea, “beatifull man”, “pretty man”, “handsome man”, or something here. There are clearly two different styles. One ends with mans femenized, like in the assian animes (assian culture?), the other is our own style (exception made for the frenchs), where man try to look pretty/beaty. I don’t know what adjetives best describe the manly man, since most I know seems to end on the femenine man side and pedofilia. Maybe theres some defense to be made of the word/concept “mature/developed” as opposed “cute/childish”. Or “Simple, but not too simple”, and demonize feminized mans as “too simple”, a dumbification of man.