That SD spread themselves a little thin on making BRINK? It almost seemed as if taking on a project to make the game on three platforms sort of left out enough time to really give the game the polish it deserved, from a gameplay and technical standpoint. I do think Bethesda does have a lot to do with the unpolished release and these somewhat lengthy patch times to do things that seem to be no brainer and easy fixes. Like spawn time fixes and gun balances, weren’t these things that could be done on the fly through netvars? And yet it took over a month to implement. They must tread through alot of red tape from Beth just to get these small fixes pushed out the door or something.
Now before people start saying I’m trolling I’m not. I logged in almost 100hrs within the first week of release and loved every minute. In fact I hope to have some constructive discussions if at all possible so all you known trolls please don’t bother posting in this thread. If it derails into another pissing contest SD you’re more than welcome to delete/lock this thread.
As a warning, I am/was looking at Brink from a competitive standpoint so my views will be biased towards that. That being said, the more I played this game the more apparent to me that the game lacked any real depth to it. I always believed a game should have at least 3 aspects with good depth: Movement, Gunplay, Maps.
Movement: The whole SMART system on paper seems great and for the most part it is. It works as advertised mostly. The problem seems to stem from how shallow the system is. It just seems very binary in nature either you do it or don’t. There’s really no leeway to the system. If you looked at the more movement oriented games such as Quake 3 or even some of SD’s past games, if you saw a video of some of the things people did in them your reactions were usually ‘man I’ll have to practice that to do it’ and usually you would need to put in some effort to achieve some of those tricks. I’ve seen some brink movement videos and although they were pretty clever, never once did I think to myself that I couldn’t do it on the first try. If that was SD’s intent thats fine, not all games have to be the bunnyhopping/strafejumping fest that other games are. There are alot of other subtle meta games to movement though. Such as sprinting, there should be some conscious thought that goes into sprinting but its not, since there’s no limit to how long you can sprint everyone that I play with just seem to want it on perma-sprint. There are a lot of games that walking/running plays a role into gameplay. Having your footsteps heard etc made how you moved important. With the way the sound is implemented, with all the going deaf effects and and the radar, the footstep sounds meta game sorta gets distorted and doesn’t play a big role.
Gunplay: This is probably the bigger sticking point for me. It just feels like whenever I’m in gun fight 1v1, it feels like I’m fighting the lottery spread more than my opponent who I’m facing and when I come out on top it never feels as satisfying as it should. The current movement system could probably be overlooked if gunplay mechanics were good. There are alot of good constructive threads regarding how the guns should handle far as spread/recoil that i agree with so I won’t go into that. I do however feel that weapon management is somewhat lacking as well. For the most part there’s really not much of depth when it comes to how you manage your weapons. You use your main and swap to your alt if you run out of ammo and want a fast swap to finish someone. It mostly plays like this for alot of situations. Pistols don’t seem to hold the weight they should in this game, I found it odd that when I played I used the pistol as a long range weapon as a light and use my smg for everything else mostly. I think this will be resolved with gun balance tweaks and shotguns and such are lined up with the rest however.
Maps: I don’t have too much issues with the maps, for the most part they’re good. It just seems…when you look from an overview standpoint and look at all the angles and attacks you can make, the maps seem really deep and diverse. But for whatever reason when you actually play some of the maps those deep gameplay potential never pans out and it just feels really linear. Good thing is there’s always new maps that can be made or even tweaks to current ones.
What’s your guys take on brink and what if any issues do you have or solutions? I think it should be said that when discussing we should bring up what platform were talking about. For me all these comments are coming from the PC. I have played brink at a friends who has the console version and honestly most of these issues don’t bother me when playing on the console. The gun mechanics actually feel ok and movement fits fine. I know this will have PC people bring up how consoles dumbed it down for the pc. Let’s not go there. As much as I think SD should have spent more time tailoring it a bit more on the PC side, I don’t think they were afforded the luxury, and I just hope either SD or hopefully modders if/when the SDK comes out will remedy that.