http://www.incgamers.com/Columns/112/why-reviewers-dont-get-brink
Article: Why reviewers didn't get brink
dommafia
(dommafia)
#1
jazevec
(jazevec)
#3
My opinion: because reviewers don’t play games. Or at the very least don’t play the way we do - for fun, for extended periods of time.
Joe999
(Joe999)
#4
good article with lots of truth in it. but to be honest, i don’t play brink. it’s not that i don’t like the sound system, i absolutely hate it. i can’t stand this going from silent to loud all the time. i really do hope that a patch will allow me to change this “feature”. you don’t force that kind of stuff upon people, you just don’t. and i can’t change the sound cvars since they are all cheat protected beyond my understanding. in single player! and then there’s the level design. i checked out all levels, but hardly spent 10 minutes on each of them, because of the sound issue. they all look the same. since you are on a floating ship, i guess it’s hard to make et like diversity (oasis, fuel dump, radar). if i’d give review scores, my review wouldn’t be high either. what i do like is the parkour stuff. i hope that sd releases a map editor, so that some community race maps might be built.
regarding that article: i probably don’t get brink either. i totally loved et, i loved quake wars. with brink it’s different.
H3LLS1
(H3LLS1)
#6
Very nice article. Funny thing is…it was the vague comparisons to L4D and borderlands that brought me in. I never played Quake wars. But I liked the idea team play, objective based, class driven, and custom characters….so I gave it a shot. So far, very glad I made the choice.
But…to add a bit….and I’m sure some of yall have seen me say as much:
I think the fact it’s so different from CoD that is turning reviewers away. Hell, we see our own gamer-base whining for more black ops type play…it doesn’t surprise me that reviewers do the same. People expect to jump from black ops into this game and expect to never to miss a beat. And when they get here…they notice it’s NOT anything like CoD….they lose it. I’m a fan of CoD, truly (well MW2…black ops was junk that I sold for 10 bucks more than I paid lol)…but I like that you can get a bit more involved in the matches and your team here than just running around dodging noob tubes and quick scopers.
tokamak
(tokamak)
#9
ETQW got much higher scores simply because it never pretended to be anything other than it was.
KAS_Will
(KAS--Will)
#10
Exactly, what I hate is when critics talk about the replay value, but don’t even play the game for more than 24 hours at times. Game Informer said BRINK had a Moderate replay value, yet the critic only played the game for 2 days. I don’t doubt the game can get boring, but it has it’s pluses and how it’s addicted, I’ve totaled a whole 24 hours at least since getting BRINK…
trigg3r
(trigg3r)
#11
excellent article. I agree with pretty much everything he said; excepet this part:
many reviewers were looking for and/or expecting a game that was focused equally on single and multiplayer. Where did that expectation come from? I have no idea.
that’s bethesda/SD fault for selling Brink as a game that “blur the lines between single player and multiplayer” and an AI that acts and think as human players.
Shotgun_Surgeon
(Shotgun Surgeon)
#12
I cannot wait until games are no longer compared to COD. I said it before and I’ll keep saying it… CoD is an infectious disease that is tearing apart the FPS genre. I do not understand why people like an unbalanced game where people spawn behind you and you are killed more by killstreaks that was ‘earned’ by a camper with a noobtube. I don’t understand why COD games have ‘team’ game modes, yet give the players the tools to be more of a one man army instead of a team player.
What’s worse than being compared to COD is a developer trying to ‘topple’ COD. For example, I am really afraid for battlefield 3. I cannot imagine what dice has done to make the game more accessible to COD players. That’s why I love Brink. SD never tried to steal away COD players or even try to beat COD. They strayed away from COD as much as possible… and action itself is the reason why I respect SD much more than any developer out there.
Jamieson
(Jamieson)
#13
Very good article, he hit the nail on a couple of Issues I want to reiterate, the first being how most sites review games these days. You will often find that reviewers don’t even bother to play the PC version of the game and just copy over the Xbox review and score. SD knowing the Xbox version was inferior should have released it later like the article suggested. This way the PC reviews would have been better and they would have had longer to fix the Xbox version.
I think another important point is the reviewers themselves. I think the article is right in saying that they just don’t get it. If you go into Brink trying to play it like its COD or BF then its not going to work out well. The game feels 10x better with good teamwork and communication. Also who said it was against the law to release a MP only game? I spend most of my gaming time playing multiplayer games not Singleplayer, perhaps the reviewers missed the fact that SD has been releasing MP only games for nearly a decade.
jazevec
(jazevec)
#14
Meanwhile RockPaperShotgun says they would love to see a “guns&conversations” type of a game set in the Brink world (on Ark). They are concerned that if Brink proves to be a failure, the setting they like so much will be lost.
Disposable Worlds and Imagining Brink 2
tokamak
(tokamak)
#15
[QUOTE=trigg3r;317830]excellent article. I agree with pretty much everything he said; excepet this part:
that’s bethesda/SD fault for selling Brink as a game that “blur the lines between single player and multiplayer” and an AI that acts and think as human players.[/QUOTE]
Agreed this is entirely down to bad marketing. It’s not unreasonable to review a game on what it’s being sold on.
dommafia
(dommafia)
#16
[QUOTE=trigg3r;317830]excellent article. I agree with pretty much everything he said; excepet this part:
that’s bethesda/SD fault for selling Brink as a game that “blur the lines between single player and multiplayer” and an AI that acts and think as human players.[/QUOTE]
yeah this bothered me from the beginning. I don’t think you can include SD at all in that equation though. Bethesda is in charge of marketing not SD. All those interviews we saw were pretty much a script of how bethesda wanted to “sell” the game. Certainly SD was making that aspect of the game but I can’t picture that their view was the same as what was told in interviews. It just didnt sound like SD tbh. They wanted to create a good training experience in single player to try and convert them to multiplayer. Remember that part? then all of a sudden it was shifted to avoid scaring away customers that didnt care about multi at all. Who else would have made that decision? Ok I’m sounding like jesse ventura now.
I guess my views are a bit skewed though cuz I’m a firm SD supporter but they ****ing earned it tbh… I’ve been playing their games since 2001 or 02 and have had a blast playing their games competitively or otherwise. The release date was no random luck and the early release wasn’t a gift. We know who to blame here.
tokamak
(tokamak)
#17
You don’t even need to point fingers at one particular instance, simply whoever thought up that marketing move blundered on it. It was a great idea at the time but if you do it you better make sure you can live up to the expectations.
Frankly Brink’s marketing created expectations for something the game didn’t actually try to do.
fprovost
(fprovost)
#18
don’t wanna make publicity but gamerdood does, not alot of games on there but the reviews that are there are good.
Coolaguy
(Coolaguy)
#19
I read the article, and I enjoyed it.
Another way of summarizing your article is stating that Brink, in terms of gameplay (not some of the user-friendly attempts), is best-suited for the hardcore audience that has aspirations of teamwork in a multiplayer first-person shooter. (It is also fun as a co-operative experience for first-person shooter fans.)
In other words, Brink’s gameplay formula doesn’t represent the majority of reviewers’ or, for that matter, gamers’ gameplay preferences these days. That is, videogame audience has shifted and is now, in general, decidedly less super-hardcore (i.e. more “casual”).
For the sake of the shift in the gaming preferences of the videogame audience as a whole, I don’t I find fault with negative or low-scoring reviews. Would-be disappointed gamers shouldn’t be mislead to play a game that isn’t suited to their preferences. Likewise, reviewers are obligated to assign a review score that reflects the biases of the demographics that they chiefly appeal to. I don’t begrudge reviewers for this. On the other hand, where reviews can be irksome is when they assert their opinions as objectively infallible and thereby discount the merit of other gaming preferences.
Videogame reviews notwithstanding, Brink has a lot to offer, particularly for players craving a hardcore, multiplayer-exclusive, objective-based, and team-focussed first-person shooter. It is what it is.
[QUOTE=tokamak;317784]ETQW got much higher scores simply because it never pretended to be anything other than it was.[/QUOTE]Not familiar, personally, with that game aside from being aware that it is a Splash Damage property… BUT I agree completely.
Some of the botched design choices in Brink seem to stem from an attempt to broaden its appeal. Others are avant garde and inspired.
Personally, I can speak to the fact that I haven’t experienced the level of teamwork or coordination amongst players in other first-person shooters that I have in Brink (with the possible exception of the first Left 4 Dead). For all of its faults, Brink is still incredibly innovative and offers an excellent experience for those shopping for what Brink has on offer.