I found the gameplay itself to be slow rather than the movement speed of players and like 3suns said it may have been because the players were greenhorns or maybe they wanted to help the viewers make sense of what was going on.
Edit: And no auras, yus! (The teams appeared blue and red, though, is that because of their customization or an improvement of the blue/red silhouettes?
Only in the rooms modified to host 32+ players. Remember, when the game was released, it was 11 per side max, even on the PC. All those mayhem rooms, even now, are 24+ player rooms. Can you imagine how empty and boring a 6v6 match (the competitive team sizes) would be if the players were all noobs? They might not even run into an enemy for 5 minutes.
Still, a pc gamer doesn’t need to know the map in order to be familiar with the basic mechanics. In every shooter I can instantly dive in and be a decent player.
Whats with all the glowing stuff?
I can’t say I enjoyed watching that video much, something just didn’t feel right about the whole presentation.
Will have to give it another look when back at home with sound 
H0RSE is going to town on all the dissidents in the replies. Haha.
@Chris I wouldn’t worry to much about the glow. It’s likely that you can adjust the post-processing.
I personally wasn’t a fan of the particular narration. “Now that guy is gonna be on the lookout to help Jolly because he’s helped him so much!” - It’s a fine thought… but clearly Richard has never played ET or QW lol. I kid… I kid. But the narration was cringe-worthy at times.
A couple of thoughts:
I wasn’t a fan of the glowing ‘upgraded’ weapon. It wasn’t so much distracting as it was annoying. I dunno, maybe I’m being redundant but I wasn’t a fan. Even like some ‘add-on’ to the weapon would have been more appropriate I think - as opposed to smearing glowstick goo all over it.
The bomb planting animation. I can understand what one of the earlier posters meant by it being slow. He simply means that after the guy rattles off a 32 number code with his fingers in 0.2 seconds to arm it, he takes his sweet time actually putting the device on the gate. There is obviously a sense of urgency during the arming of the device, so why not while actually planting it on the gate? Slam that shiz on there!
I noticed part of the bomb arming animation, his fingers occasionally would hit the left side of the screen where there didn’t seem to be any kind of ‘interactive’ button to hit? Maybe I overlooked something though.
The engineer turret planting was a bit odd. At first when I was watching it I thought it was some really weird 3rd person view that set your character has a green blurred mess of a blob. Maybe it was the high level of ‘bloom’ effect, but I was confused by it. I think just the regular green transparency like in QW would be more appropriate?
I’m interested if when we see some PC action, we’ll see people unintentionally doing parkour, especially if the SMART button is really the sprint button. I can see it now - people attempting to strafe-jump are constantly home-plate sliding across the map or others sprinting near walls and turning around quickly or looking up to scan for players accidentally start climbing random things. I only call out the PC version in this regard because of the mouse look speed increase over usual console controls.
Otherwise, I’m even more excited for this game. I sent the video to everyone I knew who at one point played FPS’s in hopes to hype them up a bit further (with certain narration disclaimers of course). 2011 can’t come soon enough!
The glowing gun looks bad, and the sort of outline thing around the players looks silly. both of these things obscure the game visual style, which is one of the big draws of the game.
Thanks for the vid beth/sd. Good stuff
Good:
Bad:
Ugly:
Several people have commented on the time and nature of the bombing animation.
I think the duration is appropriate - risk and danger is a good thing.
The animation itself is not realistic/accurate, but I like the cartoon-y style and I think it fits with overall art design. I would be very surprised if it was not intentional.
[QUOTE=3Suns;242533]Several people have commented on the time and nature of the bombing animation.
I think the duration is appropriate - risk and danger is a good thing.
The animation itself is not realistic/accurate, but I like the cartoon-y style and I think it fits with overall art design. I would be very surprised if it was not intentional.[/QUOTE]
+1.
As I said, if you can’t get something planted in 4 seconds you have a very crap team and are crap yourself. Clear the room of enemies before attempting the objective. Duh.
And I agree, once again, in the heat of the moment when playing, are you REALLY going to be focusing on the fact that the guys finger doesn’t exactly press a button when you’re focus SHOULD be on who’s coming around the corner. I bet a lot of you will use the third person view when attempting objectives anyway, so it becomes a moot point.
Nice to see the game coming along, overjoyed to see the environment animating (no moon lander flags in Brink!). My two critiques.
It does look a bit slow. I hope this is low FOV coupled with a console slowdown. SMART also seemed a bit slow compared to other games where you’d have just double jumped up those boxes. 
I may have missed it but did Jolly really not use the (paraphrasing) “so easy to use, it’s just a tap, critical to communication between players, gives bonus xp” mission system when he was a medic?
[QUOTE=LyndonL;242420]My concern from that video was the second person he killed at the start - the ironsights weren’t even on the enemy for most of the time that his (enemy’s) health was dropping.[/QUOTE]This seems true. Maybe the hitboxes haven’t been perfected yet. 3Suns’ guess is valid too because Brink’s XP system sounds elaborate enough to have things like that.
Since it’s being reiterated, I actually pointed that out. But I don’t think they had intent to make the video “slow but interesting”. They were just figuring things out as they played. The pace is probably fine. If you were sitting there playing it for the first time it would seem overwhelming at first. Wolf ET has the same effect on me if I stop playing for 6 months and then try it out again. Everything is way too fast and I have to spend hours adapting to it. Everyone in this game is someone who stood in line for it at PAX so they’ve never played it before. They also didn’t have to have any qualifications whatsoever so some of them probably don’t even play shooters. The video gives a misleading pace.
It’s a transparent green textured mesh with bloom. A green outline to help you position it. The blob you saw was probably from the video compression.
I believe it may have been pointed out somewhere that this is from a camera? All the color and contrast is pretty muted. The animation isn’t totally fluid so I don’t think this was captured but actually video recorded with a camera. Whatever was being displayed on a monitor was recorded by a camera for simplicity I guess. When that is done there is major quality loss and glowing things will look even more glowy. If not, it’s still very compressed.
Couple of things i noticed having watched it a couple more times… there was the ridiculous amount of ‘nade shooting’ kills in the kill log.
Im all for having things like that, as long as it takes a decent amount of skill.
Otherwise it will be considered a cheap kill, and nerds will rage!
yeah, I’m a little worried about that too, as well as the possibility of misinterpretation of context when using tools (since one button apparently handles all class actions).
Good catch. I think it’s totally unrealistic to think anyone is going to take time to select a mission in the middle of combat. SD apparently hasn’t learned yet that you can’t force less than optimum behaviour on a player (even by “bribing” them with XP) just because they think it will make the game better (i.e. notifying the other players that a medic is on the way). Even if I’m away from the action and it’s easy for me to pick revive player as a mission, what if there’s 4 guys down? Do I have to pick between them and only one gets the message? Do they all get the message, or all within a certain distance of the guy I picked to revive in the mission? The revive mission to notify the guy is a nice thought, and it would be cool if they make it work (didn’t work in ETQW)… or they could just turn on VOIP by default.
Hopefully the XP reward is the same whether you pick the mission or not, so long as you revive the guy you did your job. Also, did anyone notice, does the XP award kick in when you throw the guy the syringe or when he actually rezes himself? I’m guessing when he gets it, if he chooses not to revive or gets gibbed afterwards not your fault…
edit: watched it again. He got 100XP for reviving the guy. Picking the revive mission is only worth 2XP (and it had one players name so I guess it picks the closest where someone already hasn’t selected a mission to rvive him). So I guess who cares if you get it or not.
There seems to be a huge difference between XP for class based actions and kills, which should be a great encouragement for team play. It will be interesting to see how much XP the operative gets for his missions since there will probably be fewer opportunities.
Separate topic: Someone please point out where the pips are and how they are being used up as buffs are handed out and so forth. Is it the thing in the lower left corner … what is that thing, a gamepad’s D buttons? It looked like it changed when buffing or reviving. I expected something like a power bar divided into sections…
edit: OK, I see them now, there is a power meter around the perimter of that D-pad thing (if that’s what it is).
My guess is, that another way around it would be to point your cursor at the incapped player, and then double tap the mission menu to tell that player that youre going to rev him.
Looks like you get 100XP for throwing the syringe to the guy, and another 100 when he actually uses it, and maybe even more than that because it was hard to tell but when he was revived his health was boosted and it looked like he got XP for that at the same time?
Also XP health boosts and Ammo boosts look to be dependent on how much health or Ammo the guy needs (which could probably go without saying but interesting to see it in action).
It’s going to be interetsing to see how they balance the XP (I’m sure these are changing all the time right now) to keep one class from being the favourite because it’s easier to get XP in that class. For instance, when you need more medics and less soldiers (because the gate is already blown), if there are fewer opportunities to get XP from handing out ammo their will be fewer soldiers. So they could use this mechanic to encourage a proper balance of classes. (If there was a sniper I think we’d be seeing fewer of them
Lots to think about in that respect.
[QUOTE=Auzner;242432]
Also another thing I noticed is that you can see the transition jump where the explosive ceases to be an equipped item and is deleted then transplanted into the map as an added object…[/QUOTE]
It’s an Alpha version right? so a few bugs are to be expected, and even this one seems pretty minor.
[QUOTE=Auzner;242432]
I really hate the glowing gun to represent a buffed gun. Is that so every friend and foe can know about it? If not I’d rather it just be an indiscreet icon somewhere. When I get very used to a game I eventully turn draw weapons off if it’s allowed. The animations they make are actually kind of distracting.[/QUOTE]
I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off somewhere.
[QUOTE=Auzner;242432]
It looks like XP for hits and kills is extremely low. 100 XP for doing a class action and then 10-20 for a kill next to the team and objective? Or is that per hit? It seemed too low though. I know the point is to not go out on your own but even next to the group and the objective?[/QUOTE]
Are you talking about when he was a Soldier, Medic, or Engineer? Because the Soldier was getting 60ish points per kill, while the other two were getting substantially less. Also i belive that the experience you get for buffs, heals, kills, ect. are calculated by your class, distance form objective, and distance from teammates. Finally, as this is still an Alpha version the EXP values for actions are probably still subject to change.
I hate you.
[QUOTE=Auzner;242432]
Everything else in the video is more good visual confirmation of things I’ve read about and saw previews of. I’d really like to see… how initial choices are made.[/QUOTE]
We probably won’t know that until the game comes out.
I’m of the thinking that stuff like Mission Selection and XP sounds fantastic on paper and swiftly turns into a flustercluck when people actually use it. If SD, after months of testing, are skipping the mission selection then that says to me it’s unnecessary except to augment the XP and radio chatter parts of the game.
I’ve no doubt it’ll be a huge improvement over that of ETQWs and I love the idea of it telling you clearly when you’re down that someone is coming (their distance/s would be nice and if they die enroute more so). Just not convinced it will be enough improvement to make it worth using and seeing SD not use it doesn’t help.
Of course, the mission system might just be flaky right now and they’re not using it because of that.
Iron sights take up more of the screen. I said I like having that crap turned off. Also I don’t like having to press another button to take aim. Wolf ET and L4D don’t have this.