AusGamers in-depth Brink Preview and Video Interview

(danj0r) #1

Hi guys. Here’s yet another E3 Preview for Brink. I thought I’d drop by and share since by looking around, we’ve gone into a little more detail than most other publications (a luxury of not being in a mad rush to get our E3 articles online asap).

AusGamers Brink First-look Preview
http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/2755155

AusGamers Brink Video Interview & Transcript Q&A with Richard Ham
http://www.ausgamers.com/news/read/2755333

Thanks for checking us out. I’m a big ET fan (like I’m sure a lot of others here are) so can’t wait to hear some more about Brink.

(tokamak) #2

Amazing, shame I got my hopes a bit too far up in interpreting the thread title as a ‘first in depth brink preview video’.

(Salteh) #3

Cool - thanks for posting! :slight_smile:

(darthmob) #4

nice interview. it’s always good to see questions from someone who has played ET before and can be more specific.

hopefully there will be dedicated servers for the pc version. it would be a shame to not use them just because it’s different on consoles. there are just way too many advantes over peer-to-peer networking to change it. I did not really understand why there should be a lot more costs for bethesda with a dedicated server system. all you need is an official master server and the rest would be taken care of by the community. it has always been like that.

I like the idea of having a persistent character which is the same for both sections. I wonder if you will be able to have multiple characters simultaneously so that you can specify each for the role you want. a heavy character for badassness, a lighter as a medic and so on…

(Floris) #5

I’m really confused by Richard’s answer in the video interview, about a dedicated server system from Brink. I can’t remember the last time I played a multiplayer FPS title on the PC, which did not have dedicated servers. Besides, how do you want to feature a fair ranking system if everyone’s playing peer to peer on the PC, that’s not secure at all right?

(kamikazee) #6

/me hopes that we’re not going for a Battlefield-like inventory system…

Oh, and stats = t3h 3v1|_ !!!111!!!

(Rahdo) #7

I think the clue to why I confused the issue there is in my opening statement of that interview:

That is an excellent question and I am not very well suited to answer that.

Sorry and yeah, see the thing is I’m pretty sure that we are allowing standard dedicated servers, but when I was doing the interview, somewhere in the back of my head, I dimly remembered a coder saying we might re purpose the console networking system somehow. But I couldn’t for the life of me remember how, or even who it was that said that (plus this was my final interview at E3, so I was a bit frazzled too). So I kind of just blurted that stuff out, since I wasn’t even remotely expecting good detailed questions like that (after 3 days of talking about the SMART button over and over :slight_smile: )

So it’s 840 on a Friday night, and as such I can’t get an answer now, but I’ll corner Ed, our online services coder,next week and try to get the straight dope on this topic, and report back here.

Sorry again for the confusion. Take pity on a simple networking caveman. :confused:

(darthmob) #8

thanks for clearing that up!

(Mustang) #9

Another great interview Rahdo
Good job
Really looking forward to some gameplay vids now

(danj0r) #10

Awesome. Thanks for that Rahdo.

To clarify, the main reason that question (Will the game have dedicated server support on PC) is so important to us Australians is that our smaller population and geographic remoteness doesn’t really favour peer to peer models.

If we’re matched in games with players in the US or Europe (because there’s not always enough Aussies online to match us with), they’re always going to be laggy to us and us to them and it knocks out a lot of the fun for both parties.

This factor made ET:QW often unplayable on Xbox 360/PS3 for us. Whereas for the PC version, local service providers were able to host servers, Aussie players congregate on them and enjoy consistently low latency games.

So that’s why not just dedicated servers, but standalone dedicated server software that third parties can run is important to us in places like Australia.

Given the cooperative focus, I’m hoping Brink will offer something similar to what Valve have done with Left 4 Dead on PC. It would be even more awesome if local game service providers could run dedi servers for Xbox and PS3 players too.

(SockDog) #11

Great interview. Thanks Danj0r.

F1 for dedicated servers on the PC.

(Nail) #12

are there any PC shooter games that use peer to peer instead of dedicated servers ?

(danj0r) #13

No major ones to my knowledge. Most RTS games do though.

The bigger issue is really the availability of standalone dedicated server software though. A lot of shooters release this as an after-thought, some weeks after release, some never.

When game server providers have to upload an entire DVD iso, mount, install then navigate a gui menu just to start a dedicated server, there’s not going to be many places to play.

Splash Damage nailed it with ET:QW though, ranked and unranked, so one would hope we’re still in good hands for Brink :slight_smile:

EDIT: Splash Damage have kindly confirmed that Brink will definitely have a traditional client/server setup for PC .