Beginning of the End for Brink?

(LightningV) #1

Gstaff: “The Brink stats site is no longer active. Thanks to everyone that participated.”

Well, I guess that’s it then. :rolleyes:

(Ruben0s) #2

Pretty sad that a service already goes down after 8 months.

(wolfnemesis75) #3

Talk about lacking support for a game; way to go Beth. Wow.

(DarkangelUK) #4

There needs to be a player base to support in the 1st place, running that stuff costs money and it’s not worth it for a small amount of players that have even admitted themselves they don’t play as much any more.

(yoomazir) #5

Fixed for you, who cares or play this game anyway, 5 people tops?

(NthLegion) #6

And that’s that. If there’s ever a Brink 2, I’ll be playing it. However, I kind of hope Bethesda gives it to another studio. Nothing against SD (other than their attempt to bs console players when it came to the last patch), but they just don’t have the resources to support the console versions.

Of course, I’ve seen other much bigger developers abandon console versions as well (looking at you Bioware), so maybe it doesn’t really matter.

(McAfee) #7

When the game 1st came out, patches could have saved it, on all platforms. But

  1. They took too damn long, in part because of trying to fix too much in one go, and mostly things that are not even broken (Expansion Anyone?) They should have fixed the critical problems ASAP and not hold back the importance stuff because you want to bundle it with some irrelevant stuff. While some waitied, others went to other games.

  2. Maybe “too proud” too change the game. The community clearly pointed out what it didn’t like from that start…

Once upon a time there was an ice cream shop that didn’t have vanilla ice cream, and people were like: “You know what, this ice cream shop is kinda nice, but you should really try to have vanilla ice cream here.” And the owner of the shop were like: “We are the ice cream men, and in all our wisdom we tell you, you don’t want vanilla ice cream, you want chocolate ice cream”. And the people were like: “Nah, we tried chocolate, and we tried vanilla, and we really want vanilla in here”. And the owners were still on: “We’ll, we have chocolate which is better, and if you want vanilla you can always get cookies and cream, which is better too.”

Then they expanded the shop and added a few branches, but still no Vanilla ice cream. And then they changed the cookies and cream to have less cookies. Finally they said they were considering adding Vanilla, but they don’t want to add just one flavor to our roster, they were looking for a bigger change. People kept going a few times on the following weeks, expecting Vanilla to be there, but they never said anything else about the status of Vanilla, nor had any launch dates. They occasionally did talk about a few other flavors they might add thou. Eventually the people who wanted Vanilla ice cream just went to buy it elsewhere.

(Joe999) #8

[QUOTE=Ruben0s;395125]Pretty sad that a service already goes down after 8 months.[/QUOTE] Well, that’s 8 months. I’m going OT and take a look at Rage. That game was dead after 3 months. No support from Bethesda or id whatsoever. And I doubt that idstudio will ever come. And speaking of Brink: I had more hopes for a game coming from Splash Damage. First, the levels look all the same. Every single one of them. No diversity. Designing a game where each level is indoors was the wrong choice. Makes me wonder why those professionals didn’t see that. And then there’s the awful sound. I had no idea that sound could ruin a game even if the graphics are great. But it did.

(tangoliber) #9

They “tweeted” in January that the level designer for Rage is coming. I sort of believe them…because id is slow like that. But then, I wouldn’t be surprised if it never came.

I don’t understand the complaint about the levels. They aren’t all indoors… many of them have outdoor segments, and Container City and Shipyard are pretty much 100% outdoors maps. I don’t know how you can say that Aquarium looks the same as Reactor, or Terminal looks the same as Shipyard. I also don’t get the complaint about the sound…

(tangoliber) #10

[QUOTE=McAfee;395206]When the game 1st came out, patches could have saved it, on all platforms. But

  1. They took too damn long, in part because of trying to fix too much in one go, and mostly things that are not even broken (Expansion Anyone?) They should have fixed the critical problems ASAP and not hold back the importance stuff because you want to bundle it with some irrelevant stuff. While some waitied, others went to other games.
    [/QUOTE]

I think they planned on releasing patches fast, but ran into problems when their netvar system turned out to be broken. They spent 1 or 2 patches just fixing netvars so that they would work for the future…and then the community died so they pretty much never used them.

(Joe999) #11

Oasis, Gold Rush, Fuel Dump, Radar, Railgun, Seawall … they all are distinct. In Brink, even if some levels are meant to be “outdoors”, they still feel like being played indoors. Only because the texture is different, it doesn’t mean that the map feels different.

(.Chris.) #12

Yeah the levels did look largely ‘same’, you had white levels and orange levels.

W:ET and ET:QW has some awesome diversity in the aesthetics of the maps. Whilst the art style in Brink was quite nice, having the game take place on a small island did hinder what they could do as opposed to being able to set their maps anywhere in the world as with previous games.

Also, agree with Joe, the outdoor sections where largely just indoor sections without a roof.

(zenstar) #13

Except people still play it. A lot of people.
It’s still in Steam’s top 100: 470 current players and 1,364 peak player count.
It never left the top 100 since it was released.
The difference between Rage and Brink was Rage was able to stand on it’s own 2 feet and people still enjoy playing it. Maybe if Brink had had a real single-player experience we’d be having a different conversation.

(tangoliber) #14

I guess I don’t really like open fields and big outdoor maps all that much. As a kid, I hated it when Doom 2 went outside for the open levels…I always wanted to stay inside the labyrinths. In most games, I always prefer the indoor maps. Not to mention that I don’t think big open maps would fit with Brink’s gameplay design at all.

And I really like the design of the Brink maps…with all of its different routes, vents, and verticality. I feel like Splash Damage is sort of like a more successful Ion Storm, in that, they put a lot of focus on design… they have lots of good ideas, and great mappers…You can see how idealistic they are about design when it comes to the 2nd part of Reactor…and how needlessly complex it is for such a brief and focused objective. But then, like Ion Storm, they lack the technical know-how and production efficiency to back it up. I imagine that they are trying to change that though.

Also, Rage is amazing. I wish it didn’t have the driving and story… It would be much better if they just put the FPS corridor segments one after the other with a Doom style results screen at the end of each one. The guns aren’t that special (and some of them were designed around iron sighting, which I hate)…but wow… the AI is amazing. Especially in how different the AI is among the different gangs. The work that went into the environment was really nice as well. Its really the most re-playable FPS for me in years, thanks to the AI. I just hope that the level designer will be easy enough to use that lots of people are creating new levels.
My one issue with id tech 5 is that bullets don’t seem to affect the environment well. I’m not sure if id tech 4 always had this problem, but Brink certainly has it. Some textures in Brink don’t even take bullet decals, and the decals usually look pretty weak. In Rage, there are columns that seem to want to be chipped away, but there is no destructibility at all. When you shoot a concrete wall, you don’t see small pieces of the wall fall onto the ground. When you shoot a metallic wall, you don’t see sparks fly off and bounce off the ground. It feels like the environment is merely a holograph, and the player and his bullets are in a different dimension.

(Darksider) #15

Despite Brink’s issues, overall the game was a Customer Service failure, patches came out too late, other features like stat tracking/clan features came out too late which was something that should of been with the game from the beginning not release almost 4 months later. It was just a hot mess of a release that could been saved with some aggressive hot patches and updates but the vibe everyone got from Bethsucky was of Whatever attitude about the game, We all knew contractual rope bound Splash Damage could not do much or say much in regards to Brink in the beginning.

(MoonOnAStick) #16

They did release that texture sharpening patch recently, so I wouldn’t rule out level editing tools or the fabled high-res texture pack (which sounds like it’ll require an absurd amount of graphics RAM). One thing Rage and Brink have in common is getting shafted by AMDs **** opengl drivers.

Oasis, Gold Rush, Fuel Dump, Radar, Railgun, Seawall … they all are distinct. In Brink, even if some levels are meant to be “outdoors”, they still feel like being played indoors. Only because the texture is different, it doesn’t mean that the map feels different.

This was my biggest disappointment with Brink (even more than the movement or the gunplay). In ET:QW you could go anywhere, stick mines/3rd eyes/tactical shields on anything. It was a proper mini sandbox.

Brink felt so linear by comparison: no roofs in the favelas, walled-off objectives and a break in the map on Founders Tower. I take tangoliber’s point about the map design being focused and idealistic but, if you’re just getting funnelled from one set piece to the next, it feels like playing the same round over and over. Not quite as restrictive as BFBC2/BF3 Rush mode though: Refuel was pretty open (of course the sound only worked half the time but you can’t have everything).

I’d much rather have smaller/simpler maps that are consistent as opposed to invisible walls or geometry that doesn’t SMART. Give me Quake 1 over Rage.

(DrpPlates) #17

[QUOTE=zenstar;395236]Except people still play it. A lot of people.
It’s still in Steam’s top 100: 470 current players and 1,364 peak player count.
It never left the top 100 since it was released.[/QUOTE]

LOL- it must be all UK players and UK time, cause i havent seen Brink in the top 100 in ages…

(Darksider) #18

He’s talking about Rage in his reply to someone else.

(zenstar) #19

Correctomundo.

The Steam stats are worldwide. There are no seperate UK and US stats (or EU or any individual region).

(DrpPlates) #20

DOH! my bad…

never finished Rage- game got boring real fast for me… just not into the whole, go here talk to blah blah - i need ‘this’ go here to get it come back - now go here and see blah blah… over and over…

but that’s just me…

now for Stink, I mean Brink - take it the game is bye bye? logged in last night, no servers (PC version)…