Brink 2: Would You Buy It?

(Chief) #101

As much as I wanted Brink to succeed only a complete fanboy would keep on defending the game without question and overlook its many flaws.

As for SD, the argument that ‘It’s the publisher’s fault and not the developer’s’ doesn’t stick. Maybe Bethesda did force SD to release the game prematurely but the fact remains that SD has been almost completely silent towards the community with regards to the many issues that plague their product.

The very least they could have done was be more active on their own forums and respond towards requests/complaints as written down by the community. So no, I won’t buy a Brink 2 and I will not buy another SD game unless I’ve seen reviews (I was silly enough to preorder Brink, something I rarely do anyway for exactly this sort of risk) and have tasted the general consensus about the state of the game upon release.

(ButchCassidy) #102

Sorry SD but I voted No to buying Brink2…
My reasons?
Well…let me see…

The Server support was nothing short of aweful with regards to servers constantly either crashing or
dropping offline…Took you guys nearly 2 months to get them fixed so sorry not really good enough if you want your game to be a winner with the people who run the servers for your game…

Promised PC DLC has still not arrived…Even though you do not need to get it QA’d by anyone (unlike XBox & PS3)

Finally the actual game was really not that good tbh…the Parkmour was nice but was not the game changer everyone expected it to be and the lack of gametypes & maps made the game get real boring real quick
And despite a really nice looking character mod UI…The grfx in-game were pretty poor and had even worse performance…So all in all a new Brink is not for me really…

(alberto) #103

absolutly not

(DarkangelUK) #104

Regardless of Brinks shortcomings and faults, and regardless of my personal opinion towards the game itself, I’ve still managed to rack up 50hrs of play time which other games I’ve paid more for have failed to do. I’d buy Brink 2 because a) I think SD will learn from this, and b) they’re still top notch guys and I want to support them. I can only see Brink 2 being better than Brink, so that would mean another 50+hrs of play time minimum.

(sereNADE) #105

[QUOTE=wolfnemesis75;353259]Here’s what I was trying to point out last night. And what would make Brink 2 very successful. Most of what I outlined has to do with casual players and console specifically.

Four biggest criticisms of Brink (Console):

1.) Lack of traditional campaign. In conjunction with that is the A.I. on your team in campaign doesn’t help (*casual players) completing objectives. Most people play campaign and not multiplayer. So this is a causal focus fix.
2.) Multiplayer was confusing whether you were playing with Bots or Humans. Lack of Party/Lobby System
3.) Defense bias. Even out most of the maps in terms of balance. Get Sec Vs Res %50 win/loss.
4.) Lag. (Fixed)

Fixes

1.) More Traditional Campaign: (Slightly) Add more cutscenes and choose two protagonists to follow. One for Security, one for Resistance and we get a bit of back story. Add longer cutscenes (think Bioshock) specifically to campaign similar to Shipyard only extend to get a bit of back story. E3 trailer. (*Edit down these cutscenes for multiplayer)

2.) Make campaign easier for casual players and friendly bots complete challenges/objectives. Add a Normal difficulty that is easy compared to Brink 1. Basically, make the game easy if you play alone and scale difficulty as human players join for co-op.

Multiplayer Fixes.

1.) Streamline the game modes as follows:

Freeplay (2 modes six playlists total)
Objective= Standard or Ranked(Competitive) or Custom(Private)
Stopwatch= Standard or Ranked(Competitive)or Custom(Private)

2.) Add Red Highlight to a Bot name. (Or whatever will make the bots more recognizable over humans.) Make it so bots are only added to even out a team. For instance. If one team has 4 humans and the other team has 3 humans. Then the team with 3 humans gets one Bot added to their team. Add lobby/party system.

3.) Setup maps to even out Defense vs Offensive balance. Make most maps a %50 split.

With some of these changes or adjustments, Brink 2 would do really well.[/QUOTE]

How exactly do you “slightly” get a more traditional campaign? More cutscenes? Appeal to casuals? That’s right, casualize the second installment, make it easier, let the bot’s play it for you. You focus too much on what exacerbates BRINK’s identity crisis; the single player. Something that should be negligible and relegated to filler for missing teammates should receive even less attention next time around or risk an even worse fate than BRINK 1.

(dazman76) #106

Currently, I wouldn’t buy it. The reasons have been stated elsewhere, but the main one for me would be “one button does everything”. If I’d have known how bad that particular choice would turn out, I wouldn’t even have bought Brink 1.

For my own part, I seem to have completely misjudged SD’s aims and intentions. I based them mostly on ET:QW, where we got an awesome game that somehow fell off the radar, but is still pretty enjoyable today. It was obviously designed for PC, and it was better for it. Brink was obviously designed as multi-platform, and holy crap has that ruined it from a PC perspective. The need to produce this mystical “one product fits all platforms” has completely ruined the experience for me and in turn, killed any of this enthusiasm and belief I had in SD.

It feels clunky at times, it feels broken playing as a medic - and although the art and setting are generally excellent, it feels stale and lacks character compared to ET:QW. The choice to remove VSAY, the choice to try and hide VoIP by default even on the PC, the choice to cripple text chat. Not allowing sprint and SMART to be separated. One-button-does-all, as mentioned. All of this could have been optional on the PC version, but no - SD chose the route of highest revenue from largest player base, and in the process they shat on their core fan base from a great height. Just a couple of wiser binding choices would nullify some of this complaint, but no - it has to be a common version, and it has to be the lowest common denominator dictating the decisions because it has the highest number of customers.

This is why the ET:QW population has increased in the past couple of months - because PC players bought Brink, and some are still searching for what they hoped this game would provide. A forward step from ET:QW, not a backwards step towards… whatever it is they managed to produce. I doubt those people who have now returned to ET:QW, will make the same mistake when (if) Brink 2.0 comes out. Personally, given SD’s background in competitive play, I simply cannot understand how (a) Brink became what it did and (b) SD can continue to smile after releasing it. I understand the need to sell more copies, but I cannot understand how that completely overrides the desire to produce a game that caters for both casual and competitive player. Moreover, I cannot understand how they can shat on their existing fan base quite as much as they have done.

TL;DR - No, I won’t be buying Brink <whatever>. Something happened to SD between ET:QW and Brink, and in my opinion, it wasn’t a positive change. I don’t know if the wrong people left or the wrong people joined, but it certainly doesn’t seem like the SD who produced ET:QW.

(thrill11) #107

I don’t want a second for a long time. I would suggest they just focus deeply on DLCs, and when the time comes…come out with BRINK2. that way we can expect so much more.

Haha I had the idea that brink 2 would be the conditions of the “outside world”. :slight_smile:

Or Better, the outside world vs security and resistance teamed up!!! WOOOOOOT

(SPAZZING OUT) :stroggbanana:

(thrill11) #108

If SDs focus mainly on DLCs we’d have like… a new DLC every week! ^^

It’d be like an event!

(AmishWarMachine) #109

I have a suspicion that you are not the only one who did, which is unfortunate, as it poisons the data the poll was intended to gather. :frowning:

(wolfnemesis75) #110

I surmised this as well. The numbers are skewed. Probably needed to be a public poll. Man the hate wagon brigade lives on.

(dazman76) #111

One person has said they’ve done this - you’re very eager to turn that into a generalised response and an invalidation of the results. I hate using the term fanboy Wolf, but you really do try hard. Assumptions prove nothing, other than the willingness of some to see proof where none exists.

I personally voted NO on just the platform I play on, PC. I expected to see a high figure for NO/PC, and even with some contamination accounted for, it appears to be the case.

Also, don’t be so quick to label people haters - if you have a multi-choice poll, why wouldn’t people place NO or YES votes on each platform? Maybe they own all 3? Had you considered that some people may have voted YES on all platforms, maybe the “love wagon brigade” or something equally ridiculous? It seems not.

Yes, it should have been a public poll - let’s re-roll it and see what we get then? It’s largely irrelevant, but then the same could be said for most of the first page of this forum.

(anotherDopefish) #112

Yeah, Brink came out around the same time as Section 8 Prejudice and that has a full campaign in a primarily-multiplayer game despite being 15$ and download-only. Campaigns are just mandatory for retail games and even download games can’t really go without them. Making the campaign just a series of multiplayer matches leaves people dissatisfied. Probably the biggest issue with Brink was that it’s a full price retail game.

(H0RSE) #113

Saying that the singleplayer is the multiplayer, (which is what SD said) what did you really expect from this? Doing just a little bit of research into what they were describing, players could figure out that Brink was taking the UT3 approach to singleplayer - just multiplayer missions with cut scenes and bots.

(dazman76) #114

Well I haven’t been a proponent of this argument, but what they actually said was “seamlessly blends single and multiplayer” - which is not at all the same as “single player is multi player” :slight_smile: I just wanted to point that out - as I said I am not a proponent of the “we’ve been mis-sold” argument, and I’m not trying to make that (counter) point.

(Azev2000) #115

Ever think that this is what the population really feels like?

Would it not make sense considering the mass exodus just a few weeks after release.

(H0RSE) #116

They actually said both - look at some videos, read some articles - you will see.

(vbl) #117

This is a developer/publisher combo that clearly can’t get its **** straight and I look forward to avoiding their half-baked, sloppy releases in the future.

(Thundermuffin) #118

They obviously didn’t learn from ET:QW, so why do you think they would learn from this? The only positive change that BRINK saw compared to ET:QW was the fact there were no vehicles which gave hope to old ET players. Everything else is either 2 steps back or half done.

(TruGamer97) #119

Yes Id buy it

(DarkangelUK) #120

Because they have to learn from it, if a game similar to or worse than Brink gets released next, then their future as a development company would probably be doomed.