Brink is a tricky game for me to form an opinion on. On one hand, I loved the emphasis on teamwork, the nicely fleshed-out backstory you got from the audio logs and above all, the aesthetics, the look and feel of both the characters and the Ark itself. However, there were too many flaws to make it the truly great game I had hoped it would be, and after buying it two days after it launched, I finally sold it a couple of months ago.
Since then, I’ve had an idea that I would love to get some feedback on, from both the community and hopefully someone at Splash Damage: a game set on the Ark as a free-roaming, quest-based FPS, akin to the Elder Scrolls or Fallout series.
As I said earlier, my favourite thing about Brink was the setting. The Ark looked and felt breathtaking, from the clean white locations like the airport or resort to the slum areas of Container City. All I wanted to do was to explore the Ark fully, ever since my first match on the game. It was the Security mission in the Aquarium, and at the end of the mission when you’re in the small dock area, I just looked across at the Founder’s Tower and wished I could run around the entire Ark and marvel at all the locations featured in it.
As for the story, it wouldn’t have to be on an epic scale. You could start out as a Guest living in Container City but working in the Upper Ark, and you could choose between joining the Resistance to free the Guests from oppression or join the Security to stop the Ark getting torn apart by civil war. If I remember correctly, the cutscene at the end of the storyline showed a fleet of boats heading towards the Ark, and I thought the new arrivals would be at the centre of the DLC, fittingly titled ‘Agents of Change’, but I never heard about those boats again. No major changes, just a couple of new maps for the same two factions to duke it out on, no new characters introduced, nothing special. How about this: Later in the game, once your chosen faction is victorious, there’s a second act: those boats arrive at the Ark, loaded with savages from the outside world, and your character leads the fight to save the Ark from them? It would be an interesting turn of events, and would stop the story from just being ‘Resistance and Security fight each other’, which wouldn’t really be a good enough plot for a free-roaming game.
Brink’s one-button parkour aspect was also something I loved about the game; so simple I didn’t even need to think about it during gameplay but allowing you to explore the map in its entirety. Now, imagine that feature letting you explore the whole of the Ark with the same amount of simplicity. It would give the player so much more freedom than most games of its type. Add in loads of people to interact with and recieve quests from, a few towns (Resistance HQ in the Shipyard, Security HQ in the SecTower, Container City and a residential sector of the Upper Ark), some big quests for key points in the story (for example, if you side with the Resistance, a mission at the end of the first act could be an assault on the Founder’s Tower) and maybe a few new areas that weren’t featured in Brink, and I think it could be a brilliant game. Most games like this, such as Fallout, have one big problem in my opinion: no matter how big the game world is, it all ends up looking the same. Fallout 3 was miles and miles of brown wasteland, Skyrim was miles and miles of snowy fields or mountains… you get the picture. With Brink, we have a diverse, wonderfully stylised world with a huge range of interesting features, so this problem is instantly erased.
What does everyone think? Could the next game set on the Ark be a free-roaming paradise?