I figured I’d share my Brink preview with all you Splash Damage fans first-hand. If you have any questions about my preview or about my experience with the game, I’d be more than happy to take a stab at answering.
Splash Damage’s Brink is not easy to classify. “But wait,” you say, “isn’t Brink a first-person shooter?” Why yes, it is a first-person shooter, but it’s not a single-player, competitive multiplayer, or cooperative multiplayer game — it’s all three at once. Its parkour-style movement and dynamic objectives further complicate the genre issue, so I won’t slap a standard classification on Brink; instead, I’ll tell you that Brink is audacious, gorgeous, and a whole lot of fun.
Glad to hear how enthusiastic you are. It’s a quible but int he interview it seemed like just about all the questions you asked were ones which had already been answered, and probably one’s you’d already heard the answers to yourself (like when you asked Paul what were they doing to encourage players to act as a team, it was really a leading question). I guess this is all cool because these interviews are seen by lots of people who need to hear that info for background, but it’s disappointing that you didn’t take the opportunity to ask questions where the answer wasn’t already out there.
I did like the question about what was the coolest thing Paul had seen in a Brink play session tough, so points for that one!
Yeah, most people aren’t as up to speed on the game as you all are. I quite liked his answer to the last question, as well. I’m glad you enjoyed the coverage.
I think you could’ve had a happy medium, the stuff the ‘uninformed’ need to know, and stuff the ‘informed’ want to know. Obviously I’m biased a view it as a missed opportunity, and it was nice none the less… but just sayin’…
Actually, there was something that really surprised me in the interview with Paul, and that was that SD flirted briefly with allowing any class at all to do the objectives. The reason this surprised me is because to me this is one of the keystones which helps drive teamwork in the Enemy Territory series of games (and by extension RTCW, although I never played that game).
We can speculate that there was some massive effort at simplification to lower the games over-all learning curve and this was one of those things considered; but that it was even put on the table much less actually tried out seems kind of crazy.
I guess this was actually in the Joystiq review not the interview with Paul
I know, I actually got into multi-player gaming via W:ET when it was listed (along with a great review) in Computer Gaming World’s list of 100 free games. Up until that point I didn’t have much interest in first person shooters, the single player FPS games I’d tried I always thought were very boring and I never came close to finishing any of them. It was the whole experience of just being on rails that i didn’t like, so I never even considered buying RTCW. At that time I was into strategy games, Civilization (or any game by Sid Meier), Starcraft, etc.
W:ET though hooked me. One thing for me that was really important was being able to spectate the games. I remember watching a game of fuel dump and being totally lost, I had no idea where the guys were as I flipped from player to player. I was afraid to just jump in and play because I didn’t know what was going on, so I ended up watching 3 or 4 games first before playing. I think I also found a strategy guide which described the original maps and how they worked. I think having a single player mode exactly like the multi-player mode really is important for guys who don’t normally go online. the trick though is going to be convincing them to buy the game in the first place since they may still have the same feeling I did back then about FPS’s just being games on rails. It was the lack of free flow where anything can happen (like in a strategy game) that I didn’t like in the classic single player FPS’s that kept me away.
The way I got into MP gaming I think really underscores the need for a free weekend (or maybe longer). I never would have tried W:E if it wasn’t free, since I had no dollars at risk the worst that would happen was I would loose some time trying it. Thinking about it though, I probably wouldn’t have tried it if it was just free for a single weekend either (because I would have felt I wouldn’t have the time to try it out). OK, so maybe not a free weekend, but a W:ET demo would have done it for me and gotten me hooked as I would have tried that.
Jep, a demo so that people can try out the game would be a very good thing.
First time I played RtCW was the MP Test at a friends house, I only had an old 486 at that time (was still good for playing Doom :D), when I bought a new PC later that year RtCW was my first game, actually more for SP but I jumped into the MP pretty soon.
I highly doubt that they won’t make a demo given their history. But as with many games these days it probably will only come out around or after release.
