Brink Interview - Neil Alphonso, Lead Designer (Part 1)
I could almost swear I looked at that last night from Humate’s link in the NEWS section 
yeah, a few threads popped up recently for links that have been posted there already.
Neil said that the ram would be picked by the art guys before he got to do anything with it. What other uses does ram have to a designer?
I can’t help it if Neil is just a good looking dude, okay? And someone needed to point it out.
I really can’t wait to start listening to you guys all over again. Everything you did for ETQW was really appreciated by so many people. And it looks like BrinkTV will be hitting a huge audiance.
I’ll say this: I liked Neil’s reaction to the last question in part 2. The guy gives him a sort of out, he says “Oh you know, Rockstar, they killed Alan Wake, and they’re such a big company, and they’re coming out right around the same time. Do you think Brink’s sales might get hurt?” And he says “No. If sales are disappointing it’ll be because they didn’t get our vision, or because they don’t like it.”
It’s even better than that, he says people will find Brink too complex and daunting or they don’t like playing with other people
To me this is basically taunting potential punters in a, “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”, manner
Which is a great way to draw in those extra sales from people swaying on whether it’s worthy of their hard earned cash
Basically, it smacks of confidence. He’s not bragging, he doesn’t guarantee Brink will succeed. He says he’s happy with it, and if there’s any problems, it won’t be bugs or excuses, it will be design problems, or the market won’t be there for a game of this type.
Funny This may be funny but you’d be surprised how much easier it is for a fresh pair of eyes to notice something you didn’t even know you were staring at. So maybe that was why he was surprised… well at least I hope.
Big, complex games have a load of bugs. Think of a big, complex game like Fallout, and compare it to a much shorter and streamlined game like Call of Duty. Which one has more bugs? It’s difficult for QA teams to catch everything and for developers to fix everything for such complex systems. And with the plethora of movements, customizations, deployables, abilities, etc – there’s a lot of room for bugs to slip in.
The fact that it passed through Xbox / Playstation’s QA so quickly I think is an awesome sign. I’m pumped.
We planned for the worst (multiple submissions + lots of bugs) and then worked hard to make sure it didn’t happen. 