First off, my hats off to Splash Damage for making a great game. It has been a long while since last playing a game where I’d sink so many hours in a single session and not realize it. The game has a lot of potential especially in the competitive scene and I look forward to it.
With that said the game has, as I and clanmates have played it, a lot of ‘diamond in the rough’ moments. The game in a few areas, for a lack of a better word, seem like it’s just at the brink of perfection. So I’d like to open a discussion on Brink’s Parkour/Movement to anyone who’s felt the same way and what changes if any would make it feel just right or if you like how it is in its current form it would be good to know that too. I’d like to keep the discussion down to just the movement/parkour aspect of Brink. Maybe it can provide SD some insight into how people feel about the smart system and give them a general idea of what people like/dislike bout it and whether they decide that making a few tweaks to it is needed. Mind you I hope that any changes that were to be made to the smart system would be done by Splash Damage and not by way of promod. I don’t think having these kind of changes within a mod would be conducive to the community.
Sprinting
There’s a few aspects of sprinting that just doesn’t feel right. I do think some of it is just randomness that happens for no apparent reason. For example there’s quite a few times we’ve experienced no sprinting after a mantle or vault which really seems to put a hitch into the smoothness of it all. Another aspect, and this is mostly personal pref, is the lack of being able to sprint while strafing left or right. For me personally it’s not so much the speed but it really seems to put a hamper in gun fights. They feel much less dynamic and give more of a sense of ‘fight or flight’ type scenarios. It really makes fighting pretty static in that people are more or less easy to hit targets and the only thing you’re really fighting is your gun’s recoil. On the flip side if they were to have full sprint strafing…it would make ‘normal’ speed trivial in that no one would use the non sprint speed, maybe a 75% of sprint speed if your just strictly strafing left/right? Oh and having a separate bind for just sprint only would also be nice.
Mantling/Vaulting
I personally like it in its current form. Everything feels just bout right with it. A few clan mates however feel that vaulting/Mantling should be accompanied by a slight speed boost in its action if its done right (More on this). As it is now vaulting over something seems to provide the same speed as if you were sprinting through it if it’s done right. They feel it should provide slightly faster than sprint speed when doing the action properly. I could go either way with this…on one hand it would reward players who practice it, on the other it does still provide a bonus regardless cause you’re curbing your route by going through an obstacle instead of around it.
Jumping
I have to give it to SD for making vertical movement without a jump key actually work pretty elegantly. They’ve pretty much rendered the jump button in this game useless, and I think this is where the competitive community can really take advantage of it. In doing so I think the competitive community can figure ways to raise the skillcap of movement around using the jump key. I still think the skill cap for movement will be nowhere near that of say quake3 or qw before the patch, but I do think that as it stands now there’s really not much to it. Doing a jump and hitting an obstacle at the peak will provide a faster mantle/vault. The problem is that jumping in itself in this game seems somewhat random and not predictable, so unlike most fps where most people have grown accustom to knowing the apex of their jump in relation to objects around them to make it up on top of a crate or whatever. It’s somewhat different with Brink. Clan mates attribute this to just being that it’s the relatively low height that they jump and so it’s slightly harder to time jumps, but I think its just in the way the jump is animated more than anything. There’s just a really hitchy motion to the jumping action, and that sorta throws it off for me…that or there’s times where hitting jump seems to do nothing. Or it just may be that the smart doesn’t seem to activate when you want it to and clips your jump early I’m not sure. So maybe they can smooth out the motion of jumping to make it more defined so that people could better gauge jumps. I don’t however want them making the jump higher or anything, that would just introduce another set of problems, unless the height tweak was very minimal or something.
That’s seems to be the major points I wanted to talk bout. We could go on bout the light/med/heavy default speeds. I personally did think it was too slow but now that I’ve put in quite a bit of hrs into the game I’ve grown accustom to it. But if you don’t like it, voice it, just make sure to back it up with suggestions to let a few ideas roll around. I’ve posted this here in the Competition/Clan sub forum because I think people here are genuinely eager to make the game better as a whole and not to cater to what they want or are used to playing.