Brink to be Shown at Eurogamer Expo in Leeds and London

(abrain) #21

And did somebody went to Leeds today?

(gstaff) #22

I heard there were tons of folks watching the demo today.

Would be curious to hear what you guys thought.

(DarkangelUK) #23

There’s tons of folk here wanting to watch it in avi format, i’ll let you know what I think :slight_smile:

(Mustang) #24

I’d be happy it give my thoughts
Just send over the demo (preferably with dev commentary) and I’ll give feedback

(Zhou Yu) #25

I’ll be over there in an hour or two and will pop up my feedback once I return ^^

Should be good fun.

Edit:

Really great show, thanks to Paul for struggling all the way up to Leeds for us (2 and a half hour car journey, ouch).

Couple of major things I picked out;

  • The environments are ridiculously detailed and intricate, in the container city demo we saw the sheer amount of visual fidelity on show was really impressive. The game looks like the screenshots in motion, simply incredible.

  • The smart system is very slick, it looks effortlessly easy to get from one location to another quickly. Paul did a lot of sliding from cover to cover and quick jumps among raised areas. He even fired off a shot from his shotgun while sliding but unfortunately missed :p.

  • Ragdoll wasn’t overblown or silly.

  • The use of shadows is really good, there is a big contrast between darker and lighter areas (especially in the airport demo) that should make for some interesting encounters. If we don’t have IFF’s (I cannot remember seeing them in the demo, take that as you will) then I’d say ambushes and hiding would be possible, especially since:

  • The game uses smoke extremely well, you can honestly not see through it. I didn’t notice any smoke grenades or anything but every time an explosion went off (pretty damn often) a small cloud of smoke was created which would actually function as cover.

  • The overall experience of the game was overwhelming and highly cinematic. Normally in games “cinematic” equates to silly lighting and OMGCAMERASHAKE but this was done quite subtly, with convincing use of sound, slight screenshake, on-screen effects (minimal) and the aforementioned smoke. I particularly loved the rattling down of shrapnel after an explosion, give a cookie to whichever sound designer achieved that ^_^.

  • The bots didn’t appear to be overwhelmingly smart, often standing out in the middle of the open, but they are bots.

  • Engineer turret looks like it fires in short bursts then has to reload/whatever. Looks very fast to set up too. Has a range I would call similar to that of a TF2 turret (obviously approximate).

  • Flanking the enemy using smart is very possible and effective, admittedly against bots.

  • Weapons look and sound good, but when Paul was firing often the crosshair would obscure much of the screen, making it honestly hard to see what he was firing at.

  • Enemies have little xp popups over their heads when they die, which is a good indication of a kill as often its quite hard to tell with it being so action-packed.

  • Grenade launcher looks like it has the potential to be a massive noobtube :stuck_out_tongue:

  • Didn’t see any of the rpg-ish stuff like levelling or abilities

  • Thought I saw a mine in the engineer’s hands at one point

  • Soldier does look to have a “shield” ability for teammates, but it wasn’t used

  • Melee looked fairly simplistic from what I saw but there was very little of it. Paul did put the butt of his gun to good use in the crotch of a downed enemy though, which evinced a mass wince from the crowd.

  • It was hard to tally during the demo but it looked like it took a good 5+ hits for most of the (average body type) guys to go down.

  • Looks like you can cook grenades.

All in all it was just great to see it in motion and it certainly looks promising. Thanks to Paul, Sd, bethesda and the eurogamer guys for showing it off today.

(.Chris.) #26

Just got back, didn’t really see much that didn’t already know :frowning:

I asked about custom content though and Paul said it would get same level as support as their past games with wiki’s and stuff for the SDK but mentioned something about engine owners (id) been owned by zenimax and that may slow things or something on sdk front or whatever, couldn’t hear too well from the back!

(Bezzy) #27

Would love to allay some concerns in your (excellent) writeup, Zhou. Just bear in mind that it’s the E3 demo, which is, by now, something like 6 months old? We’ve definitely been addressing issues you’ve raised, but I’ll be annoyingly cryptic and not say which.

(Rahdo) #28

Great writeup, Zhou!

[QUOTE=Zhou Yu;200424]

  • The bots didn’t appear to be overwhelmingly smart, often standing out in the middle of the open, but they are bots.[/QUOTE]
    Yeah, for E3, we had barely had our AI programmer on staff for a just a few months, so the bots were doing good to not spend all their time running into walls for the demo, in all honesty :slight_smile: They’ve come a long ways since then, thanks to the heroic efford of Jonas, our one on staff AI coder. He’s a star!

[QUOTE=Zhou Yu;200424]

  • Weapons look and sound good, but when Paul was firing often the crosshair would obscure much of the screen, making it honestly hard to see what he was firing at.[/QUOTE]
    That crosshair is literally programmer art. In the full game, you’ll have the choice between several, so don’t worry about it :slight_smile:

[QUOTE=Zhou Yu;200424]

  • Grenade launcher looks like it has the potential to be a massive noobtube :p[/QUOTE]
    Bear in mind, for the demo, things were specifically balanced to let paul really kick ass and take names, especially the explosives. Just wanted to have the most impactful demo possible, so we really ramped up the damage for the GL for that big “time to kick ass” part of near the end. The GL is not anywhere near that powerful in real playtests. The guys here are very wary of grenade spam, even from grenade firing weapons…
(Shiv) #29

Wow, awesome write up zhou! :smiley:

my excitement is like a brick wall, it builds up steadily with each new snippet :stuck_out_tongue:

(Zhou Yu) #30

[QUOTE=Rahdo;200479]
That crosshair is literally programmer art. In the full game, you’ll have the choice between several, so don’t worry about it :-)[/QUOTE]

Arsemonkeys, I knew I did something wrong in that post.

I meant the ironsights, which were pretty damn massive, not the crosshairs.

(YaNz) #31

Gameplay soon, Bethesda? Please?

(Rahdo) #32

Ah, yeah, the iron sights. Yes, the one on that gun was the first one ever done, and it is pretty terrible (too “authentic”, not gameplay friendly enough). The ones that have been done since then have gotten much more "open

(Exedore) #33

There are also many customizable sight options, so chances are you’ll be able to find a few you prefer.

(darthmob) #34

[QUOTE=Rahdo;200499]Ah, yeah, the iron sights. Yes, the one on that gun was the first one ever done, and it is pretty terrible (too “authentic”, not gameplay friendly enough). The ones that have been done since then have gotten much more "open[/QUOTE]Don’t forget to make screenshots of those early designs! Then you can release them later on for free or as preorder bonuses.

Personally I think it’s always interesting to see the development in the development of a game. I’m not sure how to put it in words but as an outsider you often have the impression that the game you play is the one that has been worked on all the time. You normally don’t know about the iterations in design and gameplay. That’s what I like about beta programs as well. It gives you a little insight into the process.

(Mustang) #35

Thanks to Zhou for taking the time to give his thoughts
Still looking forward to seeing some of the gameplay stuff myself
Shouldn’t be too long I would hope

(.Chris.) #36

Just read through Zhou’s stuff:

Smoke looked over done on the explosions from nades and so on, they may aswell have actually been smoke grenades from all the dust they threw up and remained for some time, hopefully you can turn this down or off completely as it isn’t a possitive thing to have in my mind.

Shadows weren’t all that in my opinion, was hell of a lot of flickering on weapons and players for example that was rather distracting.

I can’t say I felt the same level of cinematics, the cutscenes were nothing special and the voice acting was pretty naff/cheesy.

Spawn killing looks to be problem also, with one shot of nade launcher Paul managed to take out 4 or 5 players he couldn’t see just coming around a corner, then same again some moments later, I not sure if this was some spawn exit or not but I can’t say it looked a good thing to highlight at a game showing.

Was also some bug right near start where he gibbed someone with pistol and a white player model popped up at it’s place for split second that no one in audience seemed to spot. Was pretty odd.

Overall it looked OK but not exactly outstanding but it is still early days so I wont judge too much.

(tokamak) #37

Temporary smoke clouds sound awesome to me. How many Bethesday hostages are worth one gameplay video?

(zXSwordXz) #38

hahahahahahaha…a couple of them should suffice.

(DarkangelUK) #39

Hey Rich, any idea of the system specs of the machine the demo was running on?

(MoP) #40

Sorry, that was probably my fault. Or digibob’s! :smiley: