I’ve been wanting to write this down for a while, hence, I figured I might as well do it. It’s a comparison between Splash Damage’s previous title, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and its most recent work, Brink. They have a lot of common ground between them, but there’s some distinct differences; some of them are design choices so strange, I simply can’t understand them.
Note: Comparison from the perspective of a competitive ETQW player, but in regards to vanilla ETQW1.5 in public play.
Movement:
Personally, I believe ETQW’s movement was pretty damn awesome. It might have lacked the speed and possibilities of Wolf:ET, but it was a good half-way: Plenty of trickjump possibilities, decent ways to gain speed; basically, a lot of good stuff you can use to widen the gap between newbies and experienced players, without having to resort to unlocks.
Brink’s movement is… Poor, to say the least. Having played around with it a lot, using primarily the Light bodytype, I’ll conclude that it’s a lot less smooth than ETQW’s - and that’s a shame for something called ‘Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain’. The latter part of that name also doesn’t apply; the majority of the jumps SMART actually is good for, aren’t random at all; they’re area’s that are obviously implemented for the exact purpose of using the SMART system.
Weapons:
Looking at ETQW, the weapon system is vastly different than Brink. Of course, weapons were limited to classes, an there was a total of only 12 different weapons per side… But those weapons were sufficiently defined to be useful (just ignore the post-1.2 shotgun, kay). At least, I was usually able to tell whether I was being shot at with a railgun, hyperblaster or lacerator - it’s all pretty distinct, both in functionality, visuals and sound design.
Brink has a much larger amount of weapons, which aren’t restricted to any class, but are all far less distinct. Minute differences cause a few to be used, and that’s that. Of course, this means players will be more likely to change class, since unlike ETQW, they can keep using the same gun when they do… but since the abilities system effectively cancels that out, I think weapon restrictions could’ve been kept in just as easily.
A final word on the weapon spread: ETQW’s was a little big, but good enough for pub, Brink’s is completely ridiculous. I’ve mentioned it on these forums before, but: While teamwork should be important, leave some room for individual skill and the game improves tenfold. Just look at how most people will be able to tell you their favourite football player, but very few will be able to explain to you which tactic they most appreciate seeing. Bring back the lower spread, and let the aimers go and have their multikills!
Tweaking:
In ETQW, I could set binds per team, per class, per vehicle, with modifiers and whatnot. I could change the opacity of different HUD elements, and I could change the shape and colour of my crosshair to something I could see and use at all times during a match. And all of that was just through the ingame menu! Opening up notepad and making my own autoexec, I could even write elaborate scripts to change class and weapon loadout at the press of a button.
Brink just has a crapload of locked cvars.
Miscellaneous:
While this might just sound like a buttload of praise for ETQW, it isn’t; it had its flaws, too. Some maps had a pretty bad design (outskirts, anyone), and the vehicles could’ve been toned down quite a bit. I think that the competitive scene’s decision to not allow heavy vehicles on the last objective, was a great one in that respect. The deployables could get pretty powerful, and the spamming of grenades annoyed me to death on pubs. However, ETQW also had some other good points: The visuals were very clean, and the classes instantly recognisable. I’ve seen solo defenders stop an early rush simply by picking off objective classes quickly; it lead to some of the most intense combat I’ve seen in any FPS.
On the first few mentioned items, Brink does better. The deployables might be underpowered this time, but the lack of vehicles and limits to grenade spam are wonderful additions to the formula. The visuals on the game, though, feel messy. There’s a lot of rubble, a lot of clashing colours and textures; these things just annoy me, especially when they make it hard to see opponents. Even worse when I can’t tell the opponent’s class; that entire tactical aspect is just gone. Quite a shame there, too.
Conclusion:
That basically sums up what I’ve been pondering about lately in relation to Brink. Seeing as SD has gained a bit of a following between WolfET and ETQW, I feel like they’ve let down their previous customers by releasing the game in this state. I understand patches/mods might fix that, and I do truly hope that they will; the game has the potential to blow the competition out of the water… But commercially, it’ll most likely be too late by then, and that’s a damn shame.
