#textblocknovelL0L
ETQW as an infantry game was pretty great… the main draw back was the amount of “spam” in ETQW that was a hot topic when it came to Brink development. I feel like these issues were approached much too negatively when it came to Brink. ETQW was on the verge of being a very solid game, but mostly in part to community testers/modders who spent countless hours fine tuning the numbers of the game. Vehicles and more intensive artillery were the main “new ideas” in ETQW, and because they weren’t well balanced in the beginning it drove away a lot of people.
A few years into the game however, promod helped to greatly balance the vehicle and infantry game to a point where you would just acknowledge that vehicles were a part of the game. It just happened that most of the time it seemed pubs were dominated by vehicles, while the kids on the ground ran around like ants, which was true a lot of the time due to the sheer amount of vehicles available. The infantry play however shined on the maps which lacked vehicles, and the amount of gun variety they were able to put into the game while maintaining an incredibly solid balance among the weaponry was amazing (I may have only suggested noobtubes had reduced infantry dmg). Grenades in ETQW pretty much influenced how they function in Brink, as ETQW nades were usually a topic of “spam” discussion. As much as I miss the more advanced “cookable” nades I don’t think Brink made a bad development in this area.
Overall though, I think SD made a great decision to follow in the footsteps of rtcw style games. Wolf ET wasn’t too drastically different and it definitely opened up to a much larger audience due to it being free, so people got a taste of how good these games can be. ETQW tried to offer something new to the genre, but due to lack of support from the publisher and initial polish it met defeat. This however doesn’t mean that the game was a mistake, as there was a lot of good things about it. Brink though just dumbfounds people who played these past games however. It is like anything that was on the verge of perfection was just cut out or drastically simplified instead of being further developed and perfected. Brink really feels like a product that feared failure amongst fans, but if you cut a game down to a point where you can’t even confidently have discussions about the math of a gun fight… your going to have unhappy customers. It’s just that these past games did a lot of things sooooooooo well and it is just ridiculous to see so much of it lost in Brink.
I know that just about every decision in the game was a very conscious one and I believe that this game is playing the way it was intended by SD and the way they thought their fans wanted it. They had good intentions and they listened to the forum chatter for years, but every attempt at good change in Brink is joined by the loss of vital content. SD I really want you to know that people liked your core game mechanics the way they were, and only sought improvement upon it and expansion of ideas. If I would blame anything it is the developers willingness to listen to their community’s ideas. They aren’t bias by the competitive gamer elite, the casual pubber, or the outside spectator. I just feel like if anything needed to be done on SD part when it came to development decisions it would be the judgement on how serious a common forum topic really is, as well as how much a change is going to affect the overall game play.
The successful developers keep making the same game over and over again, until the money in it runs dry (CoD). BUT the developers who have success and make great games make the same game over and over again, but make it better every time (and this doesn’t just mean better graphics). It is really tough to follow up on great games, but it has been done and I think SD is highly capable at being one of those developers in the way that they care about their communities. Leaving it on the note that Brink already hit its prime for sales on initial release, SD has their profit and it’s up to them what they are going to do with the game. I can only encourage that the focus is spent less on material content to satisfy those left, and more on bringing the game play back to the level that made SD games so much fun to play. The majority of the people who abandoned the game felt it had a lot of potential, but it was missing too many of the game play aspects that have always made people choose SD games over the generic mainstream garbage.
