First Brink Developer Diary Released

(Rahdo) #21

There’s another way to use the wheel. You can tap the wheel button instead of hold it. This makes the “most important thing you can be doing at the moment” be the mission you take… the wheel doesn’t even come up… the GUI just flashes to tell you what the new objective is. So it’s nice for newbs who don’t want to have to make decisions about stuff they don’t necessarily understand, but it also works for experienced players too. If you’re a medic and you’re going to revive someone, if you tap the wheel, the person to revive we tell you about will be the nearest teammate who is critical to winning the match (i.e. an incapacitated engineer when the core objective needs to be repaired), saving you the trouble of eyeballing everyone.

But again, in the heat of battle, if you see a man down, just go ahead and revive him. No need for the wheel if it slows you down. I tend to think of the wheel as having two uses:

–during a “quiet moment” (not that it ever lasts long :slight_smile: ) when you want to stop and think for a second, get yourself into a hidey hole and bring up the wheel to get a real idea of what’s going on in the big picture.

–after you’ve just finished doing something, if there’s nothing immediately apparent to you that needs doing, but you want to keep moving, just tap the button and we’ll recommend the best thing you can be doing for the team.

(SockDog) #22

Neat thanks

(tokamak) #23

[QUOTE=Bongoboy;195662]All the sidemissions are dynamically generated by the gameplay itself, not pre-scripted. For example, if you got downed by the enemy team, and you decide you’d rather wait for a Medic to revive you than respawn in the next respawn wave, then Medics on your team will get a mission and waypoint to revive you. But enemy Operatives will get a mission to come and interrogate you. Hilarity ensues.
[/QUOTE]

So you got a short window of time in which you have to decide whether you tap out or remain lying on the floor? It would be a bit lame to tap right out before the operative reaches you.

(Rahdo) #24

Operatives gotta be fast! Might I suggest the quick acrobatic body type? :slight_smile:

(SockDog) #25

Not even the acrobatic body type can beat a tap out fiend. :slight_smile:

(Floris) #26

But in ET:QW tap outs weren’t really tap outs in the classical sense, you could tap out but you’d still need to wait for the respawn timer to reach zero. They could even keep the character who’s being interrogated alive during the process while the actual player has already respawned :stuck_out_tongue:

Further on the mission system - in ET:QW you sometimes got extra XP bonuses by using the mission system, which was kinda unfair towards the people who just wanted to play the game and just help the team , considering they’d get less XP. Will Brink reward players with the same XP no matter if they have the mission selected or not?

(DarkangelUK) #27

Does that mean /kill has been removed to ensure the Operative has a fair chance of getting to the downed player before he hits the next spawn wave?

I suppose a good idea would be atleast not being able to /kill when downed.

This brings a whole new gameplay twist, rather than gibbing downed enemies so they can’t be revived, you’ll be gibbing downed team mates so they can’t be interrogated :smiley:

(Bezzy) #28

Yes, that issue of push and pull on whether you should gib downed players or not swings back and forth as we add things in play tests. Sometimes people gib everyone, sometimes no-one gibs anyone.

At first it was a waste of ammo, so no-one did, and then everyone got the hang of revives, so everyone gibbed everyone, and then there was something thing you could do to downed enemies as one of the classes, so only THAT class didn’t gib enemies, and then it became cheaper to finish enemies off… back and forth with this every time we do a “death gameplay” mechanic.

It’s possibly the most finely balanced aspect of the game, and one we’re watching carefully.

Cost of gibbing enemies to you and your team ~= cost of NOT gibbing enemies to you and your team.

(engiebenjy) #29

Yeah I dont like the idea of this, I can see people being gibbed by a teammate just before a medic appears and some angry players :eek:

…well more angry than normal :wink:

(tokamak) #30

Surely a big bloke tends to get information out of you much quicker?

(Nail) #31

a little guy with a taser is just as effective

(tokamak) #32

A little guy doesn’t have the psychological advantage of being a scary big brute. I know the philosophy is to let gamers sort it out themselves but surely it’s a neat in both the fluff and gameplay to let scary big guys interrogate players faster.

(10chankc2) #33

[QUOTE=DarkangelUK;195719]

This brings a whole new gameplay twist, rather than gibbing downed enemies so they can’t be revived, you’ll be gibbing downed team mates so they can’t be interrogated :D[/QUOTE]

Maybe the game could decide whether to give a mission to a medic to revive the team mate if hes close enough but if hes far away a operator gets a mission to eliminate him and bonus points for eliminating the enemy operator.

(darthmob) #34

First of all keep the information coming! It’s great to have so much talk at such an early state in the game’s development. :slight_smile:

What I would like to hear about is the connection between character customization and class selection. So far it’s known that you can customize the looks of your character without having a real effect on the gameplay and select from three bodytypes that do make a difference. Is it possible to customize the loadout of your character as well? Eg. can you select favorite weapons and tools? If you can, what effect does the class selection have on that loadout?

Eg. if you play a heavy character with your favorite big gun and you select a specific class would you simply get defibs / a cutting torch / spytools as the class specific gear in addition to the customized loadout?

(Nail) #35

in the gameplay shown, you use a taser type device to interrogate. I don’t believe there is any actual word play

(SockDog) #36

Actually, saying that I wonder if you’re down and being shocked whether you could attach a mechanic to delay the interrogator. Dare I say mini-game?

(tokamak) #37

Yes! A big guy not saying anything is even more scary!

(Nail) #38

big guys don’t scare me, and I’m 145 lbs, 5 10"

everyone is equal at 800+ meters

(Slade05) #39

I always forget to ask: is there any blood in Brink? Gore? Flesh showers after midair rocket?
Telefrags?!

(Rahdo) #40

We (and Bethesda) haven’t decided yet what rating the game is going for yet, so not sure. However, a game that heavily features incapacitation and revivals on the battlefield doesn’t necessarily lend itself to heavy gore… :slight_smile: