Gameradar hands-on preview

(3Suns) #121

One other thing, there is situational humor as well, and as soon as you involve operatives or spies, you are gonna hear a lot of laughing (and cursing). Similarly, when you emphasize teamwork: it is all the more humorous when mistakes are made, or the other team is fooled.

(Nail) #122

in the toolbox of life, a sense of humour is #1

(Qhullu) #123

[QUOTE=Rahdo;212720]Brink rewards players who are doing the best thing to help their team win the match. Being the frontline, moving it forward, all that stuff, is very important. That’s why you get more XP for kills when you’re on the front line and less when you’re off by yourself in Timbuktu.

And by the same token, we reward slow and cautious play too, if it’s in the right place at the right time. For example, there can sometimes be problems where the fight isn’t actually at the core objective yet, and the defenders who should be guarding it might be inclined to rush off and ‘look for kills’, since there’s no enemy presence at the core objective at that time. and then, of course, the enemy just comes along and finds the thing unguarded, because undisciplined guarding players ran away to look for action. so, if you’ve given yourself an objective to “stand guard” at that site, we’ll reward you with XP in a drip feed, over time, just for doing your job and staying there. so you can feel satisfied that you’re not “missing out” on XP just because the fight is (temporarioy) elsewhere. so yes, we’ll actually reward you for ‘camping’ and being a cautious player on defence, if you’re doing it where it’s needed most to win the match…[/QUOTE]
i don’t really care about xp, so i didn’t really mean “reward” in terms of xp, but in terms of who be dead? i mean for example, waiting for the other guy to come through the doorway in et, you know where to aim, they don’t, and the mechanics of the game make that almost too rewarding.

i’ve been reading some more about Brink and now know you’re using sort of a rock-paper-scissors design (fast&weak-average-slow&strong), and i’m not really very enthusiastic about that.

who wins a fight is a product of skill, situation and luck, and it’s not easy to create the perfect balance (too much importance on skill=too predictable, too much importance on situation=too boring, too much importance on luck=too random). i prefer it when skill is the most important one, and i don’t know how much additional emphasis on the situation(map geometry and where the players are) the rock-paper-scissors design puts, never really liked tf2 enough to find out. i hope it turns out awesome though.

(3Suns) #124

[QUOTE=tao;213080]
i’ve been reading some more about Brink and now know you’re using sort of a rock-paper-scissors design (fast&weak-average-slow&strong), and i’m not really very enthusiastic about that.

who wins a fight is a product of skill, situation and luck, and it’s not easy to create the perfect balance (too much importance on skill=too predictable, too much importance on situation=too boring, too much importance on luck=too random). i prefer it when skill is the most important one, and i don’t know how much additional emphasis on the situation(map geometry and where the players are) the rock-paper-scissors design puts, never really liked tf2 enough to find out. i hope it turns out awesome though.[/QUOTE]

You know, even in TF2, skilled players could dominate no matter which class they used. In my house, it was funny to watch progress as my sons learned and then mastered one class at a time, one after another. Each time they did so, it was their new favorite class, and it seemed to them the most powerful of all they had learned thus far. Yet each was so different. After they learned them all, then they just chose the class they needed at the time and pwned noobs and took bases. :smiley:

(Qhullu) #125

how does it work against equally skilled players? don’t know enough about tf2 to get specific, but i’m guessing there are many situations where a medic is just weaker in a fight than the guy with the big ass gun for example.

(3Suns) #126

Of all the classes in TF2 comp play especially, the Medic is most crucial. He is weaker than some of the other classes, but his ability to keep an entire team healthed up, and alive via “ubercharges” (invincibility) during heated battles makes him indispensable.

Check out this video from 3:41. At 3:51 the medic actually manages to help one soldier capture the base while saving the Demoman from certain falling damage death.

In competitive 6v6 gaming, however, only some of the classes are used. Soldier, Demo, Medic and Scout are the main stay.

Though I can’t hold a candle to any competitive players of any game, I sure do enjoy watching a good game played well.

(Qhullu) #127

haha what a chaotic game, almost looks like ffa, love it. looks maybe a little bit too chaotic for my tastes, but is there a demo or something to check out what it plays like nowadays?

i didn’t see one of those muscular dudes with the big machine gun i remember from when i played the beta a little bit, i assume it moves too slow to be useful in clanplay?

(tokamak) #128

[QUOTE=tao;213080]i don’t really care about xp, so i didn’t really mean “reward” in terms of xp, but in terms of who be dead? i mean for example, waiting for the other guy to come through the doorway in et, you know where to aim, they don’t, and the mechanics of the game make that almost too rewarding.
[/QUOTE]

A big part of this is actually level design and not game mechanics. Attackers should have the advantage of iniative, deciding where to attack from, defenders should have the advantage of being prepared and fighting from a stationary position.

This sense of balance is only lost if the maps has dead ends that can be defended from, a good map has no safe corners.

(Qhullu) #129

yes map design plays a part (speaking of map design, it’s been a long time since i was impressed, but fear2: reborn managed that). but the mechanics of the game play a big part too, a good example of this is how hard just two adjacent basically empty rooms can make attacking the switch room in sp_delivery if they are defended well.

i’m just saying that the lower rate of fire and higher accuracy shifted the game mechanics to favor the person who does not take the initiative slightly more between rtcw and et, and that i’d like it to shift back, whether it does remains to be seen.

(tokamak) #130

And I disagree with that, anticipation is something that is just as important as iniative, dare say even more so when it comes to assault multiplayer.

(Qhullu) #131

ok, i guess it depends on how you like to play. for example, since i find playing as axis relatively boring, i always play as allies in et unless the teams are unfair (a map is only played once on the server i frequent). whereas in rtcw both attacking and defending were equally fun to me (and maps were played in stopwatch on every server i visited).

(3Suns) #132

OT

The Heavy is not used in comp play because he has …weaknesses. lol Every so often, Valve offers free weekends of TF2. They also have sales quite often. The regular price is $20, the usual sale price is $10, and the special sales are sometimes only $2.50 (last halloween). Next time they do that, I am just going to buy a bunch of them, and then I can gift the game when I want to.

/OT

(Rahdo) #133

[QUOTE=Qhullu;213080]
i’ve been reading some more about Brink and now know you’re using sort of a rock-paper-scissors design (fast&weak-average-slow&strong), and i’m not really very enthusiastic about that.

who wins a fight is a product of skill, situation and luck, and it’s not easy to create the perfect balance (too much importance on skill=too predictable, too much importance on situation=too boring, too much importance on luck=too random). [/QUOTE]

you make a totally valid point, but i look at it this way: the rock/paper/scissors adds another tangent to who wins a fight: knowledge. skill is always the most important thing, and luck largely equals situation the way i think about it, but knowledge becomes incredibly important as more systems get layered into the game. understanding that ‘yes, he may be a skinny guy, but he has his gun buffed up and is therefore very dangerous, even though i’m a gigantor’ adds lots of depth to every encounter you have in brink.

but there’s a lot of it, and it’s why we drip feed this stuff to players. for instance, for the first few levels of the game, EVERYONE is a medium, it’s only when you get to the higher levels that we start to unlock stuff like skinny and heavy body types. so players can come to grips with all the variety a bit at a time, rather than just dumping everything on everyone all at once (because then in that case, knowledge isn’t useful at all, and everything seems random).

it also has the nice side benefit of constantly keeping the game fresh and new the longer you play, as you’re exposed, over time, to new features and functionality.

(Qhullu) #134

well with luck i mainly meant the part it plays in aiming and movement during a fight, the millisecond stuff you know, but yes it can also play a part in the initial creation of situations. knowledge has always played a big part in online game play, from map knowledge to knowledge of player behavior patterns and everything in between and it’s nice to hear you are experimenting with making it play a bigger part in the middle of a fight. i await with baited breath how it turns out!

ps. please remember to make these “perks” on your opponents that have an affect on your ideal fight tactics easily identifiable at a glance

(tokamak) #135

And not just through hud indicators