I wrote this post for Doom3World.org but wanted to pass it along here…
The lights dim. Paul Wedgwood walks on stage. Up on the screen is a muscular bald man with his back to us looking out across the water towards a cityscape that juts up from the horizon.
The QLTV staff is sitting in the third row with a gorgeous view of the first-ever Brink demo about to take place.
Yeah, this is a long freaking post…
Paul begins his presentation, talking about the variety of customization options available. The choices are pretty staggering. As he slowly pans around several character models showing off a multitude of clothing, tattoos, scars, body types, haircuts, faces and skin tones, he talks about how players will want to choose their character’s body type carefully because it will have an impact on their gameplay choices. For example, a skinny guy will move quicker and may jump higher, allowing them to reach certain paths that a larger, more hefty character won’t be able to use. The trade off is survivability. Larger, more meat-shield-like characters can take more of a beating at the cost of mobility. You’re stuck with your character once it’s chosen, so choose wisely. But that’s a good thing… character advancement is permanent and persistent no matter if you’re playing in the single player campaign, hop online to play co-op with friends, or go for an all-out all-human multiplayer experience.
Since this is the D3W forums, I need to take a moment to talk technology. This is Doom3 all grown up, folks. While a heavy amount of modification has helped the engine along, it’s still id’s engine at the foundation. To me, I think of the grown-up feel and polish that the Call of Duty titles display on what is, at its roots, the Quake 3 engine. The same applies here, in my view. Whatever Splash Damage and Bethesda are doing to leverage the power of this engine is amazing. Whatever growing pains and learning curves SD may have had during the development of ETQW seem to be mastered at this point. Animations look fluid. The detail on screen, whether it be character model complexity or the detail applied to the landscape, is impressive. The color pallet is gorgeous… I don’t foresee anyone complaining about “quake brown” on this go around.
One of the first things Paul showed off was the SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system. Instead of merely allowing your character to sprint, this key/button will gracefully move your player across the map, jumping, gravel-sliding and mantling as necessary to reach your destination. No longer will you have to walk over to a ledge, hit jump, and hope that the edge is low enough to climb. The best part, Paul mentions, is that the animations are all fluidly blended together. He expressed a hope that this would be an end to the canned hoppity-hop animation that never took into account whether a jump was just a short hop or one that required the full height of the leap.
Wedgwood showed off the system by having his character flawlessly run across an area littered with obstacles. He also showed how this system opens up tactical options for the player. Walking up to a security gate guarded by lasers, he showed that he could gravel-slide underneath the lasers or mantle on top and over the roof of the gate depending on where he was looking when he approached the blockade with the SMART button pressed. He reemphasized the importance of body types, saying that throughout each map, certain routes would only be available to specific body types.
The stage of the storyline depicts a futuristic Earth where a group of people decided to build a Utopian eco-friendly city away from the rest of the world… only now, the city, dubbed “The Ark,” is cut off from outside resources and is slowly falling apart. There are two factions available to play, and Paul suggests playing through the game at least once with each to get a unique perspective on the game’s storyline. Playing as the Resistance, the gear tends to be a bit more beat up and makeshift as the forces are refugees that have been arriving on the Ark for years. The Security forces are the original founders, the rich elite of the Ark, and are trying to maintain control over resources and have a firm belief in law and order. The armor and weaponry looks a bit more plush than the Resistance counterparts. It is uncertain if the weapons themselves are asymmetrical in damage or rates of fire or merely look different. Both sides are fighting for survival, but they have very different perspectives on the matter. Paul also hinted that each faction will also feature splintered groups that have a range of agendas. Some will be extremist lead by conspiracy theories. Others might simply want a more even distribution of resources so all can live comfortably.
Next, he began a mission from the single player campaign that was slightly similar to the MCP objective from ETQW or Tank objective in W:ET in that you had to protect and clear a path for a mobile entity. In this case, the security are escorting a large defusal robot tasked with disarming an explosive in Container City. It opens with a cutscene showing the arrival of the Security squad and an on-site briefing of the tasks ahead. Unlike ETQW, however, the robot is not player-driven. It’s still glorious objective-style gameplay, however, so the action is expected to be very focused and intense.
The Resistance quickly open fire on the position and everyone scrambles for cover. At one of the first chokepoints encountered, the enemy AI came gravel-sliding out on their knees to try to get the drop on the Security forces. Interestingly, he was the only one who really exposed themselves to open fire. The rest stayed behind cover fairly well, forcing Paul Wedgwood to dart from his own cover and try different vantage points before finding a clear shot. The gunplay looked pretty solid, but there’s no way to truly tell its true nature until gamers have a mouse in their hands.
Paul used an array of weapons to dispatch his foes: grenades, a few different light arms, and later, a grenade launcher. As he was performing the mission, Wedgwood continued to talk about the variety of gameplay. Several classes were mentioned: Engineer, Medic, Soldier and Specialist. Those familiar with Splash Damage’s previous work will know the basic differences well.
Changing classes seems to no longer be done in the limbo menu when you die, but instead at “Command Posts” that must be captured and controlled by your squad. I thought this was really interesting as it hearkened back to some of the ideas that were eventually scratched for ETQW. In fact, in the same way that Brink demonstrates the Doom 3 engine “all grown up,” so too does the gameplay pioneered by Splash Damage. Players of their former titles will recognize the gameplay style instantly, yet SD seems to have refined it steadily over the years. For example, the mission system from ETQW has gotten a slight facelift but still helps newer players figure out their role on the battlefield and is specific to their currently selected class. SD has also added incentives for players to be the objective-completing class by offering them XP to switch. Unlocks have disappeared, and instead the focus is on persistent stats. However, instead of mere leaderboard achievements, advancing in Brink actually impacts what you can take onto the battlefield. To avoid the noob vs veteran destabilizing XP and advancement issue, Paul mentions that they don’t give bonuses that make a player more powerful than another. They give them toys and features that make the game more fun.
Wedgwood stresses that they don’t ever want to dictate how someone might want to play the game. If someone loves being a Specialist, they can literally be that the entire way through the campaign. The AI will handle the objectives. Want to be on the front lines, stabbing the enemy and grabbing disguises? Done. Want to be off in the distance sniping? Done.
About half-way through the demo, we saw something that, at first glance seemed to be a bug in the single player demo… an enemy appeared right in front of Paul, seemingly out of thin air. Paul chuckled and smiled as he unloaded a shotgun to the enemy’s face. A bit later, we found out why Paul was smiling. Brink blurs the lines between online and single player gameplay. Similar to Burnout Paradise, going online doesn’t involve creating or joining a separate server from a multiplayer server list. Instead, you simply toggle online mode from within the game itself and the game seamlessly replaces AI-controlled characters with live ones. That is what we had witnessed… Paul knew he was taking out one of his fellow developers sitting behind the curtain as he let his buckshot loose.
Paul describes the system like so: You don’t have to quit the game if you’re enjoying the single player campaign one afternoon and then while you’re playing, your friend gets off work and wants to co-op with you. You just send them an invite, and poof, they’re in your game along side of you. And, since character advancement and stats are persistent, it doesn’t matter if you’re online or offline… you get to be you all the time. Some reservations arise about how the game will play if one team is fully controlled by humans and the other is only partially so, but it’s too early to know how it will turn out. Regardless, the game seems to be designed to seamlessly handle offline, co-op and competitive play, and given the lack of attention developers have given co-op play in recent years, that versatility sounds wonderful.
Cooperation really shines in Brink. Paul switched classes at one point to lay down an explosive charge to open up a back door to the enemy lines. While the class responsible for setting the charge wouldn’t get a lot of use out of the new passage, a Specialist would love the opportunity to sneak around the flanks for a bit of backstabbing. Engineers can erect turrets near Command Posts to help defend them, allowing other classes to focus on escorting the main objective. Meanwhile, soldiers can provide suppressing fire to give objective classes a chance to get their jobs done.
So far, it seems like Brink signals a gorgeous maturation of both the Doom 3 engine and the skills of Splash Damage. As excited as I am for Rage, Brink is on my must-buy list at this point.
