Hi
My name is Iceman and I want to give some constructive feedback about this game. I will be bringing up a lot of issues, so if you’re not prepared for a long read, don’t even bother going past this very sentence. I will mostly be focusing on the PC version of the game.
The points I bring up are in no particular order, so please do bare that in mind. Some of the more important issues might not be at the top, etc.
Combat feels unsatisfying
Or unrewarding, if you will. And lets be clear, this game is clearly not about K/D and whatnot. I, of course, realize that. However, this is a first person shooter game and as such, like it or not, shooting is a very big part of it.
But why is killing someone so unrewarding then? Well, for starters, shooting someone takes a lot of effort. Weapons have a lot of recoil and can become uncontrollable very fast (which, by no means, is a problem). But then there’s the continuous XP distribution (which I like).
To go slightly off topic here, I do think the continuous XP distribution is a really, really good idea. Rewarding someone not just for completing the objective, but also for trying to complete it is fair. I mean, just because I died half way through constructing that crane doesn’t mean I didn’t put effort into it.
But applying this same mechanic on shooting enemies isn’t the way to go. The XP, make no mistake, should still be rewarded based on how much damage you did to them, etc., but it should only be displayed to the player once either they or the enemy dies. To give that sense of reward for killing someone.
But what makes killing someone so satisfying and getting those multi-kills in Bad Company 2, for example, is also the personal kill feed at the bottom-center of the screen that displays only your own kills and deaths. That’s another thing this game could benefit from.
Shooting is a big part of this game, whether or not the game is a “team based” shooter or not. It’s still a shooter and a lot (in fact, I would even say the most) satisfaction you get from the game is, well, from shooting people. Or rather, that would be the case, if it felt rewarding enough.
I would imagine people might have different feelings about this and I do think this wasn’t the best thing to bring forward for my first point, but bare with me on this. There’s a lot of good stuff to come.
Performance is appallingly poor
This game is, hands down, the most poorly optimized game I have seen in recent times. It is bad to the point of hilarity. And frankly, it doesn’t even look that good. And that thing, what’s it called, “kill 50% of the frame rate” button? No, wait, it’s called ambient occlusion. That’s simply a joke. The quality of it is quite simply poor.
The first problem I would like to point out is the instability. How is it possible that it takes 15ms to assemble a frame at one point and then 25ms at another? How? How is such a drastic change possible?
How can this be explained? I could play ET:QW everything maxed out and with 16x Anti-Aliasing and still get more frames than I get from this game, with most of the advanced features turned off. And that’s comparing it to the times when this game actually does run above 60 fps for me (which is usually the small areas).
Before anyone calls “ATI” on this, I do have an nVidia card. So there.
Moving on, why is there (if slight, but still) texture pop-in on the PC? Shouldn’t texture streaming be strictly a console affair? Again, makes no sense to me.
So then, performance is absolutely piss poor in this game. And that leaves me with another question. How could this game be released in such a state? How did they play this game and not notice something like this? Or if they did, how were they completely OK with it?
Lag
So lag. Lag happens in any game, it’s just simply a fact. But developers usually use methods to compensate for that. Such compensation usually has one goal in mind - to preserve gameplay quality. This game has none of that. In fact, the game is so utterly server sided that even aiming down sights will be affected by lag.
But lets step away from that small detail for a moment. You will immediately feel any lag. Slight increase in ping? Your character will start to move uncomfortably. Slightly more ping? Whoop, no wait, you want to aim down sights? No can do, Sir.
At the very least, if nothing else, make movement and aiming down sights client sided. That is the least you can do for now.
User interface needs an usability check
The design of the user interface is quite good, all around. I’m a designer myself (http://icey-net.deviantart.com if you want proof). And I can safely say that is looks good.
However, when it comes to usability, it is quite poor. The first thing that strikes as completely ridiculous to me is the active weapon indicator. That little dot there at the top left? I’m sorry, but no. That’s a very severe usability mistake.
That interface needs a complete redesign. While you’re at it, you could also categorize weapons into SMGs, ARs, Sniper rifles and such, because throwing it all at the user at once is quite overwhelming, especially since a lot of the icons look quite similar.
Abilities and purchasing abilities is also quite badly done. It simply lacks any logic.
Coming away from the actual interface, earning ranks and level credits is simply a gray area to most people. How do I get ranks? How do I get level credits? It doesn’t make enough sense.
Also, there seems to be a bug with description highlights. They disappear after a while, not when you actually move your cursor away from the item and then when it does go away, it’s a bit tricky to get it back. Some things don’t even have descriptions. That’s an inconsistency, one that in no way does justice to the usability problem in general.
Match end screen is also pretty poor. There are a number of things wrong with it, but perhaps the most important one for myself right now is the lack of chat screen. You have to actually manually open it to see if people have been saying anything. Some matches don’t even have that, for some reason. Why?
Objectives aren’t understandable enough
Let me first start by saying that I think the objective wheel is a good idea. A definite improvement from the Quake Wars model, which I found to be quite daunting. With that said, though, there is one major problem with it. Say, I was an engineer and we required an operative to complete the objective. It would tell me to defend the area, as the main objective. That’s it. See a problem here?
So I went on to defend it, actually defended it and then eagerly waited for the match timer to run down. So when that happened, I was met with this rather interesting result. I had lost. Wait, what? What do you mean lost?! I defended the area! What is this non-sense?
Now of course, this mistake can be corrected once I replay the mission, but this is obviously an issue. The objective wheel wording and perhaps even the icons need a slight revamp here.
AI medics are better than human medics
Perhaps even slightly linked to the objective wheel here… AI medics in Quake Wars were almost universally more useful. Why? Well they knew where you were and they were given a task to go and revive you. With humans, things get a little more complicated. There’s a lot of action going on, there are loads of things on the HUD, there are things to do. Places to defend. Basically, most medics weren’t as good as the AI ones.
This rings true in Brink as well. Although you can choose to go ahead and revive someone as an objective, it’s not something you can do intuitively. And quite often, the ability is completely ignored. Even when there’s a guy lying down next to them, they often don’t revive them! Why is that?
Well, because it’s not displayed well enough via the interface. And the objective wheel might need some rework in this regard as well. Perhaps immediately highlighting fallen allies on the HUD, no matter where they are or whether reviving them is the objective. Hovering over this highlight and opening up the objective wheel would then set reviving the person as primary objective (at the top of the objective wheel, but of course, you would still choose the objective yourself). Sound good? Maybe not entirely, but it’s an effort regardless.
Hey, this mechanic could be used elsewhere just as well.
But before I go on to my next issue, I would like to compliment the developers on making the medic’s revive ability, quite simply, the best I’ve seen in any such game. If you’ve played BC2, you’re well familiar with rambo medics that would revive you just to get you killed immediately again. So then, the ability to use a revive syringe on yourself is quite welcomed. It’s genius, in fact.
AI is sometimes too accurate
Seemingly randomly, the AI sometimes have absolutely 100% accuracy, taking you down instantly. Not much I can say about this. This is clearly quite an awful way to compensate for the 80% of the time they can’t shoot even if their life depended on it.
Oh wait, I guess their life does… :rolleyes: Moving on…
Spawn traps
There are a couple of maps that are quite severely affected by this issue. I don’t care how many tactics you can use to avoid some of these slightly. If an enemy can simply wait at your spawn exit and kill your people in hordes, it’s bad map design. It’s that simple. End of story. It’s not even fun for the enemies, for that matter.
And this was especially horrible for one specific map (famous for not having sound). Might have been the AI just coming out of the same exit every time (I haven’t played it for resistance), but regardless, this sort of crap shouldn’t happen. Ever.
It quite simply drains all fun out of the game in a heartbeat.
Richard Ham has said that they monitor the stats and whatnot and are willing to change the respawn timers as needed, but that’s not what you do when your map is utterly broken. By decreasing respawn timers, you’re just simply letting people die more often. Further ruining their play time.
All that aside, I have been playing this game and having fun to a certain extent. But my play time is always ruined by some flaws or issues. Mostly the frame rate. I felt slightly cheated by the issues in Crysis 2, but now it seems I’ve been a horrible person giving Crytek a hard time about what in this context seem like silly little things.
There are some appallingly horrible issues with this game and I’ve somehow managed to accept that, but I don’t know how long I can keep that up. It just don’t. And I know for a fact that there is only a very, very small minority of people who are like me, who are willing to put up with it.
Some of these issues need to be addressed immediately. Like the sound loss issues. The frame rate issues. The lag issues. Moving about feels almost disgusting even with a slight bit of lag! These are not the kind of issues you can just look past for a while. These are the sort of issues that can absolutely utterly destroy a game’s launch, with no mercy.
But I don’t want that, because I like the game. Perhaps because I am biased slightly by the good times I had in ET:QW back in the day. Dear God, I must have had at least a thousand hours spent in that game. But I enjoyed every second of it. Which is not something that can be said about Brink. Not by a long shot.
Hopefully the issues will be sorted soon and I do hope that you find some of these suggestions useful. I know there are quite a lot of talented people over there at Splash Damage that could take some of these simple suggestions and make pure diamonds out of them.
Thank you very much for your time!