IGN talks about Brink and why it failed.

(SinDonor) #21

Yeah, well, Bethesda didn’t do much with design and dev. They just handled marketing and post-production stuff like manufacturing, shipping, etc. Oh, they also funded the entire project. I think Bethesda’s biggest failures were two things:

  1. The misleading prime-time ad campaign (not for people following the game who had a good idea what was being made, but for the average Joe FPS fan who thought this was gonna be some sort of John-Woo Call of Duty clone). Great for sales, but bad for customer reviews. It had a reverse effect. Not only did they bring in the wrong type of players for this game, but then those players *****-talked Brink non-stop and possibly scaring away many other players who might have enjoyed its team-centric, class-based, objective play style game.

  2. The hard release deadline. Bethesda was tired of waiting. They didn’t want this game to release this fall 2011 to fight against their own Rage and Skyrim. They definitely did not want to lose FPS gamers’ $$$ to BF3 and MW3. So, it was either push the game out early, or keep paying SD another year until an early 2012 release.

I believe if those two issues above didn’t occur, Brink could have been a much different game and most-likely much better.

(wolfnemesis75) #22

Brink’s main problem: Iteration 1 in a market dominated by Iteration 10. NOBODY is hating on Brink, period, if it has a track record to compare it to. Without any direct market to compare the game to, it gets matched against COD in perception or ETQW. And its not apples to apples comparison. Sorry, but this is the truth, and much of the stigma and backlash the game receives. Its not TF2 or ETQW or even COD, but is compared to those games because it cannot be compared to a previous version like Battlefield or Cod or even most games on the market can, nor does it have a built-in Brand recognition like say Batman, or any game based on a Licensed Entity. Every criticism is why its not like X (ETQW, COD, TF2, W:ET, RTC, etc.). Hence the polarized response to Brink.

End of thread.

(Humate) #23

ham said that splash damage’s main goal with brink was to take the often complex enemy territory gameplay – “which is really very hardcore, very fast, very in-your-face” – and adapt it to a wider audience. To do that, sd examined how “the best of the best” played et, like clan players who win tournaments, and tried to figure out “what it is that they do moment to moment to ensure that they win, and how we can put systems into brink that will ensure players are doing that automatically, without even knowing that they’re doing it in the bigger picture to win the game.”

ham revealed to me that early on in development, the devs considered dropping the classes completely, “allowing everybody to do everything all of the time.” but the company found that it was “so key, so core to the enemy territory-style gameplay” that the game “lost something special.”

“i’ll be honest,” said richard ham, creative director at splash damage to joystiq during a recent press event in los angeles. “brink is enemy territory 3. Let’s not mince words here.”

…lmao

(tokamak) #24

Is Wolfnemesis now seriously making a case against comparing different games? I mean, seriously? If you can only compare the same games you’re done comparing pretty fast.

(Ruben0s) #25

Q: Can we expect similiar gameplay to ET and RTCW. Fast objective gameplay. Requires more tactics instead of aim.
A: Yes, but i’ll have to say it now, Brink will not be as fast as W:ET (see my earlier comment about trying to make a game with as broad an appeal as possible). But faster than the norm, I’d say. And very deep :-

Q: Will there be ET/RTCW spawntimers & selfkilling?
A: All the normal rules and tactics you’ve come to expect from ET will be in Brink

Q: Is there any iron sight in Brink?
A: Yes. In the same way that in W:ET you would crouch to slow yourself down and get better aim, in Brink, you ironsight to slow yourself down and get better aim. Same basic mechanics.

Q: Please integrate the Wolfmap “Supply”. Most awesome map ever!
A: You mean supplydepot? actually, we’re taking a lot of inspiration from older popular W:ET maps, and in fact that we’ve got one map in Brink that follows the same basic flow of that one (at least, it does at the moment… things are still be playtested and balanced, and who knows how they might change as time goes on). but the kind of play you see there is definitely the type of play you get in Brink :slight_smile:

Q: Why does SD not come up with new and unique things anymore like you did with rtcw/et? maybe the games you make would be played competitively for more than one year then. or arent you passionately enough for your games and just aim for quick sells because of famous names?
A: Not sure what you mean. I can say that we love the kind of objective based competitive gameplay that was really invented with ET, and almost no one else is doing it, and we’re constantly finding new ways to tweak and improve it. until it’s perfect, i doubt you’d see us moving on to something completely different. we just love this kind of game too much! :slight_smile:

Q: Will BRINK support Linux or Mac OS?
A: Yes to Linux server support. not sure about Mac (will have to ask at work).

Well, why the heck do we compare it to ET games?

Linux support ouch…

Q: What I mean is; why dont you go on with the RtCW/W:ET-gameplay and movement stuff. RtCW was very successful with its 1on1 game gameplay and movement. why dont you instead of copying cod games copy this style again? Fast obj based gameplay IS NOT possible with ironsight and all this stuff.
A: While that kind of gameplay is fantastic, it’s genuinely too hard for the vast majority of players out there these days. You guys are literally too good! :slight_smile: If we make a game that caters to your strengths as players, we create a game that literally 90% of our potential audience wouldn’t be able to play well, and as a result we’d screw ourselves and go out of business. That said, I do still think Brink is faster than what has kind of become standard in the last few years, especially when you consider our freedom of movement stuff, and our “small body type” which lets you move faster. And I know our gameplay is the most tactically deep out there, so we’ve got that gong for us too. Hopefully there’s be some official video out soon so you can judge for yourself how we’re shaping up.

Q: You seem to underrate the players then. its not like my parents or whoever would play the game, only people who play fps games will buy your game anyway and they dont need **** loads of tooltips and things like iron sight. look at the fps games that were made in the past. they were popular because they were so simply to play and i think that there is the problem of the games produced nowadays. you seem to think that making a game slower, adding tooltips and using iron sight make games easier to play but its exactly the opposite.
A: I think you underrate yourself. To play at the level that you play at, it’s really beyond most players today. The audience has really expanded a lot in the last 10 years, and as well, Brink is trying to expand it even more by getting players who never try online to try us. So to make it a game where success is measured in hyper precision pinpoint actions and blisteringly fast gameplay would keep us too niche. A game could be successful catering to that audience, but it would have to be made for a fraction of the money a normal AAA blockbuster is made these days. Also, it wouldn’t hurt it if was given away for free, like W:ET :slight_smile: But we’ll try to expose as many variables to players so they can make their own competetive mods without requiring a degree in computer science! And, we’ve got the ‘fast’ body type for players who want to move fast. I don’t think it would be crazy to expect that players would have the ability to set up servers where everyone is forced to be the small acrobatic body type, so everyone is moving around at full speed, scrambling up walls, for example.

I wish I knew this before the release. Now I know why brink has such a ridiculous high spread and terrible gameplay, they wanted to appeal the masses :smiley:

<— looking at steam top 100 and CLAN/tournament site, looks like splashdamage was aiming for a niche market :stuck_out_tongue:

(Kendle) #26

While that kind of gameplay is fantastic, it’s genuinely too hard for the vast majority of players out there these days. You guys are literally too good! :slight_smile: If we make a game that caters to your strengths as players, we create a game that literally 90% of our potential audience wouldn’t be able to play well, and as a result we’d screw ourselves and go out of business

That right there is one of their biggest mistakes. They totally under-estimated the player base and the effort most people are willing to invest in a game to play it reasonably well. They made the game so easy anyone who’d ever played an FPS before felt patronised, and anyone who hadn’t felt like they’d achieved all they could too easily and very quickly felt they had nothing left to play for.

SD really need to go back and look at their design decisions and realise they totally mis-judged the market.

(Ruben0s) #27

I hope splashdamage understands that Brink was a complete failure on the PC, why the hell would the game die 3 times within weeks.

(dazman76) #28

That really isn’t the case Wolf. Be honest :slight_smile:

(Shojimbo) #29

Here’s another reason for why it failed…

I can’t play it… LOL

Last two days when I load up a game on freeplay it stays in the loading screen forever and I have to restart my PS3. If there was any chance of a recent revival (and I experienced more people playing than usual) then it’s being punched in the head again…

When I have Arkham City, Uncharted 3, Battlefield 3 and Skyrim sitting in my collection I don’t really know if I’ll even think about putting Brink back in the disc-drive again… it’s that off-putting and disappointing.

As for buying into a future Splash Damage product? Don’t think so. Not unless it’s getting proper ratings & reviews and with a demo to try it on. So sad because Brink seemed to being heading towards everything I wanted in a game.

(INF3RN0) #30

Makes you wonder how common it is for the players to understand a game better than the developers who made it…

(INF3RN0) #31

[QUOTE=wolfnemesis75;388438]

End of thread.[/QUOTE]

The court judge just overruled… awaiting your rebuttal to wall o’ quotes.

(zenstar) #32

There are many games (shooters even) that are on their first or second iteration. We need to stop crying COD when in reality there are a lot of new IP games that are emerging just fine. Borderlands and Dead Island make good recent examples in the same genre.

NOBODY is hating on Brink, period, if it has a track record to compare it to. Without any direct market to compare the game to, it gets matched against COD in perception or ETQW. And its not apples to apples comparison.

You _can _ compare player retention and sales for any game. The more sales and the longer the game holds people’s attentions the better it is in a general and vague sense. Brink did OK in the sales dept but cannot retain players.

Sorry, but this is the truth, and much of the stigma and backlash the game receives. Its not TF2 or ETQW or even COD, but is compared to those games because it cannot be compared to a previous version like Battlefield or Cod or even most games on the market can, nor does it have a built-in Brand recognition like say Batman, or any game based on a Licensed Entity.

It’s compared to TF2 because it’s a similar concept and technically TF2 is the first stand-alone TF out there (iirc) so it’s pretty similar to Brink which is the first standalone IP not based off another game. As for comparison to ETQW and W:ET - the core game is the same. That’s like comparing COD 36 with COD 35 and 34 basically. Brink grew up from ETQW which grew up from W:ET. Of course it’s going to be compared to it’s roots. Every game is.
And Brink has brand recognition. 2 brands in fact: Bethesda and Splash Damage. Both are names that come with associations. Beth is a big boy in the publishing industry and has put out some big boy titles. Splash Damage are a well known dev team with a particular style that people expect in their games. That same style that makes Brink seem unique on the console is the style that PC gamers expect (the objective class thing).

Every criticism is why its not like X (ETQW, COD, TF2, W:ET, RTC, etc.). Hence the polarized response to Brink.

End of thread.

Of course criticism will use comparisons to show how something is done well, but the criticisms themselves are against Brink and Brink alone (the criticisms that hold any weight).
For example: SMART is a nice idea but falls short of “great” and I don’t think the gameplay would be much different if SMART movement was left out and normal FPS movement was used. <- nothing to do with “Brink must be like X”. It’s just got to do with Brink not living up to potential.
Also: Guns are too random and spray too uncontrollable. <- Nothing to do with Brink becoming another game. If there’s a way of making gunplay more fun, accurate and interesting without copying another game then they can do that.
Level design is way too defence oriented <- Purely a complaint with Brink. Defence win way too often. more balance is required.
Bots are arse <- Brink again. The bots are pretty meh imo.

And you yourself have been advocating that Brink be more like other games with the inclusion of the standard lobby system. Some things happen in all games because they are the proper way of doing things. If you do them differently then you have to do them really well or the inevitable response is “that’s bad. Why didn’t you do it like game X (where it works as expected)?”. Doesn’t mean we want Brink to be COD. It means we want Brink to be good and if we can’t think of a good solution we’ll fall back on a known solution that has been implemented and works.

(dazman76) #33

Zen - an excellent and well-written post mate :slight_smile: While I’m quite guilty of mentioning ET:QW in my comments about Brink, it has always been because something worked better in ET:QW. That can easily be taken as “you just want ET:QW but with Brink’s skin”, and in fact that IS the easy counter-argument when attempting to close off the discussion - as we’ve seen time and time again :slight_smile:

However, I’ve never understood why a direct comparison is so bad, when you’re doing your best to be concise, specific and constructive. If a complaint covers a genuine, visible fault with a Brink mechanic that wasn’t present in ET:QW with the same mechanic - isn’t it natural to point this out? This leads to “well yes, I agree that this is faulty in Brink, but stop comparing to ET:QW - it’s a different game™”. Sure it’s a different game - but it shares a hell of a lot of mechanics with “that older game”, and as such, comparisons will be drawn when things don’t seem to be working as well. The term “A step backwards” was coined for a reason :slight_smile: I’m fine with such counter-arguing if I’m saying something like “I don’t like the Resistance - the Strogg were much cooler”. In that case, people would be right to sigh and tell me to stop talking about ET:QW. But mechanics and gameplay are a different matter - and there are plenty of reasons why ET:QW still has more active players than Brink PC.

tl;dr - using the old “oh noes, not another comparison!” counter-argument really achieves nothing, when the original argument concerns mechanics and gameplay. If nothing else, comparisons are valid for showing how well Product B handles something that Product A struggles with - I don’t need a desire for the mechanics of Product B to be copied in their entirety, and it doesn’t matter if Product B is overall a complete pile of rubbish made for a younger audience. If we’re discussing a broken mechanic, that mechanic should be all that matters. Depending on context, other mechanics will have to be taken into account - but that still doesn’t invalidate a comparison on it’s own. If products were not compared to other products, there would be no advancement or evolution of either product - because there would be no discernible need to improve any of them.

(DarkangelUK) #34

zen and daz, you just wasted far too much effort on those replies considering you’re replying to the Comical Ali of BHC. None the less, you couldn’t get clearer than that, and only a moro… i’ll let wolfnem clarify this part actually.

(wolfnemesis75) #35

[QUOTE=zenstar;388469]Text. [/QUOTE]In trying to retort my statement, you pretty much validated it. Basically, Brink is the first game of its kind. Its not any of those games its compared to. In the strictest of terms, its not based on a previous version. Each successive version of COD has improved over time; factor in more development time, expense, player feedback, etc and you have a recipe to viably improve the game. If Bethesda is committed to the same kind of approach, then Brink could be looked at similarly. The main problem is the limited amount of support the game seems to have gotten since May from Bethesda. If the feeling was that there was more to come in the series, there would be an additional motivation to continue to support it as a player. But, if you remember the months we had to wait for the DLC alone, the brand suffers as it feels like a doomed product. This is do to the underlying lack of positive support. Despite the fact that the game did well from initial sales.

(tokamak) #36

A doomed product. Finally Wolf said it.

(Kendle) #37

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Brink is, in the words of the Creative Director of the company who made it, ET3 (ET:QW was ET2). Brink is as different from ET:QW / ET as the COD:MW series is from the COD:WAW series. All of them COD but different eras, different weapons, different maps (and even different developers and made for different platforms some of them), just as ET / ET:QW / Brink are different eras, different weapons, different maps.

The comparisons with ET / ET:QW are EXTREMELY valid. Just because you didn’t play those earlier versions and are not qualified to make those comparisons doesn’t make it not so.

edit: sorry for picking on you, you’re on my ignore list so I don’t have to read your drivel most of the time but I wasn’t logged in, read your insane reply above and just had to post.

(zenstar) #38

Not quite.
In the strictest terms Brink is merely a slight modification on ETQW. It has a simplified class structure (ETQW had asymmetric classes, Brink has symmetric ala W:ET). There are no new objectives.
The only new things in Brink compared to previous SD games are: SMART movement and the dress-up. The dress up portion has been done in many games many many times before. It’s new to SD maybe, but it’s not so new to FPSs.

SMART alone is not enough to claim this is an entirely new game divorced from its predecessors or even it’s competitors. SMART is the only new thing in Brink technically. Even then interesting movement in FPS has been done before in other games.

The IP may have a fresh twist to it and it certainly looks unique with its art style, but the core game is not that different from ETQW. It really is a simplified ETQW (PC) when you come right down to it and that’s why everyone keeps comparing it to it’s older brother.

I’ll agree that the lack of support and extremely slow rate of communication hurts the game tremendously. But there are a lot of issues to patch before the game can feasibly hold onto a community.

(tokamak) #39

What I find curious is, after all it’s critical claim, why would SD NOT want the game to be like ET?

(wolfnemesis75) #40

[QUOTE=Kendle;388481]Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Brink is, in the words of the Creative Director of the company who made it, ET3 (ET:QW was ET2). Brink is as different from ET:QW / ET as the COD:MW series is from the COD:WAW series. All of them COD but different eras, different weapons, different maps (and even different developers and made for different platforms some of them), just as ET / ET:QW / Brink are different eras, different weapons, different maps.

The comparisons with ET / ET:QW are EXTREMELY valid. Just because you didn’t play those earlier versions and are not qualified to make those comparisons doesn’t make it not so.

edit: sorry for picking on you, you’re on my ignore list so I don’t have to read your drivel most of the time but I wasn’t logged in, read your insane reply above and just had to post.[/QUOTE]Remember. I don’t play on PC. So automatically, I come from a perspective that’s much more open-minded. I am not clouded by extreme opinion based on bias and personal gripes, but have played instead on many different platforms and so have a broad view of the reality. ETQW was not one of the sticking points for “most” gamers criticism nor was it mentioned much beyond saying that Brink was made by the same developer who made Quake Wars Enemy Territory and Return to Castle Wolfenstien in the IGN article. The main comparison is COD. Which ostensibly renders all other points moot if that’s the basis of comparison. This comes back to my main point.

Some of the review is flawed if you are playing Brink with friends who each have a role, like a role playing game. You do get to learn each class if you’re playing this way and don’t have to switch class every time an objective needs to be accomplished.