IGN talks about Brink and why it failed.

(Indloon) #61

[QUOTE=Kendle;388538]That’s the key point, we probably wouldn’t be here today, SD probably wouldn’t even exist, and Brink would never have happened if it wasn’t for a guy called Bani who made a mod for ET (ETPro), including lots of bug fixes and game changing options (the code for which he gave to SD and they incorporated into a patch for ETMain).

Anyone remember Battery on ETMain? It was the Container City of ET, the attacking team were lucky to get off the beach. ETPro effectively “fixed” the map and turned it from unplayable to playable. Map scripts, heavy weapons restrictions, XP restrictions, forget that competition wouldn’t have existed without ETPro, ET itself wouldn’t have survived it’s first year without it IMO. So much of what we know of ET today, so much we credit SD for in our ignorance, was actually the work of a reclusive American who did it all for free and in his spare time.[/QUOTE]

Instead of thanking Bani.
You should thanks Id Software and SplashDamage for sharing Software Development Kit and source code of Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory to
ETpro team…

And of course Bani mates from Microsoft…

(Kendle) #62

[QUOTE=Indloon;388562]Instead of thanking Bani.
You should thanks Id Software and SplashDamage for sharing Software Development Kit and source code of Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory to
ETpro team…[/QUOTE]

Ah of course, don’t thank the guy who did the work, for free, thank the commercial business(es) who let him and potentially profited from that work. Silly me :wink:

(tokamak) #63

That’s not fair. No matter how great, if you’ve been up to your neck into coding, testing something you eventually get sick of it. Once you’ve poured your being into something you can’t recognise it for what it is any more.

(tangoliber) #64

Brink would have never been successful on PC without appealing to the competitive community, so the following is only for consoles.

Why was their so much backlash against Brink? The marketing did a good job selling copies, but they did this by targeting an audience that the game wasn’t made for. This created backlash. Market towards the target audience and you will sell less copies, but you will have a bigger, lasting fanbase on consoles.

Why did it get bad reviews? Because reviewers have never been that fond of multiplayer-centric games. They don’t get them…they aren’t good at them…etc. Reviewers need lots of content, narrative and immersion. They don’t care about metagame or last second victories.

In my opinion, the most important question of all is: Why is the active playerbase on consoles so small? Games that suffered from much more backlash, and had much worse reviews have still maintained larger communities than Brink.
Why? Because they chose matchmaking over a match browser.
Matchmaking is never a good idea unless your game has hundreds of thousands of players a week. A custom match browser is always a better choice.
A match browser brings people together. There is no one stuck searching and only getting games with bots. They are able to see where the players are, and they can choose their match based on content and ping.
When Brink was released, I had 5 clan members from previous games who came over to Brink with me. They all absolutely loved the game, but they all left because of one reason: It was too hard to get matches with real people.
ETQW had a match browser, and despite worse reviews and sales on PS3, it had a better community than Brink for a long time. (Its dead now, but it has been a while.)
A match browser is also great for fostering a clan community, and allowing for customized rulesets.
The clan system is nice, and a great idea. But when you look at what the PS3 people were doing in the first several months by creating a Competition chatroom, and a Big Teams chatroom, and using those rooms to invite people and get games going… we were basically emulating what a match browser does. We weren’t emulating a clan system…we were emulating a match browser. It should be clear which of those two things is more vital to a community.

(zenstar) #65

I think the terribad launch caused most of the console backlash.
Let’s be honest: the game is a multiplayer only game. The “single player” stuff is purely bot practice for online play and the first long while after release the xbox community could barely get a lag free game. Then they cut down the max size of the games and the complaints lessened somewhat but by then the damage was done.
Noone is going to recommend trying out a game that they had a bad experience with. Especially with so many multiplayer games out there. The FPS market is vicious nowadays. No average games make it in that genre. It’s either the cream of the crop or it’s the bottom of the bin. No inbetweeners.
It just took them too long to make it work properly. It still needs tweaking and whatnot, but there’s hardly anyone left to tweak it for.

EDIT: At least with games with a single player component the players can amuse themselves for a while with that part of the game and learn some skills along the way until the multiplayer is patch (or in some cases: added later in a patch). But multiplayer only game where the multiplayer is broken? That’s like selling a car that only works in reverse.

(tokamak) #66

What amazes me is how games seldom survive first contact with a console. I mean, it’s not the first chance they get at actually trying it out on a console right?

(nephandys) #67

[QUOTE=tangoliber;388573]Brink would have never been successful on PC without appealing to the competitive community, so the following is only for consoles.

Why was their so much backlash against Brink? The marketing did a good job selling copies, but they did this by targeting an audience that the game wasn’t made for. This created backlash. Market towards the target audience and you will sell less copies, but you will have a bigger, lasting fanbase on consoles.

Why did it get bad reviews? Because reviewers have never been that fond of multiplayer-centric games. They don’t get them…they aren’t good at them…etc. Reviewers need lots of content, narrative and immersion. They don’t care about metagame or last second victories.

In my opinion, the most important question of all is: Why is the active playerbase on consoles so small? Games that suffered from much more backlash, and had much worse reviews have still maintained larger communities than Brink.
Why? Because they chose matchmaking over a match browser.
Matchmaking is never a good idea unless your game has hundreds of thousands of players a week. A custom match browser is always a better choice.
A match browser brings people together. There is no one stuck searching and only getting games with bots. They are able to see where the players are, and they can choose their match based on content and ping.
When Brink was released, I had 5 clan members from previous games who came over to Brink with me. They all absolutely loved the game, but they all left because of one reason: It was too hard to get matches with real people.
ETQW had a match browser, and despite worse reviews and sales on PS3, it had a better community than Brink for a long time. (Its dead now, but it has been a while.)
A match browser is also great for fostering a clan community, and allowing for customized rulesets.
The clan system is nice, and a great idea. But when you look at what the PS3 people were doing in the first several months by creating a Competition chatroom, and a Big Teams chatroom, and using those rooms to invite people and get games going… we were basically emulating what a match browser does. We weren’t emulating a clan system…we were emulating a match browser. It should be clear which of those two things is more vital to a community.[/QUOTE]
Having actually returned to play recently I think this is the same conclusion that I have come to. After all this time the worst thing about playing is that there’s never full matches anymore. The matchmaking system wasn’t as big of a problem before IMO because a lot more people were playing, but with such a small community the problems are worse than ever. All it would take is having matches not start until they are full or at least 5v5 or something. However, it seems like this was sacrificed for the sake of faster matchmaking and confidence in the ability of bots to replace human teammates. The reduction of the bot AI in MP, while seemingly a minor change at first, absolutely ruined any fun to be had in less than full games and wasn’t a problem until non-full games became the norm.

If a game can’t get the absolute basics right, like matchmaking, it’s screwed before it even heads out the door.

This isn’t my only problem with Brink, but it’s the one that currently plagues me the most outside of the fact that I might as well be playing an MMO with the RNG, spread, lotto that’s considered gunfire in this game.

Here’s to SD actually positively utilizing this feedback for the creation of their next title.

*Side note: Any way you guys think SD could self publish? That might have prevented the whole fiasco. Even if that had forced them to release Brink as a smaller, F2P, PC only, etc. game that they then expanded on over time, I still think it would be in a much better spot than it is now. I’m wondering this because I’ve been following Uber Entertainment over the course of their self-publishing two games now and the giant headaches with MS that caused them to give up on consoles altogether.

(Humate) #68

*Class action speed vs Combat speed = imbalanced / zero risk management
*Advantages gained via class actions are mitigated by the fact everyone can perform them at the same capacity
*Advantages gained via combat, are mitigated by the lotto spread and low headshot ratio
*SMART equates to a jump-pad system, that offers “flanking” opportunities. The characteristics of Brink’s combat renders these opportunities useless.
*Auto-Vsays not only makes the game feel sterile, it fails in prompting people into specific action.

From a gameplay point of view, these are the things that stand out the most for me.
But more importantly it just wasn’t an enjoyable game, no matter how much I wanted it to be.

(tokamak) #69

You know your priorities well :slight_smile:

(gold163) #70

That’s not really what I meant. Wolf: ET didn’t have to compete in the same hostile retail climate that Brink did, and it’s been out for much longer. Number of downloads and server popularity don’t equate to the consumer demographic that the game is being sold to. My point was that Brink was deliberately aimed at a different demographic than Enemy Territory because that’s where the money was, and SD dropped the Enemy Territory moniker probably because they simply wanted to do a game that wasn’t quite Enemy Territory. Whether or not that is true is obviously up for debate, and I don’t claim to know anything about Splash Damage that you don’t, but that seems to be the most logical case to me.

Also, auto voice sucked and wasn’t helpful in any capacity.

(tokamak) #71

Number of downloads and server popularity don’t equate to the consumer demographic that the game is being sold to.

That’s the kind of logic that got Brink killed.

(sanDIOkan) #72

u think that fanboys will ever realize it?
btw even at 5 euro people dont play it
brink is not even in first 100 games played on steam

it’s dead and case is closed

(zenstar) #73

[QUOTE=gold163;388653]That’s not really what I meant. Wolf: ET didn’t have to compete in the same hostile retail climate that Brink did, and it’s been out for much longer. Number of downloads and server popularity don’t equate to the consumer demographic that the game is being sold to. My point was that Brink was deliberately aimed at a different demographic than Enemy Territory because that’s where the money was, and SD dropped the Enemy Territory moniker probably because they simply wanted to do a game that wasn’t quite Enemy Territory. Whether or not that is true is obviously up for debate, and I don’t claim to know anything about Splash Damage that you don’t, but that seems to be the most logical case to me.

Also, auto voice sucked and wasn’t helpful in any capacity.[/QUOTE]

It’s far more likely that they dropped “Enemy Territories” because that was an Activision game and not a Bethesda game and they didn’t want any licensing hassles.

The game was definitely aimed at a wider market, that’s true. Part of that was opening up to consoles. Unfortunately the simplification didn’t mix well with the game type and instead of having a strong launch for the new IP we have a slightly wobbly launch.
It may have sold well but with the sort of advertising it had you could have sold “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” in bucketloads. The big question is if there’ll be a number 2 and how will this release have helped or hindered the potential franchise.
If the negative backlash was great enough then number 2 may be sunk before it’s built. If SD learnt from the backlash and do things differently then they could churn out a solid gold hit.

And I’m pretty sure they wanted to do an enemy territories game. If they didn’t want to they wouldn’t have made a game that is practically enemy territories only with the complicated bits trimmed off. The core concept of enemy territories -classes and objectives, the whole gameplay style- is all there, just implemented in a way that doesn’t hold your attention for long.

And yes: autovoice is fine to make “background chatter” but a concise Vsay would have been far nicer. You could have kept autovoice and simply had Vsay pop up text at the bottom of the screen in a far more visual way that focuses people. After 1 round you’ve tuned out the chatter or turned it off anyway.

(SockDog) #74

Activision only ever published, id Software own the trademarks. http://tess2.uspto.gov/ <— trademarks can be searched here if anyone is interested.

Of course there is nothing to say such a publishing deal didn’t include clauses to prevent a similarly titled game to be released by someone else. That said, I think it more likely the ET moniker wasn’t used simply because this was an SD originated IP sold to Bethesda and had nothing to do with id Software.

On some other points from this thread.

Call of Duty was a big success from a relatively unknown developer, so much so Activision bought it and the developer up without hesitation. So to say games require iteration to become popular is misleading and not a requirement for success. I’d quote several Valve IPs that are not sequels but I know it’ll be faced with “but they have buckets of money to polish”. Instead I’ll just say if you have confidence in your product you’re not going to let the little details be the deciding factor of its success.

If I can be arrogantly broad and sweeping. I’d have to say those who seem to like Brink fall into one or both of the following categories.

  1. Focused on leveling. Brink certainly does shine brightly compared to the regular leveling grind. If you’re playing to level it doesn’t surprise me you fail to see the flaws in the game because the game is a secondary factor of your enjoyment.
  2. Ignorance. Simply not having any experience of the same formula working to a higher standard in other games.

Finally. Retention is the biggest indicator of issues with the game, people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds just haven’t stuck with it. Not to derail but if SDs intentions were always to follow up and add to the game then I think it’s critical they work on a solid single player campaign (opening a HUGE audience for additional sales) and add extra, simpler, game modes to retain players.

(tokamak) #75

This is the article the big boys over at Bethesda as well as Splash Damage should have read.

It really is that simple. The success of a video game revolves around one single question and that is ‘Would you recommend this game to your friends?’. To boost the ratio in which people answer that question with ‘yes’ should be the sole purpose of a video game developer/publisher.

(gold163) #76

I don’t understand what you mean by this. Please explain. If Brink haters are to be believed the game was doomed from the start.

Don’t understand this either. What argument?

@Zenstar: I never thought about licensing issues; that’s an interesting point. But part of me feels like that despite Enemy Territory being a popular property, it just wasn’t as marketable as what SD wanted to make. But then again, I don’t have insight as to what Brink looked like earlier in development. It could very well have been much closer to Enemy Territory than the final result. In which case I’d have to conclude that the reason why they changed it was because they simply didn’t want to make Enemy Territory, or they didn’t see it as marketable to the demographic they were aiming for.

+1 to SockDog, although I like Brink and I’d like to think I’m not focused on leveling… so that makes me ignorant to other games of this type. It’s not so much that Brink players fail to see the flaws in the game as they don’t stop playing just because of them. Brink was the major disappointment of the year for me (I haven’t played Rage… yet) and I think a lot of Brink players are pretty vocal with what’s wrong with the game. But they see a lot of potential there that could have been capitalized upon, which makes Brink all the more tragic. I can’t really dismiss it with, “Brink sucks so you should play Enemy Territory instead, since it’s the same formula held to a higher standard.” The formula is the same, but the game is different enough for people to want to play it, whether they play the better alternatives or not. Although I don’t doubt that Brink might be a lot of players’ first experience with this sort of game, too.

(tokamak) #77

That’s nonsense! People have been incredibly patient with this game at the start. EVERYONE here has been incredibly excited about it for YEARS before it got released. Even the word ‘hater’ is getting inaccurate. People aren’t even hating the game, they’re just plain indifferent towards it, it has dropped from their radar.

Stop laying blame with the people. Brink simply is a gigantic game full with bright ideas and innovations that would’ve made it the next step in it’s genre only then to be completely doused in ass-juice.

(gold163) #78

alright, “hater” was the wrong word to use. I still don’t get what you mean. I’m not absolving the game itself from blame; far from it. If you interpreted my original statement as, “Enemy Territory wasn’t popular and that’s why Brink failed,” that is absolutely not what I mean at all.

The idea is that Brink was aimed at a different market… and not that the market wasn’t receptive, but the game’s design and focus suffered as a result. The market definitely was receptive. I can’t pretend to ignore all the media buzz that went around anytime information about the game was released. People make the point that Brink is too much like ET to be considered new, but others say that it’s not enough like ET to be good. It’s a game with an identity crisis, and that’s not the consumer’s fault. I’m not laying the blame on the people at all, or at least I don’t think I am. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Wolf ET and Brink capture different markets, despite the relative popularity of either game. They might overlap, but they’re not the same.

I also really can’t tell if the second part is you being sarcastic or something.

(tokamak) #79

SD simply had a downright insultingly low esteem of the mainstream gamer, and the mainstream gamer luckily didn’t take it. The highly random firefights, little build variation and uninspired map layouts being the biggest insults. I think it would be worse if this game would’ve become a success. That it got rejected by the mainstream gamers only shows that there’s still hope.

(gold163) #80

agreed. that being said, I’m dubious as to whether SD themselves feel this way, and I hope they really understand what went wrong with the agme. And to be honest, if they were to make another game I’d rather they follow up with an improvement on Brink’s formula, rather than just Enemy Territory’s in general.