New Brink Video Interviews Surface

[Marmil]

Sounds really awesome. Looking forward to hearing more about this one in the year to come!

[shirosae]

[QUOTE=tokamak;194514]That’s easy, just let the two campaigns run into each other. The first resistance level is defending the final objective the security need to attack and the other way around.

Resistance is defending map A which is attacking map Z for the security.[/QUOTE]

So every map change I play against a completely new team? I can’t spend an evening playing against my friends because the game forces server shuffling between maps?

I’d be a bit annoyed if I lost the ability to just make a server and play with some trusted friends for the sake of a storyline that I’m most likely not going to care about after the first run through.

That might sound harsh at first (it’s not meant to be!), but it was very much my experience with Guild Wars. The random-teams Random Arena is the joke of PvP because you simply can’t get a quality game when so many people don’t know what they’re doing and so many others will sync or quit after a few seconds assessing their random team. It’s useful in GW because it’s a worthless PvP that people can cut their teeth on, but then in GW there are other more serious PvP modes. The GW storyline is also something you skip after the first run through.

I genuinely can’t imagine any way of tying single-player stuff into a multi-player game without causing huge damage to the actual game part, which is why I’m quite curious to see what SD has come up with.

[Rahdo]

One thing I can definitely promise is that nothing is going to get in the way of friends playing together. The storyline stuff is basically something you can opt into if you like, but if it cramps your style, you can forgo it (or as I mentioned in interview that started this thread, get a narrative that ‘jumps around’) Otoh, there’s nothing keeping you and your friends from going through the storyline together, and I personally think that would provide the best overall experience (combines the best of traditional single player narrative and multiplayer party gameplay). But I’m not going to tell you how to play your game (once you’ve bought it, that is )

[tokamak]

Does ‘going trough the storyline together’ also mean, going trough the storyline against each other?

[dommafia]

Rahdo is the best interviewee of a game company I have yet to witness. Makes me want to buy the game yesterday. There’s something genuine there, something that reflects how much he loves the game he’s making. Carmack used to be that way.

[acidrain]

Carmack used to be that way.

Oh snap!

Rockets are more fun anyway.

[Rahdo]

Does ‘going trough the storyline together’ also mean, going trough the storyline against each other?

You just blew my mind!

But no, that’s wouldn’t work too well. If you and I are on opposite teams, one will win and one will lose, and so our narratives can’t stay in sync and we’ll have to split apart. So players sharing the storyline is all about co-op party play…

[shirosae]

[QUOTE=Rahdo;194762]You just blew my mind!

But no, that’s wouldn’t work too well. If you and I are on opposite teams, one will win and one will lose, and so our narratives can’t stay in sync and we’ll have to split apart. So players sharing the storyline is all about co-op party play…[/QUOTE]

I thought that might be the case.

So, how do I go about playing with a group of friends across multiple maps?

Do I have some sort of flag I can set that dumps one side’s campaign progression in favour of keeping us all together? Or is there a separate (server?) mode that’s more like the campaigns in ETQW?

+1 to Dom’s post btw; I’ve said it before, but I’ve really never seen this level of interaction with a dev studio before.

[Florisjuh]

Sounds pretty cool for an alternative type of competition though, natural brackets, winner will keep rising higher, loser will keep shrinking lower.

It would also be amazingly cool if the game could rank teams based on their performance and do some magical match making to put nearly equal teams against each other.

[Shiv]

[QUOTE=Rahdo;194762]You just blew my mind!

But no, that’s wouldn’t work too well. If you and I are on opposite teams, one will win and one will lose, and so our narratives can’t stay in sync and we’ll have to split apart. So players sharing the storyline is all about co-op party play…[/QUOTE]

i think you mentioned before that there was 3 types of game, private public + comp i think
Does comp break the story to give players the chance to do a full campaign following specific arcs.
maybe following the arc of whoever wins each consecutive round, but keeping the players the same…
i like dropping on the opposite team to friends on vent so i can stomp them down… having to re-join each map change would suck major for me :(…
and does it just dump random players in the other team from a different game thats just finished that specific map link and lost or whatever…

doesnt that need allot of players to run correctly and without massive delays between levels…
and what happens to people hosting their own servers, which team gets priority on host… doesnt it break getting fave servers, and what if the ping sucks on the following map :eek:

[tokamak]

[QUOTE=Rahdo;194762]You just blew my mind!

But no, that’s wouldn’t work too well. If you and I are on opposite teams, one will win and one will lose, and so our narratives can’t stay in sync and we’ll have to split apart. So players sharing the storyline is all about co-op party play…[/QUOTE]

I blew your mind? Have you any idea in what knots I turned myself to understand how the whole single-multiplayer story could work?

But yes, great, now I finally understand where you guys are going with your mingle player. And I think you now know why I had such a difficult time understanding it. I had the classic set up of ‘fixed team vs fixed team for the next three-map campaign’ in my head.

Frankly I think keep on playing against the same enemy players is just too much asked. It’s like trying to make a circle out of a square. It’s either two campaigns and different opponent teams, or the same teams and just one campaign. Two campaigns really seems the better deal.

[QUOTE=Shiv;194776]i think you mentioned before that there was 3 types of game, private public + comp i think
Does comp break the story to give players the chance to do a full campaign following specific arcs.
maybe following the arc of whoever wins each consecutive round, but keeping the players the same…
i like dropping on the opposite team to friends on vent so i can stomp them down… having to re-join each map change would suck major for me :(…
and does it just dump random players in the other team from a different game thats just finished that specific map link and lost or whatever…

doesnt that need allot of players to run correctly and without massive delays between levels…
and what happens to people hosting their own servers, which team gets priority on host… doesnt it break getting fave servers, and what if the ping sucks on the following map :eek:[/QUOTE]

You’ll run into very complex problems if you try that.

The only way I could see comp play work right now is trough stopwatch mode, which doesn’t really require much tinkering.

[SockDog]

It would also be amazingly cool if the game could rank teams based on their performance and do some magical match making to put nearly equal teams against each other.

I think this is essential to avoid stacking. Even with the best of intentions it’s going to be no fun playing on a server and then a group of friends who actively play together steam roll you.

I’d love a similar magic formula applied to imbalanced teams. Maybe lower XP earned, handicap etc. Not to balance the entire game so a poor team is equal to a great team. Give the poor team a 20% boost and the great team a 20% handicap. The poor team then have something to fight over and the great team and more of a challenge. Does that make sense?

[Rahdo]

Sock, interestingly, there are some mechanisms planned (not yet implemented, so not sure how well they’ll work yet) similar to what you suggest. Myself, I don’t believe an entirely lopsided match is fun for anyone – the winners or the losers, so we’re trying to ensure there’s healthy competition no matter what. But it’s a tall order to pull off, so we’ll see how it goes. And don’t worry, those are for ‘standard matches’… they will be able to be turned off to not upset the balance of serious competitive situations.

Heh, I was about to do another post about the particulars of how to string a narrative thread through a series of competitive matches, but I realized that Bethesda wouldn’t be too happy with me going into a lot of detail on that, since I imagine it’s the kind of game detail they’d like to hold back so they can wrangle more high level press exclusives (they’re smart that way), so I’ll wait on commenting further. Sounds like Toka gets the basic idea now, though, so I’ll leave it in his hands (and maybe learn a thing or two from your guy’s posts/questions )

[SockDog]

I certainly don’t envy the task. Too many limitations and the game is a complicated and restrictive mess. Not enough and it’s manipulated by a few to the detriment of the many.

Sounding like an old man, I recall my Q3 days when there seemed to be an honour code? sportsmanship? An easy win was frowned upon, the fun was always gained by playing for 20mins and a lot less about the end result. You moved teams to balance things because it made the game more enjoyable for everyone. Now it seems we’re exposed to some very polar views (griefers to winners) and sitting in the fun middle ground becomes a battle.

Along with the idea of skill/result match making I do wonder about the effects of ranking players based on community feedback. If every time you meet a player on a server you could thumb up or down their attitude and this was reflected right next to their in game tag we might see some changes. Likewise you could offer a similar vote at the end of a map, did the other team steamroll you or stack, vote against the team.

Sure there’d be some abuse but if you encouraged positive and negative voting (via xp) and made it simple and unintrusive (end of map) it should balance out.

I’ll shush now.

[tokamak]

Sounding like an old man, I recall my Q3 days when there seemed to be an honour code? sportsmanship? An easy win was frowned upon, the fun was always gained by playing for 20mins and a lot less about the end result. You moved teams to balance things because it made the game more enjoyable for everyone. Now it seems we’re exposed to some very polar views (griefers to winners) and sitting in the fun middle ground becomes a battle.

Yeah good times. Sometimes it feels I’m the only one who feels like that during a game.