Here’s a question that’s always been on my mind, which I’ve never formally asked.
In the future, if time, money and publisher permitted, would you guys ever consider producing a Brink 2 to improve upon the mechanics of the original?
We’d love to make a Brink 2, definitely; would love to expand the world, and also to improve/fix up issues with the first, on all platforms, and add all the stuff we had to cut!
“This almost makes it look like Counter-Strike, and nobody plays that game…” Sure, it’s an easy retort, but a valid one.
Sure, but Counterstrike isn’t a brand new IP trying to capture mindshare of the mass market, and the mass market surprising likes (LOVES) the grind (more than even we thought).
Pretty obvious, since it’s your own product (and bread), but I think that you managed to get people overexcited.
I would certainly agree that I could have done much better setting expectations as to what Brink was trying to do. Like I said, I was on here years ago saying how things would work, explaining stuff, but still, I know I could have done better (and not just for the hardcore PC fans either… mainstream fans certainly had the wrong idea about what our campaign mode was, for instance, since we never set out to make a big epic story, and we repeated this many times, but still, the message wasn’t heard loud and clear enough and people expected something we had never set out to deliver).
Definitely a lot of lessons learned about how to present what we are and aren’t, I hope to do better in the future. Bear in mind, in my nearly 20 years in the industry, this was the first time I ever pimped my game to the press or public, so baby steps 
Can you do ANYTHING to increase the playerbase so there will at least be a FEW other people to play with? (more free weekends, permanant price drop, etc)
I wish I could help you there, but we don’t make those decisions 
All I can suggest is convince friends to give it a try so you can play with them, or arrange games here and on Bethesda’s boards. There’s plenty of people still wanting to play with you…
What about a “Search All” option, or a “Any Region” setting for matchmaking?
Nope, sorry. And it REALLY drives me nuts that we don’t have the “ANY” choice for all the entries on the console Freeplay menu. If you were able to set everything to ANY (as was the design) you’d have what you’re looking for, but there were a number of console network reasons that we couldn’t do that.
What we can do is still manipulate the server configs, and even cut back on them more. I’m almost inclined to get rid of all but one so as to minimize buckets, but since there are still literally hundreds of thousands of players out there across the two consoles that enjoying it as is (according to the playstats we see), we’re loathe to mess things up by making a big change like that. And we don’t really have a good way of contacting the greater userbase. But it’s something we’re always talking about…
What about transform their own editor in a SDK and sell it with new maps in the next DLC?
There’s more to it than just letting people download the editor (that’s the smallest part, actually). It would take a major refactor of the entire way Brink handles its data to allow players to modify things, to allow new maps to be added by third parties, etc. etc. This was always something we had planned to do, we know how to do it, we know how long it would take and how much it would cost. And it isn’t cheap. We think it’s worth it, even now, but it’s a major endeavor, and as an independent company, we can’t afford to just throw caution to the wind and “just do it”, as much as we’d like to, for reasons I’ve talked about before.
I hope they realise they’ll have to work harder next time to earn my money
That’s totally fair, and we’re up for the challenge!
My optimistic hope is that by opening up to the console market (with associated tradeoffs) gave SD some solvency that was not likely/possible in a PC-only dev cycle, and that this will help them do more of what they wanted
This!
I will admit that I am one of the many people who were a bit disappointed with Brink. But for what it is worth, I believe the development team truly had the best intentions with this game and made it as good as they humanly could. And if you could not deliver on your promises it was because it was out of your hands and not because you don’t give a $hit. I only hope this serves as a learning experience and next time around can be better.
Thanks for that. Very kind words, very much appreciated. We definitely do give a $hit, we learned a LOT on Brink, and whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger!
Rahdo, please check out my thread: Brink Barriers To Entry
Just took a gander, and I’ll mention again that the main thing we can do about overall gameflow is play with what our server configs are. It very easy for us to reprogram what standard/oldschool/etc., settings are. We could, for instance, change standard into being no bots, with warm up on, and set the number of players needing to ready up high, so that it would basically emulate a standard lobby (just one where you can play in), and then team balance would work much better. We could get rid of all but one server config, so people get bucketed together more. Etc. Tricky thing is, since so many console players are still getting on regularly (and based on the stats we have, when they do, they generally stay on for a LONG time, on average close to 2 hours), we don’t want to mess up what’s still sort of working.
But it’s something we’re monitoring and talking about constantly, and any server config feedback is much appreciated!
And now… TO GREECE!
All I can suggest is convince friends to give it a try so you can play with them, or arrange games here and on Bethesda’s boards. There’s plenty of people still wanting to play with you…