Forewarning: This is a wall of text, if you can’t be bothered reading it, then with the best will in the world don’t bother posting about it. 
I was playing Left4Dead a few nights ago and reading brinkerviews between infected rounds when I realised that what I’ve read about Brink so far doesn’t seem entirely dissimilar from L4D in some respects. Of course, this is based off written interviews and a couple of screenies, but there were a few key features which seemed similar between the two.
-Cooperative play against ai/with friends
-Mission and campaign structure with (presumably) somewhat linear structure (this is partly guesswork from interviews and previous SD games)
-The ability to drop in and out mid-game
-Some characterisation but not overwhelming reams of text, instead based on clever scripting and voice work (see this article.)
Now, as they seem in those respects similar (again, only going off what I’ve read/heard) I thought I’d highlight one of the areas that Left4Dead did really really well: randomness and replayability, in the hope that those ideas will be/already have been taken on board for Brink.
I think randomness and replayability are really important in a game like Brink, because (hopefully) we are going to be playing these campaigns and missions over and over again, so the more variation there is between each game session, the longer those same campaigns are going to keep you hooked without becoming stale.
I know personally that L4D, though addressing replayability quite well, can get stale the umpteen billionth time you have run through no mercy, just because you know the map so well that there is little excitement and interest to be squeezed out except through the variable of the enemy infected players (presuming you are playing versus - in my opinion co-op gets boring even faster).
Therefore, this idea of randomness and replayability can be resolved down to two major areas in L4D and Brink for the purpose of this post:
-Gameplay
-Dialogue
In terms of Gameplay in Brink, I think its probably a little too early to start throwing around specific ideas, especially as it seems to have already been considered partially. This seems to have been mostly preconfigured using the new mission system to increase the randomness and replayability of the game.
Whereas in ET:quake wars the constant replaying of the same linear mission structure (objective 1, objective 2, objective 3) ended up getting slightly on my nerves after a while, Brink seems like it might be a touch more freeform. There have been mentions of missions to blow up side routes for access and random missions like interrogating a downed enemy make it seem like there might be a greater level of randomness in any given play session than something like et:qw. In any case, in comparison to L4D, just the increased number of players (8-16) is going to make a difference in each given play session.
Apart from it being too early to really start hammering ideas into gameplay then, it also looks like there is a chance that these considerations have already been taken into account. We’ll just have to see how it goes along.
The area I’m really interested in though, and that I think L4D excelled in, is the characterisation and dialogue.
What Left4Dead did in this respect, was ensure that although players would be playing these missions umpteen bazillion times, there was enough variation in what the characters said that you wouldn’t get bored of hearing the same thing over and over again easily. With each new campaign, randomness was imposed upon the character’s scripts to such a degree that you were unlikely to hear the same things said twice in a row or even ten times in a row. This was the same in TF2 where there were very rare combinations of events that resulted in your character saying something you had never heard before, instantly giving you an “oh cool” moment, along with a bit of a laugh most of the time.
This is something I would love to see in Brink, as it adds a huge amount of variation to each mission just to hear you character and others say something a little bit different almost every time.
I’ll be honest at this point and say I caught the beginning of a leaked video of the quakecon demo before zenimax nuked it from orbit, and what I saw from the beginning of the video (and read about in the article linked above) was several of the player characters standing around and discussing the mission before it started. The script and voicework was really good, and it was awesome to hear actors from different corners of the globe (I thought I caught middle eastern and south african accents in there) rather than just gruff american 1, gruff american 2, gruff american 3 etc. It was really well scripted, acted and set up, but I worry whether it will seem so good on the tenth playthrough or even the fiftieth. Having a couple of random variations of that “scene” would make an immense difference to replayability for players who are going to end up playing these missions over and over again. A few different lines here and there or even something like “right, you know what to do, cover objective 1” and effectively skipping the scene shown in the demo entirely just means that when that scene does come up again its far more special than if it pops up every single time.
This may of course not be practical with time/actor/asset limitations, but having played a fair amount of L4D and TF2 by now I can say it makes a huge difference to hear something (relatively) fresh and interesting every so often. Its the difference between muting the character’s voices to avoid going insane from repetition and still getting a small smile a year after release when you hear Louis making a wisecrack in the lift, or your heavy shouting out “WE MUST PUSH LITTLE KART”.
