ET and ETQW are completely different games based around the same core concepts; if you think they are the same… your sooooo wrong. ETQW in full infantry mode is also not at all like ET. Brink loosely imitates the general idea, but it’s not exactly “new”. For the most part it just took the original stuff and then made it all reaaaaaaaaaally bad/simple and then put in some bits from other games. I would have been more satisfied if it really did try to be it’s own game, but nope it just spit in the face of the older games and tried to sell as an image. The game plays like there was no plan in its design, but instead it just took a bunch of undeveloped ideas out of a hat and tossed them without any extra thought. Then again, that’s how a lot of console games are made…
Remember that this forum is mostly vet PC players. That was only 10% of the sales. So the real question is why does practically no one play the game on all platforms? Some would say it’s because it’s not CoD or it’s not ET, but to be perfectly honest it’s because the game doesn’t give you any reason to keep playing. Unless your just into neat art, unlocking junk, making your gun look cool, and then having the actual game play be borderline fully auto-mated (and consistently linear).
There is only one reason why there isn’t a console community. It has nothing to do with the gameplay itself, or whether the game gives you a reason to keep playing. There are plenty of console games that aren’t CoD, and don’t have a lot of stuff to unlock, but still manage over 50k players a week. Brinks problem here was soley with the non-functional matchmaking, at least in the first few months, and no one could get games with real people, unless they joined the chatrooms that were setup.
Nothing to do with the bugs and mediocre gameplay then? The game got an average of 70 (not bad but not great either) on metacritic on each platform with an average user score of 6.167 whilst metacritic isn’t the most reliable indication of a game’s worth, the less than desirable scores from both the reviewers and users shown are somewhat indicative.
There are plenty of PC games that aren’t COD, don’t have anything to unlock, and still manage 1,000’s of players as well, it’s not platform specific why Brink failed. The matchmaking on console probably stopped it taking off, but it probably woudn’t have made a difference if all that stuff worked out of the box anyway, console players would’ve stopped playing it for the same reasons PC players stopped playing it, IMO.
I think players in general stopped playing because the 8 maps are not that good, too easy for defense to defend, too hard for attack to make progress (yes, there will exceptions when a half decent attack rolls a useless defense, but in general the maps are too defensively biased), and the guns appear not to work very well (you shoot at stuff and don’t hit it, because of the massive invisible uncontrollable spread).
To make good objective maps is damn hard, look at how many maps have been made for ET and how few are considered good enough for competition (which really finds the flaws in map design).
Also consider that ET would probably have died within months as well if it wasn’t for mods as well as custom maps. Within a year, maybe within only a few months, no-one was playing the version of ET SD made (ETMain), they were playing a version of ET someone else made (ETPro, Shrub and later ETPub / Jaymod).
We give SD too much credit, they’re actually not very good map makers, and not very good game developers either. Good artists, nice people, respect for the way they engage with the community, but just not very good at making balanced objective games.
Agree with the first half so yeah not going to respond much to that.
I agree with the bracketed part but the lack of competition maps isn’t simply down to them being hard to make, it’s mainly due to those who will benefit from such maps not exactly helping the process of making such maps. The comp scene in ET are a finicky bunch at the best of times, if a map isn’t perfect right off the bat then in general that map is doomed, they don’t seem motivated to try new maps out properly either.
Earlier in the year there was the TLR/SAGE mapping competition, basically it was to get a new map at LAN. The first versions were released about 2 months before the LAN, I could count the amount of useful feedback for my entry on one hand with digits to spare also. The final versions for the competition were submitted and the teams attending LAN got to vote, before I submitted my entry I contacted teams to try get some direct feedback, not a single team had bothered to test the maps in those 2 months. When it came to voting it was decided none of the maps were suitable, I wonder why…
It’s this sort of attitude that mappers have to deal with, it’s no wonder hardly anyone bothers, ifurita (reactor, dubrovnik) was a top bloke and a really skilled mapper yet he had to put up with load of **** which eventually made him ditch mapping for competition in favor for public and shortly after quit altogether. Eim has been trying his hand for a good few years now also but has all but given up.
The competition crowds all moan when a game doesn’t support them, they should maybe ask themselves why this is, they have quite a bad image problem, they don’t do themselves any favors at times which is a shame because they aren’t all knobs, just the vocal minorities that plague scenes like crossfire.
Yeah, although I’ve always seen ETpub and co as an extension of the style of objective game SD makes, something I don’t like but there does seem to be an audience for it.
They made Radar and Goldrush in ET and to be honest oasis, fueldump and railgun were quite fun for public. In ET:QW, island, sewer and salvage were awesome for comp, they can make some nice maps when they try, they dropped the ball totally with Brink though. They do tend to need mods for their games, Brink needed them more than the past two but the tools just never arrived, whilst mods probably wouldn’t have made the game as successful as ET it may have limped on for as long as ET:QW managed.
I’m talking from the point of view of a professional game developer. SD never engaged with the comp scene or anyone else on any of their maps, the reason their weren’t any good for competition wasn’t due to lack of feedback from the comp scene. And good comp maps should be good for pubs as well, because the only thing that really defines a good comp map is balance. Unbalanced maps work on pubs, mostly, because pubs are 2 disorganised teams not working together, but balanced comp maps wouldn’t not work on pubs just because they were comp maps.
Everything you said about the comp scene is true tho of course, as far as they’re concerned everything sucks and they cba to give constructive feedback as to why it sucks. Why any mapper ever spent as much time as they did trying to appease them I’ll never know.
OK, maybe I was a bit harsh, but with Brink it really does seem as if they made something worse than what they’ve produced previously, you’d expect them to learn from past mistakes but they seem to have repeated them and then added a few more for good measure.
Ah right yeah, fair enough. Yep, agree on the last half also.
Yeah I got well bummed out over the TLR competition, was the final straw, never again, in ET anyway. The short lived ET:QW comp scene were quite helpful though when was making comp maps. I think most comp mappers are comp players and don’t like seeing these huge pubs maps all over place. Even when I make ‘pub’ maps though I approach them in same way would a comp map, just with a higher player count.
Yeah certainly, I’m still bemused as to how Brink turned out, I was highly critical of the approaches they were taking during development of Brink but in the end gave them benefit of the doubt because I had hoped they maybe had learned from their mistakes and that despite some hand holding game elements the rest of the game would be quite fun to play, that and found somewhere selling its really cheap!
If you look at the context of my post, I was talking about why it does not have even a small community on consoles. There are plenty of games that got poor user reviews and still maintained a community. You guys can talk about issues with the gameplay, which would explain why there aren’t over 50k players a week. But that doesn’t explain why there aren’t even 10k players a week. The reason that there is practically no one is because the matchmaking didn’t work, and most people were only able to play with bots.
Something like map balance means nothing with 99 percent of the people who bought the game on PS3 never played it with a real person.
If the game had a match browser/server list on PS3, there would be 30 or more rooms going at any time, even today.
Player feedback is important, and SD didn’t take enough measures to make sure their game was polished enough and working on release. Couple this with the fact that it was supposedly released early because it was coming along so well? There are fundamental problems with how the game functions. If Brink didn’t have those problems then I’m sure it would have been able to keep its player base. I don’t think the problem is necessarily the players in this case. Simply put, it didn’t live up to the hype at all.
Give us a map editor at the least if you don’t want modders messing with the game. Fix up problems with the UI and game mechanics. Make SMART more fluid and useful. Uncap frame rates. Tighten recoil a bit and change damage values. Make sure the game actually works smoothly so we can play it. THEN (if that even happens) we’ll see if the game really deserves a community or not. If all goes well add regular content updates to keep players interested, because I think we can all agree that the few maps we have are boring by now and not that great in the first place.
As far as the console versions go, the game got a bad rap because apparently the graphics were “too blurry” and the matchmaking just didn’t work. Some people also picked up the game with the impression that it had a deep, involving single-player, which it absolutely didn’t. There was a bit of false advertising there. A lot of the first-week customers probably picked up the game because of the massive advertising and didn’t actually know much about it. If you can’t hold their attention for that long on a first impression then you’ve lost them forever. Now all SD has left are angry ET fans and Brink fans who want a better game but probably won’t get one.
and @RT1, maybe I wasn’t being sarcastic enough? lol
BETA testing is nice, coming from experience with SD, not real useful…
some of us have been here since ETQW was a Open Beta- much, if not all, are ‘feedback’ was ignored…
am sure if Brink had a open beta- ‘player feedback’ would have, once again, fallen on deaf ears…
(then again if there was a open beta for Brink, am willing to bet the vast majority of PC players, who played a SD game before, would have never purchased the game)
Brink - The revolution of first person shooter - is still not playable with my ATI gfxcard ( uberlow fps )
but BF3 is running well on my system. I mean WTF!?!
Next SD titel without demo or beta is a 100% no buy for me.
You will not get me with a good propaganda again.
Re-installed Brink (having built a new PC since I last played it), first impressions are I’d forgotten how dreadfully slow the Medium body type was …
Anyway, having been playing a lot of BF3 lately I can’t believe I actually played Brink for as long as I did first time round. It looks awful, I mean truly dreadful compared to the lush beauty of BF3. And on my new rig, 6 core CPU, 8Gb RAM, GTX580 graphics (yep, ditched ATi at last), I get 80-100fps on ultra-high in BF3, and 50-70fps on high in Brink (and high in Brink looks like low in BF3). As the person above said, WTF!?!
I like the new spread (as in I dislike it less than the old spread), I don’t feel as if I’m pissing into the wind quite so much now. But of course all the other stuff is just as bad as it ever was, either getting spawn camped by the other team or rolling them, doesn’t seem to be much in between. Feel like I’ve got permanent negative mouse acceleration, choosing raw input, or not, doesn’t seem to make much difference, and tbh although I accept that due to having to play Medium I feel like I’m walking thru treacle all the time, I don’t feel particularly inspired to put in the hours to get Light body again.
Had an hour or 2 on Brink last night then went and played some more BF3 (16 slot servers, Rush, Infantry only, it’s a blast).
At its core, I vastly prefer Brink to any Battlefield game … but it’s undeniably unfinished - STILL.
This latest ‘fix’ for the stats still hasn’t fixed it for many people (including me). In fact … we don’t know if it’s fixed it for anyone who previously had problems.
P.S. I have an AMD card and frame-rates after the last couple of patches are once more excellent (generally in excess of the FPS you quote with your 580), and I ‘only’ have a 6950. I’m guessing you had an underpowered CPU before … Brink - unusually for an FPS - eats the CPU.
Just to correct a couple of things in my previous post :-
I was actually getting 75 fps in Brink once the game started, and when it dawned on me it was a constant 75 I realised I had vsync enabled. As soon as I disabled vsync my fps shot up to 120 - 150, so, er, sorry about that SD, I was misrepresenting the game there.
Also, I had FOV at whatever the default is, as soon as I changed it to my normal 105 it felt a lot faster (I know it’s an optical illusion but when you’ve played with 105 fov for 10 years not doing so sucks).
One other thing, normally I hate the idea of playing against bots, but last night and the night before I joined servers with only 1 or 2 human players, and within the 1st round every single bot had been replaced by real people. I guess the bots are actually quite good at getting a game started.
So I had a fairly enjoyable hour or 2 on Brink last night. Still went back to BF3 later in the evening tho, Brink still has the horrible do everything ‘F’ key, it still has a way too busy HUD, and it still has horribly designed maps.
