[QUOTE=Brandmon;333422]I have to disagree. The most obvious reason for this is that the linearity there serves a purpose. With the game having a degree of linearity, you enable teamplay as you can have a team focusing on something. Isn’t that the point of a team? If you scatter everyone around to do his own thing, then the team mechanics in the game lose their purpose and then it simply becomes a TDM; which CoD does well enough and therefore Brink shouldn’t try to replicate.
Rather, there are hardly any Multiplayer games that encourage team-play without a significant degree of linearity. Even the BF series is more linear than not since it all boils down to going for certain objectives and the game only allows certain freedoms for players on two main elements: relatively large maps and large player numbers; of which Brink doesn’t possess.
So in my opinion, and that of others which like these kind of games, SD have done a good job at map and gameplay design.
But indeed there are problems with the game. First of all has to be the performance of the game. On ATI cards it is atrocious (although this is not completely SD’s fault) and one can’t help to feel the lack of smoothness of the game.
Furthermore another significant problem is that Brink tried to jack of all trades. Both in terms of “blurring the lines of Singleplayer and Multiplayer”; it’s unquestionably a multiplayer game in the end, and in terms of being both a PC and Console game. In the end, it is kind of a master of none.[/QUOTE]
Once again, there are other ways than to make huge, open scale maps. There are other ways of doing it. And oh look! I meant those other ways of doing it. And also, there are other ways of directing gameplay (ways that would also work in the current state of Brink).
Also, at the moment, Brink is (for the most part) sugarcoating the lone wolf concept. Most people don’t actually work together, even if they’re standing next to each other. There are ways to encourage working together. Unfortunately, Brink does not employ enough methods to do that.
While the linearity may serve a purpose in the developers’ minds, it doesn’t actually serve that purpose in the real world. And in the process, it also damages the gameplay in general. Why are people able to play a Rush map in BFBC2 50 times without getting bored, but can’t do the same in Brink? It’s too repetitive. The only thing that slightly changes is the enemy position and even then, you will more often that not have the same guy come from the same hallway 150 times in a row. There are other, more detailed reasons (also on a map to map basis) as well.
Tactics can mostly only be employed on the team level. And even in that case, it would just be a matter of gathering X amount of people at Y position. That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t keep people hooked for months. Frankly, even a couple of weeks seems like a stretch, going by Steam statistics. And that’s putting aside the whole fireteam creation problem and the whole problem of people not communicating enough. And the even bigger problem of a lot of people not feeling comfortable communicating. But let me say this - there are ways of encouraging teamwork. SD simply expected people to do it on their own (albeit, with a slight bit of attempted help from the objective wheel).
Bottom line is that, even if the intentions are good, the linear gameplay doesn’t really work. And I don’t just mean the bigger picture of it. I mean everything that came with it, and frankly, that didn’t come with it. And bare in mind, again, that there are other ways of doing this than either making it completely linear or making it ridiculously open scale. There are a lot of things that can be done in between those things. And even things that don’t actually fit between those things.
@howie, That’s interesting. Also, it is very relevant, because we are talking about ET and RTCW. Oh wait! No we’re not. Oh. Whatever.
