Okay first let me start this out saying that this is not a hate thread. I enjoy the game very much even though its the bastard child of the Enemy Territory series.
There are several serious flaws in my opinion that flaw this game greatly. Leave technical problems outside of this discussion. I am making this strictly about gameplay mechanics from an ET veterans point of view.
Firstly is the use of the new class item system.
As many of you know in the old ET players would equip a medpack or syringe separately and then proceed to use them as if they were an individual weapon. In Brink they took that out completely which left me pretty disappointed at the start. Instead everything is basically used with 1 button. The game has no more item tossing which was another blow to me. The new resurrection system was a pretty fresh idea but I wish they would have kept the original method in as the normal way.
Every class suffers from this new 1 button action function. When you build or repair something as an engineer you get “locked on” to it and can only move left and right. It’s very inconvenient if you need to make a quick break for it since moving forward or back is impossible. Also you can’t equip the blowtorch before hand so it’s very annoying and frustrating for me when I’m trying to do an objective. I just feel so sluggish and bogged down to this all.
I don’t really have a problem with the new hacking mechanics since it was basically the same as engineering missions in quake wars. I just wish you could pull the items out beforehand and not be stuck to 1 button for everything.
On a positive note, the class buffs are a very nice feature to the game, but still I feel myself very handicapped and somewhat naked without being able to equip the items beforehand.
The online of Wolf09 had the same problem and some people even tried to mod it back in with a wolfpro mod. We can all see how that game ended up, Atleast you could toss items on the ground, even if it was the same 1 button function mechanic.
Communication
Now I’m not sure if the game has working voice chat or not since I’ve only heard one person talking before and there was no indication on who it was. Quake Wars showed who was talking and had fireteam, team, and global chat options.
This next one is a HUGE problem in the game!
The game has no Quick voice commands which is a very MAJOR flaw in this game. If anybody played the old ET’s you would remember how important they are to keep in communication and throw up markers on the map/screen. Brink has no such feature and is impossible to know if somebody needs ammo or health unless you are right next to them.
Also not being able to do all the fun various voice commands certainly does kill a lot of the fun and nostalgia for me.
It’s pretty obvious that consoles took priority sometime during development and is the only reason why I can think of the voice commands being removed completely.
No prone. Some people may call this nitpicking at this point but prone was very useful in the ETs.
So in closing, I feel that Brink was a very a ambitious game but lost its roots and ET charm along the way. Are consoles to blame for this? Who knows, but that’s what I’ll say that what happened to it.