Without telling the community leaders, I've decided to start on a new article series called Games To Watch. Simply put, it'll be previews of upcoming games that any one of us are particularly excited about, especially if it involves co-operative play. First up, we have Splash Damage's upcoming IP, Brink.
Splash Damage is without a doubt one of the British games development world's greatest modern developer, and also holds the unique title of having been built from a community of dedicated gamers and modders - not only that, they are responsible for Enemy Territory, one of the most popular online multiplayer games in the world, so it is always exciting to see what they're working on. This time, it's their own unique IP, and frankly, when I went to see a preview of it at Eurogamer, I became incredibly interested in how the game is becoming one of our games to watch.
Brink is set little more then five minutes in the future, aboard a floating city simply called The Ark, a gargantuan structure, representing modern humanity's greatest achievements in both urban art and communal design. As time went by, The Ark ends up being the last civilised remnant of Earth, and refugees coming from all over the planet begin to put a strain on The Ark, pushing it, as the name suggests, on the brink of civil war. Complicating this is the different ideologies both factions, the Security Forces and the Refugees, believe in. The Security Forces believe the refugees are a threat to The Ark's stability, which would send humanity into freefall, and the refugees believe themselves to be freedom fighters.
When I went to see the game showcased at the Eurogamer Expo, Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood demonstrated many aspects of the game, the SMART system, the art design as well as showing us an entire level showing off the components of the co-operative play system, the last of which I was most impressed by.
The SMART system (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain - I think that's a backronym) is intended to take some of the problems of movement out of the equation - it's a generative system whereby pressing the sprint key and moving towards your destination makes the game calculate the movements smoothly without players having to risk falling off of obstacles - a bit like Mirror's Edge without pressing buttons. At first I wasn't entirely convinced by this system, but then it occurred to me that when you're being shot at, the last thing you want to happen is to get yourself stuck on the geometry. When you factor in the fact that many areas surrounding The Ark, for example, Container City (a level shown at Eurogamer).
Container City was the example level demonstrated, and I'm happy to report that Splash Damage has retained the system shown in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars of encouraging you to complete objectives that help your team by rewarding you with experience points. Anything you can do will help the team. Want to do a bit of stealth? You can change your loadout without penalty (sometimes, it'll even rewards you) at convenient locations and then sneak around alternate routes, doing a bit of light torture on a hapless grunt. Want to blow shit up? Switch to Soldier class for general mayhem, or Engineer for more objective focused explosive action. Earning XP also feeds back into your character generation screen, much like Enemy Territory, earning XP earns you rewards that can change the way you play your chosen class.
Technically-wise, despite being in pre-alpha, the content shown was incredibly sharp -map design, art direction, even the soundscapes of The Ark was brilliant. And finally, there's still competitive multiplayer, which is separate from the co-operative story mode. Speaking to Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Jim Rossignol, Paul Wedgwood has confirmed a meta-narrative which plays throughout the game which rewards playing as a group. Which can be as much as 10 or more players playing co-operatively.
Why is Critical Gaming excited about Brink? For the same reason why Team Fortress 2 and Enemy Territory are both games we enjoy. Objective based co-operative multiplayer with different class loadouts and play styles make a game for us, and of course the co-operative side of things always chimes well with us. Hopefully when it is released, we'll be blowing stuff up as a group, and we hope you'll join us
Brink is scheduled to be released in Spring 2010
I moved it to the 2nd post in the thread since people won't like autoplaying stuff.(see comments) -Nali
