Brink (360/PS3/PC)

[Flawless]

Missed this during E3, but it sounds awesome.

The Story

A man-made floating city called the Ark, made up of hundreds of separate floating islands, is on the brink of all-out civil war. Originally built as an experimental self-sufficient and 100% "green" habitat, the reported rapid rise of the Earth's oceans has forced the Ark to become a refuge for humanity. Crammed with the original Ark founders, their descendants, as well as tens of thousands of refugees, the Ark exists in total isolation from the rest of the world. With 25 years of social unrest, the inhabitants of the Ark have reached their breaking point. It's up to you to decide the future of the Ark and the human race.

Game Overview

Developed in partnership with Bethesda Softworks, BRINK is an immersive shooter that blends single-player, co-op, and multiplayer gameplay into one seamless experience, allowing you to develop your character across all modes of play. You decide the role you want to assume in the world of BRINK as you fight to save yourself and mankind's last refuge for humanity. BRINK offers a compelling mix of dynamic battlefields, extensive customization options, and an innovative control system that will keep you coming back for more.

Game Features

• Blurring the Lines Between Offline and Online
  Advance your character's development across every gameplay mode: single player, co-op, and multiplayer. Gain experience points that you can spend on customizing and upgrading your skills and abilities, designing an entirely unique look and feel for your character.
• Groundbreaking Kinesthetics
  BRINK uses the familiar shooter controls that you’re used to, without frustrating, artificial constraints and takes advantage of a new feature: the SMART button. When you press the SMART button, the game dynamically evaluates where you're trying to get to, and makes it happen. No need to perfectly time a jump or vault, the game knows what you want to do.
• Context-Sensitive Goals and Rewards
  Objectives, communications, mission generation, and inventory selection are all dynamically generated based on your role, your status, your location, your squad-mates, and the status of the battle in all gameplay modes. You'll always know exactly where to go, what to do when you get there, and what your reward will be for success.
• Virtual Texturing
  BRINK's proprietary technology, Virtual Texturing, breaks new ground on current-gen consoles and PCs with an even greater focus on highly detailed characters, realistic environments, lighting, effects, and atmospherics. This competitive lead on the squad-combat genre helps thrust players into the gritty reality of the Ark's epic secluded arcology.

Screens

[Blzer]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

I was hoping it would be a rollerblading game.

[Flawless]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

Joystiq Interview

The transition from single-player to online, obviously when you're playing single-player or co-op, you're affecting the game world and changing it. Is it something where we'll see that online, or is it a case of choosing from a set number of maps or modes? You know, CTF, deathmatch, that kind of stuff?

As far as I'm concerned, there really are no modes like that at all. When you first start the game, there isn't going to be any choice to play online or offline. That doesn't exist at all. There's a continuity across all of what you'd consider the game's modes, you just play the game. So, you know, I decide I'm going to go into Container City, I'm going to do that mission, and you go through in a traditional, story-based kind of way, and you could do that alone or with up to seven of your buddies, or you could play that as a full-on multiplayer deathmatch.

So we expect a lot of players are going to be like me, going along, having a good time, and there will come a point if we recognize you are online, we'll actually stop you between missions and say, "You're doing really well, you may not have noticed, you've accumulated a lot of stuff, so you may want to go online. We're not going to make you, but if you do, we'll pay you twice as much experience." So the players will try, because they'll find things exactly the same. They'll really be much more comfortable than they have before. And, we're putting in a lot of stuff to totally obliterate the anti-social stuff. For example, you won't hear anybody's voice except for someone on your friend's list. There's other things, like guys that block the door, we're letting you pass through, and there's a bunch of those things.

That's a really smart implementation, the voice stuff. What else?

Another big thing you saw was the objective wheel, and at any given time, at the very least, there's five or six -- usually a lot more -- specific things you can do to help out. But, if you're like me, and you enjoy shooters, and don't want to be on the front lines, there's tons of stuff for you to do. Those command posts, you can go off and capture them. Or somebody else is capturing them, and you can take them back. Depending on what kind of class you are, you can upgrade them. There's also other ancillary objectives that are popping up as well, so it kind of caters and lets you feel valuable. In the demo, Paul went off an interrogated somebody, and it gave him experience points. But, in doing that -- for the rest of the team, if he's playing multiplayer or even single-player -- they all get the benefit of that. Inadvertently, just for having fun, going off and doing your own thing, you can still help.

[pfunk880]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

Sounds ambitious, and it sounds like it has the potential to be really cool.

[Flawless]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

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[deaduck]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

I love what Bethesda does with gaming but the "seemless" modes of online/offline play seems a little daunting of a task to a offline player like me.

But I hope it works out because the game looks sick so far.

[MC Fatigue]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

I love the look of the screenshot in the first post... The way that city is just so clean looking, and futuristic. I hope they actually manage to make some of the game really look like that. Everything is always so dark and grimy lately. I'd love to see something clean and bright - and that white city in the background of that shot matches that perfectly.

[deaduck]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

I love the look of the screenshot in the first post... The way that city is just so clean looking, and futuristic. I hope they actually manage to make some of the game really look like that. Everything is always so dark and grimy lately. I'd love to see something clean and bright - and that white city in the background of that shot matches that perfectly.

Dark and grimy would be hard to pull off in a water based game. Even salt water rust erosion tends to be artistic in nature

[Flawless]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

You will be able to drop in and out at anytime with up 7 other people.

Kotaku Impressions

Splash Damage's 2010 squad-shooter Brink wowed our Luke Plunkett at E3. Here at QuakeCon, a public demo of the game wowed several hundred more people. The game defies easy classification. It's ambitious.

The essence of Brink is playing as a multi-class squad, taking on class-specific missions and changing class in the heat of battle if need be. An individual player's missions — tasks, really, that the player does within the context of the larger battle they've entered — are generated on the fly.

In the situation being demoed, Wedgwood pulled up a radial menu that showed several available missions for his character class, specific to the current fight. Missions grant experience points which can be used to get better items. One mission, for 300 experience points, involved interrogating an enemy. Selecting it produced an arrow at the top of the screen that guided Wedgwood to a downed enemy. Finding the enemy, Wedgwood's character produced an iPhone-a-like in his left hand and transformed it into something that looked more like an electric-shock device. He extracted his info; his character's right hand popped a thumbs up, and Wedgwood pulled up a menu to browse more missions.

Throughout the demo, the game sported the visual signatures of a first-person shooter, like the on-screen barrel of the player's gun. Less common was its adoption of a visual element seen in last year's first-person free-running game Mirror's Edge. Wedgwood's character could amble up a crate, vault over a wall, his hero more athletic and acrobatic than most first-person shooter protagonists.

Remaining an operative, Wedgwood selected a 10 xp/second mission to escort a bot. This led him to a large, golf-cart-size rolling robot. The longer he stayed with it, the more points he gained. Then he took a mission to change into an engineer, for 250 points. To do that mission, a guide arrow led him back to a controlled command post. He arrived, changed to an engineer and immediately selected a mission to repair a crane (500xp). Engineers have repair and construction abilities, and can lay mines. At this point, two other developers joined and took control of Wedgwood's two squad-mates.

Wedgwood explained that the game would keep generating contextual missions that suited the classes of the three controlled characters. They assisted each other until reaching a narrative choke point that cued an in-engine cut-scene and a cliffhanger — the three troopers discovering something surprising that we couldn't see.

Brink already looks very good. It boasts the level of graphical detail up there with a Call of Duty and approaching even a Killzone 2, but with a more diverse color palette than Sony's drab first-person shooter. The area Wedgwood was fighting in was densely packed, a tighter theater of war than seen in some of the flashy games just mentioned.

[Whitesox]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

I love the look of the screenshot in the first post... The way that city is just so clean looking, and futuristic. I hope they actually manage to make some of the game really look like that. Everything is always so dark and grimy lately. I'd love to see something clean and bright - and that white city in the background of that shot matches that perfectly.

I just hope they don't turn it into a mirrors edge style of city. Because while it was novel at first, it got real old after a while. Especially while playing in a dark room.

[Flawless]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

New Screens:

[Flawless]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

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[Flawless]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

Eurogamer Interview

Eurogamer: How much of a single-player campaign is there for me to explore, what sort of emphasis is there on story? Or is the solo mode more of a training ground for multiplayer?

Paul Wedgwood: No no no: it's massive! Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was pure multiplayer and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was a multiplayer game that had offline bots but apart from that was exactly the same game. This is a game that has been built from the outset as a heavily narrative-driven story by full-time writers. We're making use of techniques like performance capturing - so we get really good physical performances from actors along with their facial expressions and voices and their interaction with other actors - to build a game that has a really strong narrative component that isn't just a highly replayable shooter. So that's a big part for us.

Your experience through it, imagining you have no internet connection should, for us to have achieved our goal, be as compelling as any other triple-A shooter.

Eurogamer: And what worries you most about Brink as a game at the moment?

Paul Wedgwood: I would say that the biggest challenge is that transition from being a pure PC studio to a multiplatform one. To me as a game director there are some things that are just alien, like PlayStation 3 technology and job systems, that I find it really difficult to get my head around. Luckily it's not my job to understand job systems: we just hire really talented people to solve it instead. We have Dean Calver who was lead programmer on Heavenly Sword as lead programmer on Brink. The art director that we hired, Olivier Leonardi, was the art director behind Prince of Persia [Two Thrones] and Rainbow Six Vegas. We got Tim Appleby back in 2007. He'd just finished Mass Effect; he was the guy who created Shepard and the aliens and stuff. He's our lead character artist.

We've done that pretty much across the company. Even our level designer Neil Alphonso was the lead level designer on Killzone 2. We've really tried to bring in people who all have shipped multiple multiplatform Triple-A games, just because I'm such a noob at that stuff. Hire people who are better than me, which isn't hard.

[WDOgF0reL1fe]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

Holy **** these graphics look better than real life

[Candyman5]

Re: Brink (360/PS3/PC)

Where did his come from? Looks good so far.