Excellent Brink Addict Q&A
While we wait for our own Q&A to take place, we stumbled across this great Q&A with with Steve Hessel (Community Relations Manager) from Splash Damage, from the guys over at BrinkAddict. If you don’t know anything about the title yet, have a read of the Q&A and check them out.
Q1. Starting off with a little background on yourself, could you tell us what you do at Splash Damage and what you are currently working on?
My name is Steve Hessel and I’m the Community Relations Manager for Splash Damage, though people on the Internet will probably be more familiar with my handle ‘badman’. In a nutshell, I am the link between the online community and the Splash development team. In practice that means keeping the Splash Damage website and forums updated and running, liaising with fans sites and tournament organizers, and, naturally, keeping the community informed about what’s happening in the world of Brink. I also work closely with the rest of the Media Team here at Splash Damage, as well as the marketing and PR folks at Bethesda to support their respective efforts.
Q2. With all the great press Brink has been getting from the Eurogamer Expo and others, what do you think sets it apart from other first person shooters on the market?
Brink brings several new things to the table that players really haven’t seen in previous shooters. For starters, there’s the blurring of single player and multiplayer into a new type of game, where you can seamlessly transition from playing by yourself with AI-controlled teammates to full-blown competitive multiplayer. Then there’s our extensive character customization system. We’ve got dozens of unlockable abilities that let you build a character specializing in the things that you enjoy doing in the game. You can also customize every single weapon in the game with a myriad of attachments to create your perfect arsenal. This aspect of Brink is really all about personalization and turning it into something that really suits a player’s unique gameplay style.We’re also really happy with how the SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system turned out. One general misconception is that SMART somehow plays the game for you or takes the skill out of movement. On the contrary! SMART opens up tons of additional routes to gameplay and adds a whole new level of tactical depth that we know players will have tons of fun exploring.
Finally, there’s the automated mission system, which builds on what we had in Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars and kicks it up about three notches. If you‘re lost or don’t know what to do next, just bring up the Objective Wheel and it will suggest a bunch of useful things you can be doing at that point — and then it’ll even tell you where to go. It’s such a helpful thing to have in the game, especially for those who’ve never played the Enemy Territory titles. Of course, I’ve got to mention Brink’s gorgeous art style as well, which ties all of this together beautifully……………
Q3. In your previous title Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the unlocks players gained got reset after the 3 rounds so you didn’t get that much of a chance to use them, could you explain how the new Brink unlockable abilities system works?
In Brink, everything you unlock – be it clothing, weapons, weapon attachments, or player abilities – stays unlocked. In the case of player abilities specifically, every time your character gains a level, you get one credit to buy a new player ability. Once purchased, the ability is available to your character.
Our abilities are grouped into four categories: Soldier, Engineer, Medic, Operative, and Universal abilities. Among these are what we call Active and Passive abilities. Active abilities you have to manually select and use, while passive abilities are always on. For example, the Grenade Shooting ability is passive, so once you’ve bought that, you’ll be able to detonate your own grenades prematurely by firing at them – no matter what class or faction you’re playing as.
In the case of active abilities, each class has a load-out you can customize for it consisting of three active abilities. So you might customize your Engineer load-out with a heavy turret and landmines, while your Soldier gets to play around with Molotov cocktails and other explosive toys.
What’s great about this system is that it’s all about personalizing the game to match how you like to play it. You can focus on unlocking abilities for your favorite class or, if you don’t have a preference, spend a little here and there. You won’t be able to unlock every ability for your character even if you reach the maximum level, so you’ll have to pick and choose the ones you think suit you most. Since you can have several characters at the same time, this allows you to create specific character builds (like a Heavy Medic focusing on keeping everyone’s Supplies topped up, for example), and we’re very much looking forward to seeing what players come up with.
Q4. I’ve heard that Brink will let players pick an accent for their characters that they will hear during cutscenes and gameplay. How many different accents are there and what are they?
Since the Ark is a true melting pot of different cultures, we felt really strongly that this should be reflected in the ethnicities of the characters inhabiting it. When you create your character, you can choose from eight different voice packs for him, each of which has a unique accent from a different part of the world. In addition, we’ve got our NPC and Commander voices, which also sound quite different from your standard videogame voices.
Q5. When Rahdo recently talked about fireteams, he seems to imply that they are made up of 2 players, by saying things like “you can see either your friend or that player who is really good, and you can click on them and issue them an invite into your fireteam,” and “the system is always looking behind the scenes for a map which has two slots.” My question is, are 2 players the max limit a fireteam can be, or can it be larger? Also will it be possible to spawn on people from your fireteam like we’ve seen in other titles?
Fireteams in Brink support up to eight members, so theoretically the entire team could be in the same one. There are several ways to get a fireteam started. If you invite one of your friends to your match, Brink will automatically try to put them in the same fireteam as you. Similarly, if you join a friend on a server via the friends list, the game will try and do the same. You can also invite people who are in your match, or request to be invited to an existing fireteam via the scoreboard.
The biggest advantage of fireteams is that Brink will automatically enable VoIP chat for all of the members in it. Spawning on other members of your fireteam is something we explored early on, but ultimately decided against.
Q6.Regarding the unlockable abilities in Brink could you tell us a little more about some of your favorite unlocks that we haven’t heard about so far?
Lately the Operative’s Control Turret ability has been a favorite in our play-tests – it allows you to directly control an enemy turret you’ve hacked, which can be used for all kinds of naughtiness. Not far from that on the Mischief Scale is the Cortex Bomb, which essentially allows you to turn yourself into an explosive cloud of death and destruction when you’re incapacitated. It’s the best of surprises to pull on enemies when they think they can safely move in for a Comms Hack or a finishing move.
Q7. Could you tell us about how Brink will cater for clan/community admins with regard to administrating servers will it a use Rcon based system, or an external application?
Would love to talk about this, but we can’t just yet. We’ve got a few neat things planned that will soon be revealed. On the PC, we’ll of course support dedicated servers, so a lot of the things in that area will be similar to what players are used to from our previous games.
Q8. Could you give us some details about the SDK and how custom maps will be implemented within the game?
We don’t have anything to announce on the SDK front just yet, but both Bethesda and Splash Damage have a long history of supporting the modding community.
Q9. Could you give us some details on how you plan to support Brink after game release, are there plans to release any new content for the game later on down the line?
We’ve always supported our games after release and Brink will be no different. We’ll be talking more about some of things we have planned for the community there in the near future, so keep an eye out for that. Can’t reveal anything about things like DLC quite yet, either, but Bethesda obviously has a pretty extensive history there.
Q10. Regarding the deployables, will the deployable machineguns have a time limit on them or will stay on the map until someone destroys them and if so, in how many ways will it be possible to destroy them?
Deployable turrets stay on the map until they’re either destroyed or replaced by a different turret, as you can only have one active at a time. There are a few ways to take them out (including bullets and grenades), though not all of them actually involve destroying them. For example, if you’re an Operative, you can unlock an ability that lets you take control of enemy turrets and turn them on their own team. Insidiously, since you can actually control the turret directly, you can pretend that everything’s working normally — until they’ve got their back turned on you.
Q11. With the new SMART system, can you tell us how the game handles characters’ hitboxes when going through a SMART move, and will players still be able to shoot as they would without the SMART system in action?
When we designed the SMART system, one of the guiding principles was that SMART would never interfere with your ability to fire your weapon. It’s there to support the gunplay, rather than take center stage. With that in mind, you can fire your weapon during any of the SMART maneuvers, albeit, as you’d expect when hurtling through the air, at reduced accuracy. Our hitboxes are divided up into several parts (think arms, legs and so on) that allow us to track where on the body a character is hit. These boxes stay in sync with the character model when going through SMART moves and other animations.
Q12. And lastly, With regard to the delay of release, what would you say has been the biggest improvement to the game since that time?
The biggest difference that extending the game’s development into 2011 has made for us is the additional polish and balancing we’ve been able to do. The game has come a long way since last year and we’re really looking forward to getting it out there and into people’s hands!
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