The week before this year’s E3, Fallout 3 creator Bethesda announced a new original first-person shooter and released a teaser video with the promise of more info to come out of E3. Check out the video below:
Bethesda (of Fallout and Oblivion Fame) reveal new game: Brink on Current Gaming
This short video left me a little cold honestly. Sure, I always want to see what Bethesda’s up to, and I’m excited that developer Splash Damage is making a new game — their last release, 2007’s Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, was a great multiplayer shooter with a lot of unique twists on the genre, but it never really found its audience, a fate that could have easily crushed a lesser studio — but this first look at the game doesn’t really tell us anything. It didn’t make it stand out or raise my interest much at all.
Thankfully, the 20-minute demo I was given at E3 really cleared up that problem of why I should care about Brink…and Quake Wars is a huge part of the reason. Quake Wars took the normal online shooter formula and shook it up by giving players more interesting objectives than simply capturing the flag or achieving a set number of kills. Brink takes this concept to the next level.
You begin with an introduction to the game’s clever setting, The Ark. This artificial floating city was originally built as a home for the elite, but following mass-flooding from environmental disaster, it has become the last refuge for humanity, full of far more people than had ever been intended. Despite the overpopulation, you build one more person to inhabit the city with a deep character creation tool. You also choose one of two alignments for the character: Resistance or Security.
Whichever side you choose, you’ll be facing off against the other side’s forces, and this is where Brink’s brilliant gameplay mode-shifting mechanics come into play. In single-player, you’ll accept various missions pitting you against the opposing faction. Should you choose to change seamlessly to co-op, up to eight of your friends will be able to jump into your game with characters they created that are on your side. Is their assistance against the AI making things too easy? Switch it to 16-player multiplayer and that mission you’re on will become populated with real players using their real characters from the other side.
Regardless of which mode you’re playing in, there will be a variety of Quake Wars-style objectives that you can choose between to help further whatever mission you’re on. Harder objectives will earn you more XP. Want to just blast away at the enemies? Choose a kill objective. Want a bigger XP boost? Take on the objective to capture and interrogate an enemy soldier. And do it on your own, with friends, or against real players from across the world. This easy transitioning between single-player, cooperative play, and multiplayer modes means that a single mission or set piece can be played in several distinct styles, all of which will earn you XP toward improving your character, who remains consistent between all three modes.
The only question, then, is just how many awesome set pieces that work for all three modes can Splash Damage create? At E3, I was only shown one, an area called Container City that was built out of trash and boxes. The battle here raged around a huge crane that could be destroyed, repaired, and turned to your own use depending on which side you were on and what objectives you focused on. It was an intriguing scenario that looked like a blast, but if I’ve still got some concern. Multiplayer/co-op maps are inherently replayable, but does that mean Brink’s single-player experience will be significantly shorter than we expect from single-player shooters because all of the levels will be built for multiplayer and co-op as well?
If they can overcome this worry — or hell, even if they can’t, and we just get a shorter game, but one that successfully blends all three primary shooter play styles — Brink could be a revolutionary step for the genre. At the very least, I hope it’s a worthy successor to Quake Wars that gets a lot more notice from the gaming community.
June 17th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Some of the concepts sound similar to The Crossing, a game that I was very interested in before it got shelved. I hope that Brink and Bethesda are able to see these concepts through, where it seems that Arkane Studios and Valve failed with The Crossing.
June 17th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
The Crossing got shelved?! I was wondering whatever happened to it, but I hadn’t heard that! Sad.