E3 09: Brink Eyes-On Preview
The earth of 2035 is a grim place to the developers at Splash Damage. Global warming has lead to rapidly rising sea levels, leaving continents underwater. The surviving humans inhabit a giant city adrift at sea known as “the Ark.” Designed to be a utopia for all men, a “last refuge of humanity,” the Ark is now a warzone between violent factions. Once great edifices stand in ruin. Entire neighborhoods have turned into battlegrounds. Pandemonium fills the streets. It’s an entire society that’s been pushed to the Brink.
Splash Damage CEO and Brink game director Paul Wedgwood provided us with an early look at his studio’s hugely-ambitious new project at E3 this evening. Wedgwood describes one of his design goals as “blurring the lines” between singleplayer and multiplayer shooters. Players of Brink will find their character to be both persistent and constantly evolving, and earned skills and experience carry over between the game’s singleplayer, cooperative, and multiplayer modes. It is being designed with the notion that players will want to stay with a single, almost “MMO-style” character for however many months or years they decide to play.
As is tradition, players are first presented with an extensive character customization screen. They begin by choosing which side in this war they want to be on– Security or Resistance– and then go about customizing their character’s body dimensions, facial features, and manner of garb. Those who enlist with Security enjoy the finest assortment of body armor, while Resistance forces make-do with flak vests fashioned from scrap metal and vulcanized rubber.
The first environment we witnessed was an abandoned airport. Wedgwood took the opportunity to demonstrate the game’s “smooth movement across random terrain,” or ‘SMART’ system (publishing partner Bethesda purportedly helped with the acronyms). What SMART enables the player to do is traverse an area of the map by way of the most efficient route, all with a single button press. Simply look in the direction you want to head, hit the corresponding button, and sit back and watch your character leap over barriers, slide under obstacles, or vault onto platforms automatically, as necessary to reach his final destination. Of course, the player can turn and look around during the SMART sequence and break from it entirely by either moving or firing his weapon.
After scurrying about an empty airport for a few minutes, we were eager to see the real game in-action. Wedgwood loaded a map called Container City. Once a transport and storage center for the wealthy elite of the Ark, it is now a shanty town carved from mountains of shipping containers and plagued by violence. The level began on a dock right outside the city, where we stood alongside a small group of Security squadmates (the multiplayer mode accommodates up to eight players on a side). Our major mission objective was to infiltrate the city, quell the Resistance, and recover a McGuffin inside a shipping container.
To begin, Wedgwood approached a nearby computer terminal called a “command post.” Command posts are scattered throughout levels and allow players to switch between the game’s various character classes, change or customize weapon loadouts, and obtain new missions. We assumed the role of an Operative, whose abilities are geared toward stealthy infiltration, and selected a standard assault weapons class.
It’s at these stations that the player can view and select from new mission objectives. Different missions reward the player with different levels of experience points, and, once selected, add waypoints to the player’s radar and map. Each level, therefore, has at least six different smaller, side-missions the player can select from while carrying out his main objective. This applies to each side: both the Security and Resistance forces have their own unique assortment of missions to complete in each level.
In one mission Wedgwood demonstrated, the player needed to progress up platforms to reach a crane that needed repair. While gunning down enemies and vaulting up ledges, we saw an incredible amount of detail and action in the background; turrets blasted enemies with a deafening roar and squadmates were cut down by the fire of Resistance forces. The player feels like his role is critical in shaping the outcome of a mission, but also that he’s not the only one embroiled in battle.
Splash Damage has assembled an all-star design team for Brink. Olivier Leonardi, whose past credits include the Prince of Persia series and Myst IV, was brought on as Art Director last summer. Tim Appleby, whose creatures inhabited the worlds of Mass Effect and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, serves as the Lead Character Designer. During action segments, the game most resembles Killzone 2, at least in terms of graphic fidelity and shader effects. But up close, there’s an incredible attention to detail in the decaying ruins of the Ark and in the harried faces of its denizens.
The actual gunplay, too, is most comparable to Guerilla’s latest. Wedgwood blasted away at Resistance forces with an assault rifle outfitted with a red-dot sight, hurled grenades at enemies bunched together, and sprinted across the battlefield before sliding behind cover.
Splash Damage has taken measures to ensure that the non-playable characters of Brink aren’t generic grunt Marines that have become all too common for this kind of genre. Security force squadmates we encountered were ethnically diverse, exhibited a range of emotions and motivations, and spoke with believable accents that didn’t make them sound like caricatures of themselves.
While you may feel like you’ve seen bits and pieces of Brink implemented in other games before, all these systems and design choices work together here to incredible effect. We’ve been long awaiting a game that takes the strong storytelling and character development of a singleplayer experience and mixes the persistence and competitiveness of an online shooter. Brink looks to finally be that game. Look for it to launch on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC next spring.
