Brink'ish update

Since the last Brink-post here on Crossfire (read more..) there've been some new Brink'ish updates to report. First of all, if you've somehow managed to miss it, Splash Damage's Creative Director Rahdo is still around here on Crossfire answering questions in the Brink ?'s-topic. An example of a recent question, made by etkar, Rahdo replied to what lesson Splash Damage have learned from their failure with ET:QW and attracting the competive scene, apart from the tech things.

Quote by Richard Ham

That's a good question. I wasn't at Splash for ETQW, but I know when I started, they know they missed the boat on several things, but the #1 problem was accessibility and communication to the player. The game was very dense and overly complex (not complexity in a 'look how deep' kind of way, but in a 'damn, there's a lot of stuff to wade through' way). So we're trying to ensure everything about the game is streamlined and smooth.

Other then that Brink have been in the headlines on several occasions. Among those we can find the HookedGamers interview with Splash Damage CEO Paul Wedgwood and the 2-part interview made by EDGE online with Senior Game Designer Ed Stern (Part 1 & Part 2) about writing Brink, which is a little bit more "behind the scene at Splash Damage" then the usual stuff we've come to see lately. There's also been the Turkish gamingsite Merlininkazani Q&A with Splash Damage Media Direcor Richard Jolly. The biggest update have however been the Brink Developer Diary #2 (you can find #1 here) with Splash Damage Art Director Olivier Leonardi. Here we get to see some new art from Brink such as the two sides, Security and Resistance. We also get to know abit how they worked at Splash Damage when they decided take a chance with their very colourful and overdimensioned style of Brink.

Quote by Olivier Leonardi

There has been a big trend in recent games to push for an overly desaturated look, for Brink we wanted ‘colour’ back. I really like using colour, and the work of painters like Edward Hopper (with his fantastic way of using light), David Hockney (his work on the ’swimming pool’ series in the ’60s and ’70s especially), and impressionist painters inspire me every day.

Brink’s environments are similarly colourful and the reason for this is really quite simple: we’re out at sea, and all the open water acts like a giant mirror. As a result, there’s a lot of light bouncing everywhere, which yields more vivid colours. The rusty reds of Container City provide a great contrast to the bright blue sky above.

As a bonus I've also, on doffelicious.com, tried to dig into the official Splash Damage Brink forums, what's been said and replied on and made a summary of that for those who might not camp their forums as some might do. It's basically formed as a Q&A, just remember that it ain't a real Q&A, just a summary of the perhaps most interesting bits of what's been said in a very long forum thread over the last month.

Quote

Q: Talking about upgrades. Will you be able to turn off such upgrades (or, a few selected ones) on "non ranked" servers? If it proves to be unsuitable for competitive game? (like in CoD4 when some of the upgrades are just.. "too good").
Q: I'm more interested in knowing whether we can turn them all on by default (ehh, I mean, allow players to customize their character with unlockables they have not achieved yet). That might make matches a lot more interesting while still not destroying the balance. And I think it will help blur the lines between casual and online competitive play. I'm not sure if SD is interested in blurring that line though, considering competitive players like me are in general far from the easiest customers to please.
A: To both those questions, what I *want* to do is give as much flexibility for players to make their own preferred server settings, allowing/disallowing weapons/abilities/game features etc. as they see fit. When we get to the point where we're actively working on setting up the interface for these things, I actually intend to start asking on the boards about what kinds of choices players really want in detail (hopefully being able to talk openly by that point about the kinds of things that are on the table). So there's your vague non-committal answer for the evening :s

Read the whole thing on doffelicious.com..

Related sources:
SplashDamage forums
doffelicious.com
Merlininkazani
EDGE Online
Hooked Gamers
BethBlog.com