Bethesda announced this morning that a group of hackers have grabbed data from some of their users, including "e-mail addresses and/or passwords." If you frequent Bethesda's sites, like their forums or the Brink statistics site, change your password. [BethBlog]
Brink closes its checkered launch week with news of free DLC and promises it's fixing the crippling lag in its multiplayer.
With an update now live, Brink developer Splash Damage is introducing a configuration change for Xbox 360 users (which will also be available for the PS3 when PlayStation Network comes back) that limits Campaign matchmaking to eight human players (default is up to 16). The config change will also be available in most Freeplay modes.
Those who haven't had lag problems can find the 8 vs. 8 setup in something called the "Big Teams" configuration in Freeplay, and also via custom settings in Private matches.
As a token of appreciation for those who've offered feedback on Brink and stuck by it through this first week, the game's first DLC extension will be free. Splash Damage says it's planned for a June release and will offer "additional maps and new content for players."
Brink: Updates Now Live & Free DLC [Bethesda Blog]
They're sick of waiting. And now some are crossing over to the other side.
According to a report in EDGE Magazine, retailers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe are claiming a dramatic increase in the number of customers trading-in PS3 units—either for cash, or, in many instances, toward the purchase of an Xbox 360.
One source in Belgium told the magazine that "just ten days into the month and already we have an increase of 200 per cent in PS3s coming into the store compared to all of March. Normally we sell them really fast, but not this time. We've only sold 30 to 40 per cent of our inventory right now."
Another retailer speaking to the magazine classified those gamers most put-off by the PSN outage—and thus most willing to defect to the competition—as those involved in the "the hardcore online shooter crowd." Unsurprisingly, there are corresponding reports of mass trade-ins of PS3 copies of titles like Call Of Duty: Black Ops and FIFA Soccer 11, as well as cancellations of pre-orders for Brink—all which rely upon their online component as elements of crucial interest.
These customers might represent only a very extreme (and easily perturbed) portion of Sony's consumer base. But that oughtn't be grounds for assurance—these customers could also be the hardest for the company to win back.
PSN Outage Begins To Hit Retail [EDGE]
Video games let us be heroes. They let us don the cape, wave the flag, put on the badge, hoist the blue lightsaber or simply face the fires of dragons to save the princess.
They could let us be anyone, though. Terrorists, for example. They could let us be them.
If you take your video games as fun machines, you wouldn't much like the idea that a video game can let you role play a terrorist. You'd be happy being an Angry Bird or Batman or the person controlling dropping Tetris blocks simply because that's fun. Terrorism? Not fun.
But if you're interested in video games as role-playing devices, as time machines or actors' scripts, then you, like me, may have been eager to be a terrorist in the new game Brink. Unfortunately, though, it's all a cheat.
Brink is a multiplayer-focused first-person shooter with a strand of narrative justifying a series of skirmishes that pit two factions against each other. One faction is Security, the police force on a floating city called The Ark. The other is the Resistance, dubbed "terrorists" by the Security forces. The game is futuristic. Most of civilization on Earth has supposedly been wiped out, wrecked by, among other things, the melting of the polar ice caps. The Security does the bidding of the Ark's head honchos, The Founders, to keep The Ark safe. The Resistance, made of scrappy refugees from the outside world who fled to the Ark resist being treated like unwelcome dregs.
(Spoiler warning: I'll be discussing late-game missions from Brink.)
As grievances go, The Resistance's objections seemed reasonable. They didn't want to be rationed water and only be given the worst jobs. They didn't want to be consigned to shantytowns. They were, understandably, ready to get off The Ark to find real freedom. Perhaps these problems excused armed rebellion, though terrorism felt like a stretch, as, you know, it tends to.
The Security forces in the game refer to the Resistance as terrorists and—wouldn't you know it?—early in the game we discover that the Resistance is building a dirty bomb. Later in the game, they are aiming a surface-to-air missile at the tallest building in The Ark, a sort of mash-up of Hamas and Al Qaeda tactics all in one. These guys are terrorists? By mid-game, playing as the Security, and learning their side of the story mission by mission, I bought it.
Brink lets you play as both sides. The game lets you see either side of the story. This is one of the things games can do well. Take the Halo series, for example. In Halo 2, you can flip-flop from fighting as the heroic Master Chief or see moments of the war he's waged from the other side, in the boots of one of the supposedly malevolent Covenant. To be specific, what games can do well is actually let you play both sides. Whether you actually feel for both sides is another story. For example, in last year's Medal of Honor game, which was set in the ongoing war in Afghanistan, you could compete online as Western forces or as members of an "opposing force." Until the 11th hour, that opposing force was going to be called "the Taliban," but outrage from veterans' families compelled a change. That outrage and that change implied that playing as the Taliban would have felt meaningfully...anti-American and presumably pro-all-the-things-the-Taliban-supports. But that's not how it works in games. (It's no surprise that a recent video game version of the U.S. raid on Osama Bin Laden's hide-out recast the conflict as a balanced gunfight bereft of ideology.)
There is seldom any sense of ideology baked into the roles people play in multiplayer games. Distasteful as it may seem to play as the Nazis in a competitive World War II game, for example, few if any multiplayer games define the Nazi side by anything other than the class of tanks they command, the cut of their uniform and the shape of their guns. While games often let players wear the boots of either side of a conflict, they've seldom made the wearing of those boots uncomfortable.
Brink had a chance to be different. According to the storyline in the game's Security missions, those Resistance guys really are terrorists. Dirty bombs? Tower attacks? To hell with them. But... I could play as them. The game offers eight missions for the Security side and eight for Resistance. I was eager to hop into those other boots and learn just how they justified their actions.
Oddly, the Resistance doesn't justify their actions. Brink's mission structure is the product of smart recycling, so even though it supposedly has 16 missions across both campaigns, it really only has eight, each one played from opposite sides. After a few missions of the Resistance campaign, I reached that dirty bomb mission. Surprise! The Resistance doesn't talk about building a dirty bomb. They talk about crafting a vaccine. To be clear, the mission that infolds after those different narrative set-ups is exactly the same. Played from either side, the action involves a gunfight in a shantytown, one side escorting a robot through gunfire while the other tries to stop them, some intel being stolen (or not). I thought Brink's creators were sending a message here about the manifold understandings of a conflict. I thought I was being asked to accept both the Security take on the mission and the Resistance one as equal, valid and simultaneously canonical. The Security people had been misinformed, perhaps; The Resistance's aspiration to terrorism wasn't real, just misunderstood benevolence.
I was reading Brink wrong. In the Resistance version of the game's events, the so-called terrorists never fire a missile at a tower. They just try to get off the Ark. This confused me, until I realized that four of the game's missions, the last two in each campaign, are "what-if" missions. In one of the Resistance side's "what-if" missions, we actually do get the missile strike. That mission's summary: "What if [Resistance leader] Chen's extreme rhetoric inspired his followers to extreme actions?" That, I realized, is Brink's real message. The sides aren't equal. The terrorists are terrorists, in the reality of the Security's world. The Resistance do horrid things. And they are not me.
When I'm not the Resistance they are terrorists. When I am the Resistance, they are not. It's not a matter of interpretation. It's not a symptom of subjectivity. It's not an apology that deems one man's terrorist as another man's freedom fighter. It is, instead, a warping of the game's virtual reality. For whatever reason, the game's creators don't want me to be uncomfortable. They don't want me to wrestle with the opposing side's views. They have instead created an enemy faction I can simply hate, and then, when the roles reverse, they cleanly endorse a revised ideology and let me be that enemy guilt-free. There's no tough choice here. It's just checkers. I was no terrorist in Brink because the game never gave me a chance to be.
Oh those silly console gamers. They couldn't possibly handle the advanced PC gaming concepts like objective-based teamplay. Why, if there was a bug in the game that say, deleted their characters completely if they exited the game too early, console gamers would be beside themselves. Wait, there is?
The screen above, pulled from my copy of the game after the original Reddit image disappeared, pops up after creating your first character in the PC version of Splash Damage's new multiplayer shooter Brink, offering 1,000 experience points to PC gamers that suffer through a tutorial video created mainly for the benefit of ignorant console enthusiasts. Luckily we PC players can hit a button to skip the video after it loads while still earning the experience.
That's the sort of convenience that gives us more time to accidentally delete our characters.
Though a recent Steam update patched the problem, many PC Brink players were horrified to discover all of their characters and e4xperience points lost due to a particularly nasty glitch. That's right, even the tutorial video experience points.
According to a post on the Brink forums, this issue popped up when players exited Brink before reaching character selection, causing a corrupt, unrecoverable save file.
Don't worry about that now, however. The game has been patched, and your characters are safe. For those of you that suffered the loss of characters, don't worry; PC gamers are experts at objective-based teamplay. You'll have that experience back in no time.
Pease Read: To avoid loss of character progress [PC] [Brink Forums - Thanks, Chris!]
So, Brink is out. And it's divisive! Some people appreciate the new things it's trying to do, others lament the fact the game is in many ways simply broken, while others still have no idea what to think. Whatever your view on the game, though, surely we can all agree the thing looks great.
Its stylised characters, vibrant colours and rich blue sky are all a breath of fresh air as far as shooters are concerned, the genre normally content to slug it out amidst a wash of browns, greys and brown-greys.
Interestingly, the inspiration for the game's unique art style comes from some unlikely sources. The slightly deformed player models, with their elongated features, were inspired by the works of Australian sculptor Ron Mueck, as well as American comic artist Jon Foster.
Brink's "washed out" colour scheme, meanwhile, draws from English pop artist David Hockney's famous series of swimming pool paintings from the late 1960s, along with American artist Edward Hopper's strong, contrasting use of light (Hopper's Nighthawks should be familiar to just about all of you).
The gallery above features concept art for the game, where the colours and hyper-real character design from the above inspirations are clear to see. If the pic looks a little "zoomed in", be sure to click the "expand" icon to see it at full size.
I knew I was going to have a hard time deciding whether Brink was any good. I still can't say it is.
I can't say it's bad yet, either.
I've played Brink for several days. It's a hard game for me to judge.
Others have judged it, of course. It's been given wildly divergent review scores. I've played the game through, completed both of its campaigns and felt confident about how the game works to create a 10-minute video to show you how it works.
But I still can't give you a straight answer if you ask me if the game is worth buying.
The first problem is only sort of a problem: I'm no expert about this kind of thing. Brink is a class-based first-person shooter, just like the wildly popular Team Fortress 2, which I last played on or close to the day Team Fortress 2 came out. I'm not at all the kind of player who's ready for an eight-on-eight battle, with each player utilizing their class role to the utmost. We've got the Security, who are the police of this floating city called The Ark, against the Resistance, a ragtag group who just might be terrorists.
I had expected my liability, my unfamiliarity with team shooters, to be a plus. One of Brink's innovations is its dynamic mission wheel that, on the fly and in the middle of a heated mission, can show you which things a character of your class can do and which of those are most worth doing. So far, in matches I've played of the game with computer-controlled allies and with real people, that wheel has worked. It's taken the place of having an expert player sitting next to me on my couch, suggesting what I can do next.
The mission wheel has helped me target key objectives, like a safe that needs to be cracked or a pillar that needs to be blown up. It's also helped me figure out what best to do when I'm playing a support role. It's shown me that there are machine gun nests that need building or other characters who need guarding.
The developers of Brink might as well call the mission wheel the Training Wheel, because I suspect that, as I get better at Brink, I'll use it less. I don't need it when I switch mid-mission to playing as a medic, since I'm pretty good at sticking with other characters on my team and healing them—the wheel's directions toward the next wounded players are irrelevant. It's been a good back-up though, and it proved most handy when I played the game with strangers. Instead of chatting with them to sort out their needs I could check the wheel, an advantage considering that they weren't stopping to strategize. It was best for me to use the wheel so I could figure out how to save them from their gung-ho selves.
The second problem is that Brink feels like the second day of college right now. The game is brand-new and not exactly the experience I imagined it would be. It's also not the experience I expect it will be remembered for. The game marries single-player and online, essentially allowing any of its 16 campaign missions to be played solo, with seven computer-controlled allies against eight enemies, or with up to 15 other human beings. You can, as I did, leave your campaign settings open, which means you may wind up starting a mission with real people in it, or have real people tumble into your match. The presence of human players transforms the game, for better and worse.
Played alone, Brink is ok. The teammate artificial intelligence is weak, but the enemies aren't much smarter. You can be a hero and win most of the game's adventures on your own, relying on most of the bots in the game to kill each other while you do the work of hacking, or setting charges or whatever. I, for example, was the only player on my team of otherwise computer-controlled heroes, who was smart enough to put a turret at a choke-point of one map, preventing the enemy force from advancing. Human enemies would have figured out how to flank me; the computer enemies did not. Sometimes its your computer-controlled buddies who let you down. Other times, the disappointment is the enemy.
But who is to say that relying on artificial intelligence will be the typical Brink experience? Over the weekend, I played about half of the game's campaign with another games reporter. Our two real brains were too much of a match for the computer-controlled enemies on the tougher missions. We played differently than I had with computer-controlled allies. He'd guard me when I was hacking a computer in an airport. I'd keep healing him as we sprinted, him in the lead, toward an escape route. When we played with a third person, the experience was even better, except when our connections were lagging. Occasionally the game did choke, stuttering its frames and turning into an unplayable slideshow, though this problem didn't seem to correspond to the number of people who played. (It's also an issue that's supposedly set to be addressed by a patch, though you never know how those things will go.)
One time, last Sunday, I was playing the game by myself. At least, I thought I was playing by myself. I was in a tough mission that I'd yet to complete without a real person helping out. I was struggling for a while, when suddenly things started going my team's way. It took me a little longer to realize that two strangers had joined my game. Real people. Helping out.
I still haven't experienced Brink will a full crew of human players. I imagine the game will feel even more alien to the thing I played via my Xbox 360 this past weekend. Brink has been better when I've had people playing with me, but who is to say that putting people in every role will improve everything? This experience my turn again. I'm not a highly skilled class-based team shooter player, and I fear that a week from now, any improvement of the Brink experience that may be gained thanks to the presence of other gamers might be off-set by the punishing skill exercised by human players. I do fine in Brink right now, maybe thanks only to the limited artificial intelligence. A week from now, will I be dying from well-thrown grenades and compromised by so many disguised operatives that I'll be shelving this game alongside my copy of Team Fortress 2? Or will that training wheel save me again?
Should you buy Brink now? I'd wait. It's just now touching the oxygen of being played by gamers online. Let the chemical reactions take. Brink today is not the game Brink will be in a week; the game today may be better, it may be worse, but it's temporary. For now, I'll give you a shrug and tell you: I'm just not sure.
In Splash Damage's Brink, rival factions do battle over the fate of a post-apocalyptic floating city called The Ark. Judging by the critical reaction of some video game critics, The Ark may have already sunk.
Brink's intriguing combination of class-based team shooting a free-running movement have kept it high on gamers' radar throughout its lengthy development cycle. It's distinctive visual style, unique setting, and countless character customization options only fueled the fires of anticipation.
Now the game is live in North America, and as gamers run rampant over The Ark for the first time, the assembled game critics have already been there, done that, and painted an often disparaging picture of the future of this floating utopia.
Brink is unfinished. And that doesn't mean it's full of technical problems. Well, it's got those too. But mostly, it's just an unpolished, poorly executed mess of ideas. Wait, let me temper that. There are times when Brink looks like it's going to break out of its shell. There are times where the fairly interesting and cool (honestly!) ideas seem to be just about to bubble up and make the game worth playing. And then, suddenly and without warning, they're pushed back into the murky depths under the boot of poor design choices and lack of polish. It's exceedingly disappointing. Of course, for a game to be truly disappointing, it has to have potential. And Brink has more potential than it knows what to do with. (Note: Metacritic converts 1UP's D letter grade to a score of 25)
Here's one of the first major problems with Brink's objective-based structure: Each level that a player earns lets them unlock a new ability. Though there are a few permanent boosts the player can spend their unlocks on, most of these abilities are class-specific, meaning eventually, you're going to find a class you like and spend most of your points on it. Naturally, you'll have a predilection to play as that class — but should you refuse to switch your class to suit the objective, you're going to feel like your services aren't really required three-quarters of the time.
Brink's one shining aspect is SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain). Using SMART, holding a single button lets you navigate up walls, over obstacles, and through the game world. Depending on your body size, you can do more or less with movement, but overall this finesse is fantastic. Nothing in Brink feels quite as good as sliding under gunfire into someone, taking them out with a shotgun. However, it's easy to forget which size your character is in first-person perspective, as movement abilities don't change dramatically. While the Large size allows miniguns and shotguns, they still move only slightly slower than the Medium size. Only Small characters can really burst through levels, leaping off of walls and finding clever passageways.
My central beef here is that anemic feel to the action. I love complexity in games like this, and strategizing how to utilize the varying skills of the different player classes to achieve your goals. But when the core action doesn't feel good, it kind of weakens the entire venture. When I shoot an enemy, especially in the head, I want them dead. Not laying on the ground waiting for a medic to revive them, dead. Especially when I pop someone in the head. If there is a cardinal rule of shooters, it should be that no one survives headshots. No one.
While some of the levels have a more even chance of success for either side, I have a feeling there are certain stages that players are going to eventually refuse to play, rage-quitting should they find themselves on the wrong side. Had Brink employed something similar to Killzone 3 — where objectives constantly shift and are evenly split between teams — it might have worked. Instead, the game has a totally bizarre flow where even if a team is dominating an enemy and wins two objectives, they can still lose a hard-fought match because they failed the third imbalanced requirement.
Brink deserves to be ranked among the finest co-op games available. As a multiplayer experience, it is exquisite. But as mentioned earlier, it falters if played solo. While all the modes can be played in single-player, the bots that act as stand-ins for other players are a poor replacement. It certainly isn't the case that gamers who buy Brink will feel ripped off if they don't have access to their console's (or PC's) online network. But until you've fought both with and against living opponents in Brink, you have yet to sample the best of what it has to offer.
Brink is a strange game. Is it the next must-play shooter? Is it a forgettable Team Fortress knock-off? Or is it something else? Is it really a decent single-player game? Actually, how does its multiplayer even work?
The best way to explain this odd game to you is to show it to you. I played through it this weekend, and now, if you can give me 10 brisk minutes of your time, I can zip you through one of the game's missions and provide enough commentary so that you can know all you need to know.
Fair? Press play, and let's get started.
(I'm playing on the Xbox 360. The game is also out for PC and PlayStation 3. Also, as some commenters have noted, the game is getting a patch that is supposed to address the issue of graphical texture pop-in—you'll know it when you see it. This video was captured prior to the release of patches, the day before the game was released.)
Brink will still hit the Playstation 3 as planned despite the ongoing Playstation Network outage, the developer tells Eurogamer. While the game mostly lives online, it does have the ability to be played with bots and in single-player mode. [Eurogamer]
