The Jon Venture

By Jon Venture

I own an Xbox 360, but I am not a Halo junkie. Nor do I play overnight Call of Duty sessions with friends until I pass out and drool through the gap between the analog stick and controller casing. First person shooters are not my “thing” at all. Yet I was blown away by the presentation I saw at E3’09 for Brink, the upcoming FPS from Bethesda Softworks and Splash Damage. Not since GoldenEye on the N64 have I eagerly looked forward to the floating hands wreaking havoc upon so many nameless faces.

Scheduled for release Spring 2010 on Xbox 360, PS3, and PC, Brink is shaping up to be yet another blockbuster game from the guys who brought us Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. The premise behind Brink is fairly familiar, with a post apocalyptic artificial floating city in 2035 serving as the last refuge for mankind. As the oceans rose and the remnants of human life crept and settled into any space they could find, factions formed, war erupted, and once again man fell into conflict. The resistance is once again combating “The Man”, so to speak. Not enough to keep my attention for long initially, but thankfully that’s where some of the similarities stray from the rest of the FPS pack.

After constructing a highly detailed character to rip through the opposition (serving as either part of the security force or a rebel) CEO and Game Director of Splash Damage Paul Wedgwood began to slowly sway me towards a life of FPS addiction. One of the greatest features in Brink is the S.M.A.R.T. (Smooth Marketing Across Random Terrain) button, which propels you a-la parkour up and over any obstacles standing in your path. Think of Mirror’s Edge-styled movement in a FPS, but automated and intuitive, and you’ve got the basis for the S.M.A.R.T. feature. In the pre-alpha gameplay behind closed doors, a security fixed with red laser beams stood between the protagonist and his objective on the second story of an abandoned airport. Now, one could very well go through the door and set off the alarm, causing every sleeping soldier in the vicinity to wake from their caffeine and doughnut induced comas and charge towards my area with weapons blazing, but that is much more trouble than I would like to cause in an unknown environment.

Rather, by pointing the camera over the door and hitting the S.M.A.R.T. button, he automatically hopped towards a nearby railing, leapt off the edge, grabbed the top of the security door, and lifted himself up and over the peril. That not only saved me ten minutes of strafing around the room and ducking fire, but also the time I would have spent taking the pacifist route and simply looking for an alternate way to cross the room. Don’t want to risk setting off the alarm in the first place? Aim the camera across the open atrium towards the other side of the airport, hit the S.M.A.R.T. button, and the character effortlessly bounds over the railing, lands and runs across an advertising platform, then jumps up to the railing across the way. At that point during the demo, my eyes were wide with amazement. The tediousness was taken away from the game, and I was even closer to converting into a FPS fan.

The innovation shown during the Brink demo did not cease at its S.M.A.R.T. feature. After the agile moves exhibited at the airport, we were transported to an abandoned dockyard where Brink’s dynamic mission generation system was put on display. As the team dodged incoming fire after landing on shore, it was time to initiate the primary objectives at the combat post. By logging onto these computers strategically placed in the level players are able to choose their character class (soldier, engineer, heavy arms etc.) and weapon bundles, as well as one of many class-specific objectives. Depending on which objective was chosen from the circular H.U.D., each other player’s objectives acquired from the combat posts changed as well to compliment your moves in battle.

The goal we were shown to exhibit this feature involved transporting a robot to the center of a shanty town just past the dockyard to diffuse a dirty bomb. If a player chooses to fight as a soldier class, his objectives would include clearing the path and eliminating enemy resistance as the robot rolled on. If a bit more intricacy was desired, choosing to fight as an engineer would activate an objective involving the giant crane looming overhead. The engineer’s goal was now to repair said crane in order to raise the robot to a higher platform, and in turn, the option now presented itself for soldier-class players to protect the engineer as the crane was being repaired. Mind you, these missions and classes could all be changed not at a specified checkpoint after a goal had been met, but in the middle of a skirmish. Ultimately the goal of the group remains the same, but how and with what tools those goals are achieved are now at the whim of gamers.

Maybe it was the secretive manner in which Brink had been demonstrated at E3 ’09 by Paul Wedgwood, or the teaser trailer I had seen before the convention (which gave no details whatsoever what Brink was), but my anticipation to play the game grew exponentially as I witnessed the pre-alpha version of the game before me. And after some further insight from Ed “Bongoboy” Stern, Senior Game Designer at Splash Damage and incredibly motivated fellow, I was even more excited about Brink’s premise and release in Spring 2010. There is much to be said about a game that could potentially convert a gamer into an FPS fanatic, but all I can say is we are upon the brink of something incredible.