
Brink is Splash Damage's first ever original IP to come out in the FPS market, and they're reassuring us that this game will take you to a world you've never seen before.
Talking to CVG in a comprehensive sit-down interview, Creative Director Richard Ham gives more than just a few enlightening remarks about Brink, from making their first ever own IP and bringing it to the FPS market, to his opinion on the shape of the industry today.
Splash actually worked on some really big titles previously, such as Doom 3 (with id Software) and Territory Quake Wars (with Never Software and Underground Development), both for the PC. Brink then is their first official original IP.
"Wolfenstein Territory was obviously in the Wolfenstein universe, we helped out on Doom 3 and then we did Enemy Territory Quake Wars for the PC. Enemy Territory Quake Wars for the PC was a prequel to the Quake universe, it kind of charted the mechanical alien invasion of Earth."
"So we had to do concept art for everything from scratch; new Earth environments, new characters, but we didn't have to write the story, we didn't have to create it from the very beginning.
So Brink is the first game where, when I sat down and wrote the high-concept at the very beginning I was basing it on an idea for a setting that I felt was really unique, was really quite different from anything anyone else had worked on."
With all the other FPS games out there right now, what would separate Brink from the rest of the pack? How does he feel about the current state of the FPS market?
For Ham, he still finds the shooter market as the biggest in the world, on the Big 3 platforms (PC, Xbox 360, PS3). The important thing is that they continuously try to ramp it up with "something new, something unique, something different, something that they haven't seen before."
"For Brink, we have four or five firsts, in our past certainly -- I can't really speak for the competition. We wanted to massively advance the way that you move in a shooter. So we have a new system called SMART: you can now slide and vault and mantle and climb.
This is pretty significant not least because when you go and play another shooter afterwards it's incredibly frustrating when you can't jump a wall, vault over something, clamber something, because it's a system that's about moving and shooting."
This new SMART system, he says, is "a big part of the game for us." It should also be a first "for shooters to have that depth and aesthetic and gameplay effect in weapon and ability to customization in a shooter."
All in all, he says he feels pretty good about what they've accomplished with Brink "because we've got this world people haven't seen before that you experience persistently, that you can play through with a movement system that's different from the stuff that everyone else has done."
"Most importantly you can experience it in single-player, or co-operative, or full versus mode battles with a kind of smart approach to networking and playing with friends, that is just not possible with any other game on the market today."
He does, however, have reservations claiming that their AI is the best ever. "What we've come to expect from first person shooters is that , while sat on a mine cart, I have the hit detection box the size of a fridge, as do all the characters areound me so, if I shoot towards them, I hit them no matter how far away my shot is within that box..."
"Well none of that is what happens in real life or what real humands do. They might do it in the movies, which unfortunately is one of the biggest sources of inspiration for the way we do things in videogames. But if you wnat to see how humans move in the environment, wath the way they move in the environment in multiplayer.
So in Brink we wanted your single-player experience to be realistic and to represent what was going to happen when you started playing co-operatively with other players."
Brink, the FPS featuring parkour-inspired movement, is scheduled to come out in the US on May 17th, while Europe should get it on May 20th. The game will be featuring Steamworks integration, as well as the Valve Anti-Cheat syste