Richard Ham: Brink’s Brave New World

Brink is a much brighter and more colourful view of humanity’s next phase than we’re we used to seeing. To what degree did other post-apocalyptic games inform your approach to the look of Brink?
It’s important to us with Brink to make a game that really stands out from the crowd. So we’re always looking for ways to imbue our world with splashes of life and colour, even on our levels that predominantly feature rust. Basically, our view is that players would rather play in a world that they could say to themselves, “hey, I’d like to go hang out here.”

For a game so grounded in real concerns, the look is highly stylised. Was that an effort to temper the serious undertones of the premise? Did you ever consider making the look more true to life?
I think the juxtaposition between serious narrative and stylized look works in much the same way that it can in anime. There, you’ve got tons of really deep and socially relevant storytelling, often done in the most outlandish and far-out style. We strike a similar balance with Brink.

There are two factions in the game: Resistance and Security. What are the differences between the two on a gameplay level, beyond playing the same maps from the opposite direction?
We actually decided early on to ensure that both factions play exactly the same, because we didn’t want to make players have to learn two different styles of gameplay when they switch teams. Plus, the character you build, with his selection of weapons and abilities, remains constant when you change teams, so we didn’t want a situation where players are required to have two different characters. We wanted that continuity of a character that the player is building and becoming attached to, and that just wouldn’t work with asymmetrical teams.

In my experience, there’s an inherent resistance to teamwork in virtually every multiplayer shooter I’ve ever played. Did you keep that in mind when developing the idea for Brink? How does the gameplay reflect this?
We recognized this as a huge hurdle to overcome, and it’s a central element of all our design. Basically, what we decided is that if players are going to be selfish and pursue their own agenda, we can’t fight that. Instead, we have to embrace it, and find ways to make it in a player’s best interest to help everyone else– not through punishment, but through rewards. This is why we’ve got our XP system set up as it is.
First rule about our XP reward system: The biggest XP gain is always to be made by completing core objectives in a level. So instead of running around lone wolf-style, not really contributing to the team’s overall chances to win, it’s in a player’s best interest to take the combat to the front line if he wants to score big points. Also, we give the player more points per kill if he’s sticking close to his teammates. This encourages players to stick together and move as a group if they want to get anywhere. And when they’re doing this, they have a better chance of working together and helping each other out of a jam.
It’s not just about XP, though. It’s also about communication, or in our case, “auto-chatter.” This is a system we’ve implemented that emulates what a really tight squad of competitive players will say to each other in a match, automatically, without the players having to worry about VoiP or anything like that. So for instance, if you see an enemy player and start to aim at him, everyone else on the team who didn’t already know about the existence of that enemy will hear your character say (in the voice you chose for him) “enemy spotted!”, and get that enemy’s location put on their mini-map. By streamlining the communication so it just “happens”, we create a system where players are co-operating and helping each other, often without even realizing it.

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