Splash Damage, the folks who made Gears Tactics and Brink, have announced they're working on a new sci-fi game. They've worked on a number of series created by other developers over the years, including Wolfenstein and Gears, but haven't made their own PC game since Dirty Bomb in 2014. It'll be interesting to see what they have in store - perhaps a first-person shooter like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory? Or maybe something more strategic, given Gears Tactics' success.
]]>Splash Damage's 2011 first-person shooter Brink [official site] is, out of the blue, now free. Swing by Steam and its yours for keepsies - it's not a free-to-play conversion, just Brink being set free. Publishers Bethesda don't say why they've done this (perhaps to celebrate QuakeCon this weekend?) but hey, thanks. Brink does Splash Damage's usual Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory sort of class-based and object-driven action, this time taking it to a dystopian futurecity and introducing a natty parkour system. I didn't play Brink for very long back in the day, but I do still fondly remember the parkour and bold, battered character faces.
]]>Splash Damage, the English studio behind first-person shooters like Dirty Bomb and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory as well as the multiplayer side of Batman: Arkham Origins, is being bought by an unlikely new owner. Splash Damage are selling to Leyou Technologies Holdings Limited, which is a name you're unlikely to know given that they're a Chinese company whose main business has been poultry.
Looking to diversify from the exciting world of poultry and poultry products, they also own most of Digital Extremes (Leyou were Sumpo before). Isn't business funny?
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Have You Played isn't always a recommendation - first and foremost it's a discussion about a game. And Splash Damage's team shooter Brink certainly brooks discussion, in this case about the question "what went wrong?" Because it's not as though the game itself was anything like a disaster, yet still its name seems to get passed around as an example of high-profile failure.
]]>It might appear that we didn't cover the news that Splash Damage's upcoming team shooter Dirty Bomb has been unrenamed Extraction and is now Dirty Bomb again, but what really happened was that all the chopping and changing sent our tags system into quantum disarray. There are in actual fact 418 posts about Dirty Bomb in our system, but they can only be seen if you can correctly guess which name the game is going under at any split second. It was called Dirty Bomb 655,315 times for the duration of the last sentence, and Extraction 641,978, so good luck with that. You'll probably have more luck getting into Dirty Bomb Extraction Dirty Bomb Extraction Dirty Extraction's closed beta, which went live today.
]]>Good news! After a period of relative silence following Brink's splash-that-wasn't, Splash Damage is back with another game about men shooting other men. However, not-so-good news: iOS, greedy devourer of worlds that it is, swallowed the poor thing whole. And while the Enemy Territory developer also has a free-to-play PC exclusive in the works for later this year, Rad Soldiers - as the iOS-bound strategy is known - looks like asynchronous XCOM wearing TF2's pants. In other words: delightful. I wants it, precious. I wants it. Fortunately, Splash Damage told us that all hope isn't lost.
]]>The UK Writers' Guild Awards took place at the end of 2011 but the American guild like to time their ceremonies a little closer to the Oscars so that they can fall into Awards Season, which isn't actually a season at all. You may remember that a man named Gillen was nominated for the UK award, along with Ed Stern whose script for Brink received a nod. The winners were the writers of Enslaved though and that doesn't exist on PC so we neglected to mention its victory. A belated round of applause to Alex Garland and Tameem Antoniades. So, who has received a nomination from the American guild? Read on.
]]>Brink's forthcoming clans and tournaments update is being celebrated by a free weekend on Steam, says Bethesda blog. The game is going to be free to play all weekend, this weekend. If you play for free this weekend you will also be able to purchase the game permanently for 75% off at any point during the weekend. That weekend apparently runs from "10 AM PST today... through Monday at 10 AM PST." So that's what's happening with Brink this weekend.
]]>Brink: a most curious beast indeed. I'm still not entirely sure what I make of it. While I wish it had done quite a few things a little differently, I'm heartened to see that it hasn't been left to die: a forthcoming update will better turn it to the not-so-tender mercies of community-centric play. Clans and tournaments will be the focus of the patch - the kind of stuff that perhaps should have been there in the first place, but hindsight is 20/20, as my Dad so helpfully observes several hundred times a year.
You'll be able to create a clan, recruit members, create some sort of no doubt nightmarishly ugly clan symbol, manage things via a dedicated profile page and, of course, wage war on other clans. They deserve it, the rotters.
]]>The Writers' Guild of Great Britain - a rather different entity to the US Writers' Guild - last week announced its nominees for assorted mediums' most lauded writers. Included are the obscure likes of 'television', 'theatre', 'books' and 'radio', but fortunately Best Videogame keeps things relevant to our little corner of the internet. This is a prize given only to UK writers, so who do we think got a nod? Some clever people, that's who.
]]>LATEST: Servers still broken, no idea why, working to fix.
]]>Jim: I'll post about the Brink DLC... or did we post about it already? John: I posted screenshots earlier in the week, saying when it was out. Jim: Ok. Jim: I will post that it is out and free for two weeks. John: That's just what your MUM would do. Jim: She would, she's top mental for free DLC.
]]>As Alec brought to our attention on Friday, Brink's first DLC, Agents Of Change, is due out on the 3rd August. That's in two days time, calendar fans. Let's celebrate this proximity with eleven screenshots of the runny, jumpy, shooty content. Except, er, without the runny, shooty or content. These are pics of the environments. Until the very last they somewhat forgot the players. But still, they're very pretty. And pretty things distract me from the turmoil within.
]]>Well, we already knew full well that the first add-on content for Splash Damage's bold team-based shooter Brink would be a freebie for a limited time, but what we didn't know is when it would turn up. Of course, I've gone and ruined all the mystery by writing it in the headline, haven't I? Man, I am an SEO expert's worst nightmare. 'Always ask a question if you want to soullessly farm traffic', that's the rule. Why don't we do that? Why don't we do it for every post? Why don't you read on to find out? Or at least to find out what's in Brink: Agents of Change? WHY DON'T YOU? WHY? DON'T YOU LOVE US? DON'T YOU WANT US TO HAVE PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS, HITS? WHYYYYYYYYYYYY?
]]>Splash Damage's solid team-manshoot Brink has been out for a million years by now, of course. Except if you live in land of chaotic weather and fine tea known as the UK and like to buy your PC games via Steam, in which case it's only just come out. Our inquiries into why it's been missing from Brit-Steam for so long have only ever been met with no comments, but whatever the problem was (a disagreement with Steam ToCs? Something to do with keeping retailers happy? A mountain goat chewed an important cable? We can but speculate.)
]]>Brink DLC is coming soon. It is called Agents Of Change. That's it up there in the image. The news about it is this: it will be free on Steam for the first two weeks, say Bethesda, and will appear at some point in July. As previously mentioned, the DLC will include "two all-new environments, five new player abilities, two new outfits, and two new weapon attachments." (We asked about why it's not on Steam in the UK, incidentally, and got a "no comment". It seems to still be missing, so that remains an oddity.)
]]>Update: LulzSec have released what they claim to be everything they took from Bethesda, including source code and admin passwords, except for the 200,000 user details which they say they're leaving out because, "We actually like this company." (They also claim to have broken into senate.gov, and paste this as proof. That should bring them some dark-glassed attention.)
LulzSec, who have claimed responsibility for many of the gaming hacks of late, have announced they've had access to Bethesda/Zenimax's data for a couple of months, and are planning on releasing details today. They've been winding up BethSoft all day, threatening to release details of a number of games, including Brink. However, in their usual way, they are suggesting they'll go easy on them because "we love Call of Cthulhu." They rather spuriously suggest this is motivated by a lack of details on Skyrim, but even if they received some, plan "to embarrass you anyway."
]]>UPDATE: This is out some time "this month" rather than "this week". Sorry about that.
Ah, while we're over at Besthesda blog, there are also some details on Brink's forthcoming DLC which raises the level cap, adds new maps, and a bunch of other stuff including a "Sad Punk" outfit. I've posted the rest of the details below, just in case you are scared of going to other, lesser websites. You're right to be scared. We're not like the others.
Anyway, the DLC should be out this week. Relatedly: Brink is still not available on Steam in the UK, for some reason. Why is that? We just don't know. I've asked Bethesda for an answer, and I'll update this if/when we get one.
]]>I miss demos. I miss them so much. I wouldn’t be here, writing these words, if it weren’t for demos: how else could a sport-fearing, skinny young misery with only the slightest pittance for pocketmoney have found his way into playing video games? Once, my bedroom was littered with floppy discs, each and every one of which had at some point led to me standing outside a game shop, counting pennies with a quivering hand, praying I had enough.
Granted, magazines were the gateway drug back then, when there was no way to watch a trailer or scour Facebook for new screenshots, but later in life the web too seemed an infinite fount of sampled digital delights, and led to any number of purchases of those games that seemed the most absorbing - or simply because the demo ended, apparently expertly, at a point which left me urgently hungry for more. Those days are gone.
]]>Bethblog had the details on this late last week, and it looks promising for the PC version of Brink, with fixes to the server browser, the dedicated server, and some minor bugs. The weirdo sound bug on certain maps has been fixed, and also: "Graphical performance has been improved, especially when using Ambient Occlusion. We’ve worked closely with both AMD and NVIDIA, and you should see performance and stability improvements in future driver revisions from both parties." No exact date yet, but it should be this week. I'll make sure I schedule games on the servers when it's all updated so we can take a look at the improvements.
]]>We've got a UK server in London and a US server in Chicago. And we're going to have some evenings manshoot on there. More details below.
]]>Playing Brink this weekend made me worry. But not about the usual things. I was worried that there would never be another way to experience the details of its world - no possibility for further exploration of the Ark and its precarious situation. This isn't something I normally think about when faced with a multiplayer shooter. I certainly had no interest in finding out more about the world of Quake III, or Battlefield 2, because nothing in them really inferred anything outside those isolated battlegrounds. Their conflicts were their world entire. Not so with Brink, and, now that I come to think of it, a few other worlds, too. I begin to wonder whether game fictions might be too readily disposable.
]]>Brink is here, and we've been playing it. We've even got some servers up. But what do Alec, Jim, and Quintin actually think about it? Let's find out.
Jim: Brink then, the long-awaited multiplayer shooter from British devs Splash Damage. Everyone had a bit of a play?
Quintin: I have shot so many men.
]]>Brink is out now in the US and apparently out in the UK tomorrow. We've spent the last couple of days playing it, but you'll have to wait until tomorrow for our full critical verdict. Nevertheless I thought I'd say a few things tonight, including venting my frustration with a critical bug, and providing you with our server details for US and UK-based Brink servers. Read on for a mixed bag of information!
]]>Bethesda's sent VG247 some stats relating to Brink prior to the game's release one week from now. There's no actual story here, but these numbers are too mad to not post. I guess you could argue that they're a statement of precisely how much work goes into the modern videogame, but instead I'm going to simply raise both my arms into the air, start spacking them every which way like a bugged ragdoll animation and scream the following:
Brink has 102,247,681,536,000,000 possible characters variations. And that's just the start.
]]>Two more Brink videos have arisen from the crackling fronds of the interweb, detailing the classes and the HUD of this objective-based future-combat extravaganza. I've posted them below. Of the two, I would say the Classes one is worth watching, because it shows the most important mechanics, like how you can change classes in game (without dying) and how many of the objectives depends on the abilities of specific classes to be completed.
Anyway, that's enough videos for now. Let's get to the game, please. Thanks, Slow March Of Time!
]]>Just two weeks to go. And that means a last gasp newsburst. We've got two more feature-elucidating videos below, which talk more about objectives and general gamefoolery. We've also got some clarification about dedicated servers. Anyone will be able to run a dedicated server, in the tradition of multiplayer FPS games since year dot: "The Brink Standalone Dedicated Server will be available for download via Steam prior to release. Once the server is available, you can simply browse to the Tools tab in your Steam client and grab it from there."
]]>Want to understand the fundamentals of how Brink's objective-based game unfolds? Then you, sir, must have no fear, and must watch the video that lies beneath this introductory paragraph. I remain fascinated by this game, and can't wait to see how it plays out. More interesting, perhaps, will be how the wider gaming community takes a slightly more complex multiplayer manshoot in this time of simplicity. Will the CoD-consuming masses be hungry for something with a little more substance? I'll be interested to find out...
]]>I've had brief encounters with Splash Damage's upcoming athletic shooter Brink a few times now, and by this point I'm simply very keen to be able to sit down and play it at my leisure, building my character under my own steam, tackling its challenges with an RPS collective. Fortunately it's now just a handful of weeks away, but even so there's a few things left to chat about.
On my most recent entanglement with it - while I was also seeing the likes of Skyrim, Prey 2 and Rage - I had a chance to poke my big, stupid nose into two aspects I'd not seen before. Number one! The training missions, which double up as tutorial for the more esoteric aspects of the game and a gear-unlocking, high score-chasing sub-game in their own right. Number two! Being a fat guy.
]]>Second Brink post of the day, eh? I bet this takes you to the brink of your patience, or something. Apologies, but ultimately this is all Bethesda's fault for sending out another press release announcing the minimum and recommended specs of the game and that it'll use Steamworks. Full thing thing after the jump.
]]>What! Another game arrives early this year? Something funny is going on in game dev, but it's true. Brink has apparently wrapped up production a week early, and consequently the game will now release on May 10th in North America and May 13th in Europe. Hmm. I suppose that makes our review schedule a bit easier, anyway...
]]>Via the newsbeast of VG247, I am made aware of a new Brink trailer. This one is about the abilities you can unlock for your characters over time. It includes a pretty sweet deployable turret, and the obligatory stealth-dude ability to counter it, in this case hacking it so that the thing guns down its former owners.
Brink is out on May 17th. So that's going to be a busy week.
]]>We've only got to wait to May 20th before we can all pile onto the Brink servers and run around pretending to be peculiarly proportioned men. I can't wait! There's a video out that explains the abilities and missions that some of these men will face in the moments between shooting each other. These subdivisions of shootermen will be called "classes", each with its own skills and things. Clever, I know.
And - my goodness - it's looking good. Go take a look, below.
]]>Sometimes we're guilty of fire and forget posting of trailers - showing you a pretty video then buggering off without much else said about it. Not this time! For the latest video from Splash Damage's upcoming (and very promising) shooty death game Brink, I've taken the liberty of a near second-by-second commentary upon what it's showing. In it, I uncover incredible secrets and reveal an unprecedented degree of insight into the game.
You'll see.
]]>My weekend consisted in playing a bunch of games from different points in the past: Quake III, Unreal Tournament 3, Battlefield 2, and Mirror's Edge. It all got me thinking about movement.
]]>Indeed. It is true. We've put our mouths in front of a microphone and made noises at it once again. Only not very much this time, I'm afraid. Instead, the bulk of the larynx-gymnastics originate from Splash Damage's Senior Game Designer Ed Stern, who's behind most of the words and a whole lot of other things in Brink.
Also making vocal appearances are a cartel of RPS readers who attended the recent Eurogamer Expo, at which this chat was held. They had questions. They asked them. Ed answered. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. Many Bothans died.
If that still isn't enough mumbly Britvoices for you, you'll be glad to hear RPS' Alec Meer (I hate that guy), Quintin Smith and Karen Gillan or someone were also in attendance, chiming in with matters relevant, string-related or just plain rude.
]]>My first ever published review was of Project Gotham Racing, and ended with this thought: “Because really, what’s the point of winning if you don’t look cool doing it?”
Which is a concept that I feel has hobbled FPSes for a while now. An FPS athlete isn’t some cowboy gunslinger, thrashing superior numbers with grace and cunning. He’s a robot. A horrible, jinking turret, popping the heads of other players like a rushed bartender opens bottles. Having played about an hour of Brink at the Eurogamer Expo last weekend, I can safely say that Brink bucks this trend. Winning actually feels cool. And here’s why.
]]>Assorted pustules of RPS spent the weekend at the Eurogamer Expo in London this weekend. While we were there, we arranged some characteristically ad-hoc and vaguely inept events for some of the readers who happened to be in attendance, which nonetheless - I think I hope I pray - turned out pretty well. As in, no-one died or suffered catastrophic organ failure, which is forever my personal benchmark for success.
And so it was that, earlyish on Sunday morning, I led a cartel of gun-curious readers past a phalanx of annoyed security guards, and managed to seat them down for a play session of Splash Damage's Brink before the show kicked off for the day. It's worth noting that Brink drew by far the biggest queues of the show, with some attendees reporting 2 and a half hour waits. But did the team shooter deserve such patience and passion? I shoved a microphone into the mouth-holes of some of the RPS readers (and contributors) who played the game that fateful morning, and listened to what they had to say about trousers and violence.
]]>The wait for Splash Damage's hybrid single/multiplayer shooter Brink feels oh-so-long now. From mutterings to concept art to proof of concept to concept to ooh-that-looks-ace to last month's hands-on sessions (which RPS hasn't actually yet had, mostly due to haphazard GamesCom scheduling on our part), the near-future team-barney has very much been made flesh. It's been a long time coming, but all of sudden we're theoretically now just a couple of seasons away from release. Spring 2011? Oh, that'd be grand. Here's why the big-faced factional warfare game matters to its creators....
]]>Ah, QuakeCon leftovers. Delicious. Here we have two Brink videos via GameTrailers, one being Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood talking about the game in some depth - although with plenty of stuff we've heard before - and one talking about S.M.A.R.T., which is the game's unusual movement system. It's worth taking a look at that second one, at least, because it looks fairly intriguing. A free-running, sliding, leaping, vaulting, mantling approach to movement. And, well, blimey. Getting more excited about this one each time I see it.
]]>Giant cities in the sea, a crisis of resources, a refugee disaster, the brink of civil war (do you see...), yes it's all going on in Brink, and Splash Damage have produced an enthusiastic new video to explain it all. Richard Ham, Paul Wedgwood, and Ed Stern explain the world they've created while we get to see more of the art, and more of the fancy shootin'. Interesting to see an FPS developer making this kind of effort, and certainly landing a few yards from the usual sci-fi template. Of course I'm rather more keen to actually see how this one plays, especially since it's been a while since a multiplayer FPS really grabbed me. Maybe... just maybe.
The video, via the News Colonels of VG247, is below.
]]>Bethesda has released new assets for two of the games on our watch list, Brink and Rage. (They also released shots of New Vegas, but they're dreadful.) And they're all rather pretty. So you should probably want to look at them. First off, here's Splash Damage's Brink looking all colourful and fun.
]]>As Jim prophesied, so it has come to pass. Yes, I come here to link to a preview of Brink I wrote for another website. To whit, IGN UK, and specifically here. If, hypothetically speaking, I had written the piece in an incredible hurry because I'd stupidly but hypothetically forgotten what day the embargo lifted on, you might hypothetically be able to tell. Hmm. Here's a non-hypothetical quote:
]]>There's going to be a heap of Brink coverage turning up across the net this week, as Paul Wedgwood, Ed Stern and their Splash Damage crew have been off showing the game to European press in Paris. We'll link to some of that in a bit, I suspect. Brink, the grapevine has it, was quite the star in an event that showed off Rage, Hunted, and Fallout: new Vegas. In the meantime: see these new images. Click for full size!
]]>The new cinematic trailer for Brink (via VG247) is pretty damned good. Lots of running and jumping and sliding all tries to get across the movement system that is one of the game's core features. The character and environmental design is absolutely fantastic, too, as it should be given the studio's astonishing pedigree. Quake Wars might not have been everyone's cup of tea, but they've pretty much put together a supergroup to make Brink, and I think it's going to pay off. (Although, is it just me, or is that the TF2 spy at the end there?)
]]>Brink is showing all sorts of potential. Back at E3 I was rather taken aback by the possibilities for blurring the lines of team-based online gaming and offering a linear narrative. And also slightly bemused by it all. There's a big old preview here. Below is a video showing off the character customisation, but carrying with it a bunch of more useful information. The body type you create, it seems, isn't just for your aesthetic pleasure, but also defines the role your character will play and the types of equipment he can use.
]]>Once we get past early summer things get a little hazy. We enter a nether-realm of shifting dates and unclear prophecies. By then we'll also have a whole bunch of games I haven't previously mentioned show up in the intervening months, stuff that we didn't have release dates for to place them in our line-up. This final post in our preview attempts to survey them all. To the future! (And check out part one and two if you haven't seen them already.)
]]>We already had the first proper video via G4 earlier in the week, and now the blighters have two more videos, which I've posted below. The environments really do look as impressive and freely explorable as Splash Damage have been boasting. We also get to see even more of the romping gun-action, which is making the delay until the end of 2010 all the more frustrating. This really is one of the most interesting FPS games in development, and I pray Splash Damage have the talent to pull it off. For a lot of chat about the philosophy and fiction of the world, check out our interview with senior designer Ed Stern.
]]>Cryptic, gravitas-laden teasers are of little use - genuinely seeing a game in action is all that matters when it comes to trailertime. So, it's relief to be able to show you goodly human beans just what Splash Damage's upcoming hybrid single/multiplayer shooter Brink really looks like. This video focuses specifically on the (optional) auto-jump/climb system they call SMART. It's caused a bit of a fuss as Some Gentlemen have expressed that it must mean the game has been stupidised in the name of consolebox success, and similarly snobbish knee-jerk assertions. Maybe it will. But have you played it yet? No, you haven't. So maybe it won't. Gotcha!
This walkthrough vid tries to both explain and justify SMART's existence. Does it help, Some Gentlemen? Oh, and it also does a sterling job of demonstrating that the uber-shiny screens we've seen to date really are very close to the real thing...
]]>Some weeks back, I visited Splash Damage to take a peek at how their upcoming shooter Brink is coming along. Thanks to the invaluable assistance of Master Transcriber Jim Rossignol, I finally have a textual record of my interview with SD's Senior Game Designer Ed Stern. Read on for an avalache of Brink-o-facts...
]]>Earlier this week, I saw Brink, a game whose substance no-one had hitherto seemed terribly clear about. Pray allow me to try to correct this...
You can tell this is a Splash Damage game because it’s about two teams of players fighting an eternal, bloody war against each other in objective-based maps. It’s not nominally an Enemy Territory game (as have been SD’s two titles to date, Wolfenstein: ET and Quake Wars), but for all the Kent-based developers’ claims that Brink is something of a new beginning, it’s very much a natural extension of what they’ve done previously.
You can’t tell this is a Splash Damage game because, well, everything.
]]>After a mysterious announcement of Brink last week, we tracked down Splash Damage at E3 to see the game running.
With over a billion matches played over six years in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, London-based developers Splash Damage feel pretty cocksure of their multiplayer prowess. What makes Brink so interesting is that rather than simply repeating a tried and tested formula, once again they're attempting something new. Brink is... well, this will take some explaining.
]]>Splash Damage's new game, being developed in conjunction with Bethesda, is called Brink. It's a game of future war. The teaser trailer below offers very little in the way of additional clues about the title. Eyes, it seems, will feature in the game. And you can bet it's a multiplayer FPS (because we know it is). It's scheduled for Spring 2010. That's all eye got. (Sorry.) Perhaps you guys can speculate the game into existence, below. Oh, and the official site is here, although it doesn't contain much more than the video, yet.
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