Brink

[jakonovski]

Two hours in, I'm liking this game a lot. It's very pleasant to play, and I'm really digging the cutscenes too. I'm playing the campaign solo for now, because there's definitely a bit of a learning curve for every map. If I start a public campaign game, does it mean that both sides are humans or that it's just a coop versus bots?

[Mrbloodworth]

Both.

[jakonovski]

Thanks, gonna try it now.

edit: holy shit that was awesome. Even though 50 bucks is an awful lot, it's worth it to do the campaign missions in multiplayer. I loved the cutscened mp mode in KZ3 as well, but there they played second fiddle to the ridiculous campaign. There's so much potential here.

edit2: one huge annoyance though -- alt tabbing crashes the game. I reflexively alt tab all the time.

[01101010]

You fuckers are making it really hard to ignore this game 

I am not opening this thread anymore for fear I may do something irrational.

[jakonovski]

TotalBiscuit has a video up on Brink, for those who wish to live vicariously: http://www.youtube.com/user/TotalHalibut#p/c/2272A4EE84269E1F/0/B9zDpaQPoEI

[Malakili]

TotalBiscuit has a video up on Brink, for those who wish to live vicariously: http://www.youtube.com/user/TotalHalibut#p/c/2272A4EE84269E1F/0/B9zDpaQPoEI

I had this one while working this morning just to hear what he had to say and it felt like a pretty fair appraisal, for anyone that is still on the fence about it might help add some clarity.  It is an hour long though, I didn't watch the entire thing.

Edit: He sort of summarizes his experience around the 50 minute mark if you want to skip to the end.

[Mrbloodworth]

He was confused about a few things, but I think thats just oversight on his part. Like, he said guns are all spread, but he had the drum canister and a bunch of other crap on his gun mods that make accuracy tank out. All mods are give and take adjustments, of course.

[Mrbloodworth]

lol.

[Malakili]

lol.

Cute.  Too bad this game has to be in competition with COD though, doesn't seem very similar to me.

[Tarami]

He was confused about a few things, but I think thats just oversight on his part. Like, he said guns are all spread, but he had the drum canister and a bunch of other crap on his gun mods that make accuracy tank out. All mods are give and take adjustments, of course.

Question, is it true spread (i.e. the deviation is due to the kick of the gun) or random bullshit spread (i.e. Counter-strike where the kick and the deviation aren't directly correlated?)

One of the best things about CoD is that the guns are always pin-point accurate.

[kildorn]

Explain a bit more. Your first shot is usually dead accurate, and burst firing is pretty accurate in Brink.

What the game DOES have is a somewhat unexplained Range statistic, and firing outside your range results in hilariously low damage. So pistol sniping will HIT, it just doesn't do more than a half a percent of damage.

[jakonovski]

Is it just me or does the MG spit out way fewer bullets than the sound effect would imply?

[kildorn]

The heavy's MG, or the MG nests?

The nests seem to be terrible. Can't hit shit, and don't do shit for damage.

Reminds me of the turrets, which seem to do low damage and only detect targets that stand in front of them for over 10 seconds.

[Tarami]

Explain a bit more. Your first shot is usually dead accurate, and burst firing is pretty accurate in Brink.

What the game DOES have is a somewhat unexplained Range statistic, and firing outside your range results in hilariously low damage. So pistol sniping will HIT, it just doesn't do more than a half a percent of damage.

Right, the CoD weapon model:

ALL guns will ALWAYS hit in the dead centre of the screen when aiming down sights. What makes you miss is recoil/kick, by means of jerking your screen around. If your gun kicks right, you can theoretically compensate by pulling left. Many guns kick more in one direction (often right, as the bolt is heavier on that side due to the handle) which means you'll get a over-time kick of up and right. It adds a level of depth to guns, as you become accustomed to compensating for a certain gun's kick. Pistols and revolvers have massive kick up, for example, which makes them very different from rifles (which have less and more regular kick.)

That range statistic you mention is in CoD, too - every gun has a statistic that tells its effective range - beyond that point, it will decrease in damage. Assault rifles, for example, often do 35 points of damage up to 40m or so and then decrease to 25 per shot. SMGs do similar damage, but have shorter range, which is why they're inefficient at range.

Counter-strike does it the old-fashioned way - it simply adds a random angle to every shot fired, where the angle interval depends on the gun (maybe sustain, too, not sure.)

The trusty Den Kirson can tell you more about how it works in Brink, by the way:

http://denkirson.xanga.com/738334226/brink/


The thing is, the CoD model is pretty much superior to everything else. It's absolutely fair to everyone - you aim at people, you hit.

[kildorn]

Enh. I don't really figure it's more fair for all guns to be dead accurate all the time. A character moving on a screen is a far shot from a person moving around. So while a realistic "gun barrel goes X" model makes sense, it makes just as much sense as "you are in a firefight sprinting and firing. You are NOT dead accurate" does to me.

Brink's guns are really freaking accurate if you burst fire, and don't take more than 5-6 rounds to drop someone in general. But that's usually missing how brink is played: staring down your sights at something just doesn't happen in this game. If you stop moving, you're dead. Most of the gunplay in my experience is from the hip burst firing. I actually saw someone trying to play a sniper and it struck me that said person was going to walk away from that match thinking this is a TERRIBLE game.

[jakonovski]

Very laggy today for some reason, couldn't really use molotovs (more like lag-otovs) because I'd end up burning half my team. Also, I'm extremely annoyed at people voting for Terminal when it's the one map where the game loses all sounds.

edit: and now it started to crash every time I enter a server. Fuck video games, I'm watching X Files.

[Malakili]

Haven't had crashing problems.  The no sound issue is annoying though.  I've been playing this shit out of this since I bought it and only liking it MORE the more I play it.
I think any technical problems will get sorted out in due time and none of them are total show stoppers for me.  Played some with Bloodworth earlier, definitely a good game to play with people.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yeah I hit a few lag spikes last night myself, not huge though, also, first time I experienced the "no sound" bug on the plane map, seems its a common issue. Got Malakili on my vent, was good to talk. But id love to form a strong 4 man team with others as well. We did the best when we moved together.

[Furiously]

The gameplay sounds interesting. It needs womens.

[jakonovski]

Ho ho ho, everything works again today (except sounds in Terminal). I think I have found my calling as a soldier using a grenade launcher. It's just so much fun to spam your noobtube in the enemy's general direction and then just resupply yourself. I'm also trying to max out my supply skills, the idea being to make a build that makes it possible to spam GL nades and resupply other people's ammo too. There's not too many kills in it, and next to no exp for some reason, but it's fun.

[Malakili]

Ho ho ho, everything works again today (except sounds in Terminal). I think I have found my calling as a soldier using a grenade launcher. It's just so much fun to spam your noobtube in the enemy's general direction and then just resupply yourself. I'm also trying to max out my supply skills, the idea being to make a build that makes it possible to spam GL nades and resupply other people's ammo too. There's not too many kills in it, and next to no exp for some reason, but it's fun.

You, by and large, get way more points for helping team mates than for the things that normally boost your score.  If you just ran around resupplying people, you'd gain tons of points.  Also, grenades don't kill especially well in this game, they do cause knockdown though, which can be really useful when assaulting a position because its a bit disorienting.  Speaking of which, this game does knockdown/knockback better than any other shooter I've seen so far.

[jakonovski]

BTW, if you guys wanna skip the startup videos, put this in your launch options:

+set com_bootLogo 0

[Malakili]

Speaking of config options, this tool was just released, seems pretty good: http://www.reddit.com/r/brink/comments/hdv8p/official_config_tool_of_rbrink_release_brinkkit/

[Surlyboi]

The gameplay sounds interesting. It needs womens.

They couldn't spare the development cycles for making boobies. It all had to go to shitty tattoos and long chins.

[jakonovski]

I have discovered the secret of some people getting insane xp: they're just farming to get to level 20 asap. Kind of dumb, but oh well. Also, the soldier gets xp based on how much ammo he gives someone. So from an xp perspective it's no good resupplying anyone who isn't almost dry.

I'm way too tired to play any more tonight, but the weekend shall be spent learning how to use a gatling gun.

[Malakili]

The gameplay sounds interesting. It needs womens.

They couldn't spare the development cycles for making boobies. It all had to go to shitty tattoos and long chins.

I don't know if you are being funny or not, but thats actually more or less the exact reason they gave 


Playing this game is interesting right now.  Most of the people playing seem to understand the objective based gameplay at this point, and in this case the small map pool is actually good for the game at the moment in a sense.   Every once in a while though you get on a team where no one on the team wants to be the class you actually need to complete the objective and it drives me crazy when I'm the only one who switches.   Still, over all its a minor frustration.  Very fun throw back.  It might be that its just not destined to do well on the consoles tech problems or not, but I can see this game having a dedicated PC community for quite a long time.

[Malakili]

Livestreaming some of this now if anyone is interested

http://www.livestream.com/newslang

[Strazos]

Gah, higher rez, please.

[Malakili]

Gah, higher rez, please.

I'll see if I can turn it up next time.

[Surlyboi]

The gameplay sounds interesting. It needs womens.

They couldn't spare the development cycles for making boobies. It all had to go to shitty tattoos and long chins.

I don't know if you are being funny or not, but thats actually more or less the exact reason they gave 

Nope, being totally serial. I saw that, knew the missus wouldn't play for just that reason and pretty much wrote the game off. I love the concept, hate the execution.

[Malakili]

I love the concept, hate the execution.

The execution is even pretty decent.  At this point the anemic community is the worst problem as near as I can tell.  Its difficult for me to find populated servers with reasonable pings even during primetime, and a lot of servers are filled with bots.  I'm still playing regularly but I'm honestly a little disenchanted with having to search for 10 minutes to find a server that is suitable to play on.  Its a shame too, because its a good team based shooter.

[jakonovski]

The execution is even pretty decent.  At this point the anemic community is the worst problem as near as I can tell.  Its difficult for me to find populated servers with reasonable pings even during primetime, and a lot of servers are filled with bots.  I'm still playing regularly but I'm honestly a little disenchanted with having to search for 10 minutes to find a server that is suitable to play on.  Its a shame too, because its a good team based shooter.

Must be an US thing, there's plenty of EU servers still. Have you tried the Rock Paper Shotgun US server?

[Malakili]

The execution is even pretty decent.  At this point the anemic community is the worst problem as near as I can tell.  Its difficult for me to find populated servers with reasonable pings even during primetime, and a lot of servers are filled with bots.  I'm still playing regularly but I'm honestly a little disenchanted with having to search for 10 minutes to find a server that is suitable to play on.  Its a shame too, because its a good team based shooter.

Must be an US thing, there's plenty of EU servers still. Have you tried the Rock Paper Shotgun US server?

Yeah, I think it is a US thing, I see lots of full servers, but they are mostly EU and I don't like to play shooters with 150-200ms ping.  

Also, its not that there are absolutely zero, but it usually will take me a bunch of attempts to find one that pings well and isn't full of bots.  I'm not giving up quite yet though, so we'll see if they patch coming out this week that is supposed to make the server browser better solves any of my problems.
Speaking of which, the new patch is out:

General:

Fixed sound dropping out when playing networked games
Improved graphical performance, especially when using Ambient Occlusion
Fixed voice packs being reset to default when you delete another character
Removed ability to use certain cheat protected commands in challenges
Fixed memory leak/crash when alt-tabbed out
User Interface:

Full servers are no longer filtered out of the browser
Added support for entering a range of numbers (i.e. 10-12) in server filters
Reduced font size in the server browser
Exiting Head customization returns to the correct menu
Fixed being unable to bind KP_Enter in the UI
Increased font size of in-game text chat
'Enter' now closes text chat prompt if empty
Fixed challenge in menu flashing even after completion
Dedicated Servers:

Improved dedicated server CPU performance
Fixed NPC not spawning for escort objectives online on servers using unsupported cvars

I'm still having sound cut out on Refuel, but the server browser is definitely a bit more functional, was able to get into some games easier.

[Azazel]

lol.

Good luck with that.

[Malakili]

Just had an awesome round on Shipyard.  I was on defense and we kept frantically building the barricades and  they kept blowing them just as quickly.   Very back and forth match, could've gone either way and we BARELY held out until the timer ran out.  Both sides had good class balance and were making use of all the map's many pathways.  Really showcased the best parts of this game.  I do wish every one of them was that good though.

On a side note, really enjoying pistol wielding light body type.