British game development studio Splash Damage is well known for their multiplayer first person shooter games such as the popular Enemy Territory series. They partnered with Bethesda to bring us BRINK - a new innovative, revolutionary first person shooter set in the not so distant future. UGDB.com sat down with senior game designer Edward “BongoBoy” Stern to tell us why we should be hyped about this game, and why should we expect not only one of the best games in 2010, but more like the next phenomenon among the team-based FPS games.



UGDB.com: You guys are now known as masters of the team-based PC FPS games. But it seems that with BRINK you are trying to reach a much higher level of accessibility and innovation. Is this the case?

Edward Stern: We previously worked on PC FPS games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. So, we know how to make such team based, class-objective games, where only certain classes can plant explosives, and certain classes can defuse explosives, for example. We have a lot of affection on this type of genre, because we know that the most fun you can get playing a game is a part of the cooperative team. The most fun we had with a game was playing online first person shooters, but also the worst time playing a game was playing online first person shooters, too. So, the challenge really was to take everything that was good, prevent or remove everything what was frustrating, because for the console players - they tried it and it was not a positive experience – it was just too fast, or people are just screaming about this and that, etc. So, yes, we are trying to make a very, very accessible game, which still has all the depth and the tactical excitement.



UGDB: For most of the players the story in a FPS game is nothing more than inconsiderable option, but we already know that you guys have prepared a good back-story for your new game. So, what is going on in BRINK?

ES: Yes, we realized long ago that for most players the narrative is just optional. Well, some players really are enjoying the back-story, the story of their teams, the environment and so on. But most of the people are just enjoying blowing stuff up, and the shooter games are primary about running and shooting things. We really wanted to be able to import every possible exciting social tension and thematic conflict. War games have this problem with the setting, where the player has been put tens of times into prisons, space stations, at the World War battlefield, etc. And we loved the idea to put the player in an artificial floating island named The Ark, which is the pinnacle of science and engineering. The Ark is a prototype of a perfect city and build to demonstrate technologies like wind farms, solar farms and these so called green developing technologies. All this stuff is going on in real world, and there is only one thing that this experimental community needed to invent – a new building material. The main problem with concrete for example, is that it gives carbon dioxide emissions into atmosphere. So, they came up with a genetically modified coral, called ark coral (which is why The Ark has this gleaming white color), and with the help of this new material, this new technology, they are getting all the money needed to build the perfect city.

The player starts in the year 2045. The experimental community is continuing to explore all sustainable technologies, but they have lost contact with the outside world already. They are running out of everything, they have a rising social tensions and this is why the main conflict has started out.



UGDB: OK, so what exactly is BRINK and why we should be hyped about this game?

ES: So, obviously BRINK is what we are doing right now. We really tried to remove the traditional differences between singleplayer and multiplayer – there is just one form of the game, which is this team-objective mode, because we think that all other things are part of that. We love deathmatch, we love team-deathmatch, we love capture the flag, steeling of documents and king of the hill… But all of these are all parts of the objective mode, and this gives the map a very strong story; because you have these liner objectives one team is trying to achieve certain thing. In BRINK, you create a character, and you can play that character with either the Resistance or the Security. When the people are thinking of singleplayer, they are actually thinking about story mode, but everything is in narrative mode, and it doesn’t matter how many human or AI players are connected at any point. So, for instance, you have bought the game, you started playing it on your own - just against the computer. But I’ve bought the game too, I’m in your friends list, I see that you are online, and I’m joining to your game. So, suddenly it’s a co-op game, but nothing has changed, I’ve just replaced one of the AI players – if I drop out, an AI player will take my place immediately. So, there is no difference between the singleplayer game, the co-op game, and the competitive game anymore – it is exactly the same game.

UGDB: This seems to be so simple and effective and yet it hasn’t been done before… Why is that?

ES: The reason it hasn’t been done before is that it’s very difficult to get the same graphical quality when you are sending all the information over the network, and of course on consoles that’s just peer-to-peer, there is no server to work for. So, we had to solve a lot of technological problems of how not to sacrifice any graphical detail, even though players could be AI controlled from within the same machine you are playing on or real people that are playing from their machine that is situated in another continent.



UGDB: This sounds great! It seems that you’ve been working on the project for a long time now?

ES: We’ve been in full production for about a year, and we’ve done a lot of pre-production as well, because for start, we were only a PC developer, we had to expand and get a lot of new experts – lead programmer, who did work on Heavenly Sword; art director, who worked on Prince of Persia and Rainbow Six: Vegas; lead character artist, who did the main character for Mass Effect. So, we needed those experts, because we wanted to develop BRINK for consoles and to bring it simultaneously on the three platforms [PC, PS3 and Xbox 360]. And this is a lot of additional work just to begin with, but so far is going really well and smooth.

UGDB: What were the biggest challenges that the development team faced during development?

ES: When you are developing a game, there are always certain challenges… Xbox 360 is very similar to PC in terms of architecture, and there are some unique challenges involved with the PS3… But I can point easily the graphic engine, for example. It is hard to believe, but we are using the same engine that was used for our last game [Enemy Territory: Quake Wars], and this is idTech4. But, as you can see from the level of detail in BRINK, we have rewritten every part of it – it is very flexible, very strong system. In Quake Wars we introduced a new technology, called MegaTexture (a texture allocation technique facilitating the use of a single extremely large texture rather than repeating multiple smaller textures) that helped us make vast, enormous and most importantly unique terrains. This time we are using a more advanced technique [with not so sexy name] – Sparse Virtual Texture (this technology is also used in Doom 4 and RAGE), which basically means that we can get more than twice the resolution in terms of textures. And that’s why BRINK is looking so good…



UGDB: What is the average size of the textures you are using?

ES: Well, basically we are using a gigabyte size source textures, but on the fly we are compressing it, calculating it, and in the end, we are only using dozens of megabytes of video memory. It is very, very efficient technology.

UGDB: So, back on the subject… Your plans in terms of visuals were to make a game with a unique graphical style and not just a good looking game, right?

ES: Yes, our goal basically was - if you see any screenshots, or just a glimpse of the game, then you should immediately recognize BRINK. The environment is the best story-telling medium we have. I mean, a cut-scene, a FMV? You watch them once and then skip it. A NPC character talking to you? This is really a clumsy way to tell the story. But if you look around the environment, you can say what happened there a month ago, a year ago, tens of years ago. It is a much more satisfying way for players to pull the information, rather than us pushing the back-story. So, now we have the technology to do the environments that we want, but also to have these really complex customizable player avatars. We really wanted to get some of that passion, which the people had with the roleplaying games, the MMORPGs, where you create a guy, and that is your guy. It is not just – “Oh, I must be this class and do these things, or that class and do this thing”. No, that’s not fun anymore. You should own your guy. When you unlock a facial tattoo, a scar, or something like that, and then it doesn’t matter in which team you are playing for, he is your guy; he has those tattoos, that scar, that hair style. And that’s something that people haven’t been able to have before, because the multiplayer shooter games are simplified and there are class-types for that. And the main reason is because it’s cheaper to make a game this way. But we want a single-player level of detail throughout the entire experience.



UGDB: And to what extend can you customize your avatar in BRINK?

ES: Oh, lots, billions, billions of combinations! Well, of course most of them are cosmetic and they do not affect the gameplay, except for the body type. One of the things we wanted to fix in shooters for a long time is the movement. Let’s say that you have a wall in front of you and there is only one place to climb over it, there is an entity which the level designer has to place there to allow you to trigger the climb animation. Instead of that we scan the terrain from the player’s point of view, so that he can know if he can make this jump to climb the wall as he can do it in real life… OK, maybe we’ve added 10 percents of style for more coolness. So, we are talking here for our new technology called S.M.A.R.T. (Smooth Movement Across Randomised Terrain). But don’t make it wrong, this is not an autopilot, it is not something that will play the game for you – it just means that you don’t have to spend time to learn the interface and timing of button pressing anymore. If you want to do it, then you can do it – I prefer to time the jump myself, because I know that I can actually jump a bit further. And the thing that really affects this is the body type customization. You start off with a medium body type, which is quite mobile, quite agile, it’s got good health. You can choose to be heavy, which means that you just cannot make the high jumps, you can’t climb over things so good, but you have much more health. And you can go light - you have very little health, but you are much more agile… Well, not so agile that the heavy guy can’t shoot you. So, obviously it’s a balancing issue to make sure that all three body types are still playing the same game.

UGDB: All this sounds like, you guys had a lot of freedom and time to experiment with every new game that you were making… Tell us a bit more about the improvements you are making to the genre?

ES: We are very lucky as a developer, because we get to try new things. So, we wanted to fix movement for a long time, but we were trying to improve the audio as well. We have Chris Whitman, our Audio Director, who worked on Burnout Paradise and Black – he’s an award winning audio guy. So, the guns already sound fantastic, it is really, really good. And we are doing this, because we have to deliver as a shooter. We want to achieve in terms of bringing console gamers into… you know, getting them interested in this type of gameplay or get rid of the differences between online, or offline, singleplayer or multiplayer – it’s got to be fun to shoot the guns. So, they are in a pretty much good shape in the moment, they are really fun to play.



UGDB: OK, what can you tell us about the role-playing elements of the game?

ES: Well, this is what Splash Damage does - we are getting the basic shooter format and we are adding elements from other genres. So we had a kind of limited version of it in our previous games, where you could unlock abilities, but that was just over the course of the campaign, and in the end of the campaign they all are reset, because otherwise everyone who just did the campaign would be at the same level. The classical RPG problem is for example you are level 7, you are pretty excited, but you’re heading up some level 30 guy who can just destroy you. So, instead, we now have a persistent character development – you create a character and you start to unlocking things - some of them are cosmetic, like tattoos, clothing, cool hats, or whatever, but some of them have a gameplay effect, like the body type, which I mentioned before, and that’s a whole different way to play the game. Some unlocks are applied to all character classes, some of them are specific to just one class.

UGDB: Can you illustrate this a little bit further…?

ES: Well, let’s say that I want to be a medic. I want to be the most agile, cool medic. So, maybe you will drag that character to some specific things that can help you to be this kind of medic and not so much the soldier type of medic, for example. And we have a lot of choice here… Not as much in a MMORPG, where you have different races, different classes, abilities, etc. But certainly for a first person shooter, I think it will be more than people had ever seen before.



UGDB: We heard some details about the dynamic mission system, which is scanning the gameplay all the time. What exactly is the meaning of this and can you help us understand it better with some examples here?

ES: As I said before, we are perfectly aware of what is the best and the worst in a multiplayer shooter game – the best fun that you can have is being a part of the team, which is really cooperating and thinking tactically as one; the worst time that you can have playing is where nothing isn’t working right, no one’s cooperating and some idiot is screaming abuses. In BRINK, for example you will only hear people on your buddy list, and yes it is as simple as that, but it was not done before. Particularly for the console players, the FPS game can be a really confusing place to be… They’ve tried shooters and it is just not fun, they were killed a lot, they didn’t know what to do, or where to go… So, we have this dynamic mission system to help us that scans the gameplay all the time. Let’s use the previous example - you are a medic and one of your team mates gets down, he is not completely dead – he can decide is he just going to respawn or he’ll wait for a medic. If he decides to wait, you will get a mission that says - “Go! Revive this guy!” and if you choose that mission, and you revive him, you will get an extra experience points. And let’s just say that you are going to just farm XP – you are completely selfish and you are just doing the things that will give you the most XP – those are the missions that will help your team the most. So, the most important thing that you can do is to do the main objective, and never mind the side quests and the other minor missions to get that main objective done. But maybe there is no one in your team of the right class to do that objective, then the dynamic mission system will bribe you with XP – if you are the first person to change the class to do the objective, we will give you extra XP. But even the second player which changes his class can get an extra… the third, too, but not so much, because after all the game is 8 vs 8 and you don’t need half the team to get the job done. And even if you are completely self-interested, you can always use the “Up” button on the d-pad to see the best current objectives that can be done. And in the course of the game if you’re just pressing “Up” every 10 or 15 seconds, it’s going to change all the time. Because as the objective move, the combat changes and you will need one class to go to do this or that, the dynamic mission system will tell you what is going on, what changes are happening in the field, what it must be done as a main objective, as a side objective, etc. So, all the different classes can get a different experience from the game. As a soldier, you can plant charges; as assault class you can give ammunition and we are very keen for players to buff each other all the time – soldiers can give ammunition, engineer can buff the weapon - they can actually come up to you and improve the damage you are doing; medics can improve player’s health, not just to heal them once they are damaged, but to raise their health; and there are command posts that you can capture, and some of them can boost the health of your whole team, but the other team will know that as well, and they will come and try to steal it. So, all this emergent gameplay from these simple rules - do the main objective, support the main objective, and do the things that gives you the most XP. And from that comes the rock, paper, scissors model – “Oh, hang on… I know, that he knows that I’m about to go do that”. So, we have done a lot of play tests in the office, which showed us some terribly devious, fiendish, deceptive, deceitful behavior between the enemies. And this is great - it’s a lot of fun! We really wanted to make it so that it’s easy for players to see what’s fun about it, because in our previous game, we had a lot of complexity but it was very challenging for players to get up to speed with.



UGDB: How do you guys have come up with these ideas? How did you decided to make such a game?

ES: When I first joined the company 7 years ago, our boss said: “We can do a game based on arcology [a mix between the words “architecture” and “ecology” – architectural design principles aimed toward the design of economically self-sufficient hyperstructures]”. And we all said: “Well… OK… Really?! I guess…” After a couple of years, he said it again, and this time we started doing BRINK.

UGDB: Are there some differences between the three platform versions of BRINK?

ES: In terms of gameplay, no – it is exactly the same game. And we are not talking about similar versions – they use the same assets in all three.
In terms of control, obviously there are differences between the mouse, the keyboard and the console controller, but we have done a lot of work to create a proper aim correction, and what helps us here is once again a smart system that we created that helps us. So, in BRINK is a lot easier to track a target, but it won’t play the game for you. And it’s similar with the movement – we wanted to make sure that all players are feeling good playing the game, so we’re going to give them a little bit of assistance, but once again – this won’t play the game for you.

UGDB: What are you doing right now, where is the development process and is it everything going on schedule?

ES: We are in pre-alpha state. So, yes, there is still plenty to do, but we are aiming to ship in the beginning of 2010. And we are heading to simultaneous release for all three platforms – PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.