A different kind of multiplayer?

Maybe.

Splash Damage and Bethesda revealed Brink last week, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun has some insight:

Your team of eight, whether all human, some human, or just you and the machines, has tasks to complete. Many, many tasks. And many each. These aren’t objectives everyone works together on - instead you pull up the Objective Wheel (OW, because it’s funny in capital letters) to see what needs doing. Perhaps an enemy needs interrogating, or an engineer is needed to perform some specific tasks, or a robot needs escorting. Pick one, it becomes your task, the floaty compass pointing you toward it, and it may well effect the tasks available to everyone else on your team. Perhaps they’ll now have options to help back you up.

Part of this means being able to change class at any time you can find a terminal. Become a soldier and you’ll be tasked with blasting through enemies. Switch to engineer and you’ll have jobs like laying down turrets or fixing cranes. Find that the bot escort mission you were on isn’t making good progress? Switch out to another challenge and perhaps help clear the way. In order to pick things from the OW you’ll need to spend XP, which is earned by completing tasks and shooting the enemy. XP is also spent on new weapons and customisations for your character, which are persistent changes in the game world.

If you’re muddled about any of that, then frankly so are we. Quite getting to grips with how eight people choosing different objectives but working together is going to work we can’t know without playing it. But Splash Damage say they spend all day every day playing the multiplayer, and are confident they’re tweaking it to perfection.

Online multiplayer games can start to feel pretty formulaic after a while, even with the surge of co-op stuff we've been seeing lately. I'd very much like to see some kind of quantum leap forward before I die, by which I mean a broad and deep departure from the standard online FPS feature set.

Maybe Brink will do that. Hell if I know.

And yes, I did say online F-P-S. I still refuse to cavort with the glorified garden gnomes in WoW.