1. There is no "KDR" in "TEAM"
The Kill-to-Death Ratio has become a blight on multiplayer shooters. Tracking it institutionalizes selfishness, inviting players to maximize personal stats while being mostly useless. The few games that have avoided this innanity (i.e.: L4D1 &; 2) have made "killing the bad guys" a compenent of teamwork, rather than a separate goal unto itself.
Brink will be the third MP shooter of this generation to buck the KDR-whoring trend. The game's leaderboards will not track run-of-the-mill murder. Players will get experience points for solo kills, but that XP reward will be tiny compared to the outlay for more team-oriented actions. For example, while a player may earn around 25 XP for a kill, the same player might grab ten times that number for blowing up a door that's blocking a sneaky access point into the next zone. The XP reward for a kill will be multiplied in some circumstances – as in the case of dropping an enemy near a core objective – but capping objectives, setting up defenses, and healing teammates are all higher-value endeavors.
2. Nonetheless, combat is king
While a player so inclined can operate effectively without ever firing a shot, the warfighters in the game will have have the tools to wreak havok. Objectives need to be assaulted and defended, and Splash Damage wants the resulting mayhem to be art in motion. Edward Stern, Brink's lead writer, had this to say about the combat:
We're trying to get rid of no-skill kills. No air strikes. No grenade spam, all the grenades are on a cooldown. Also, grenades are assist weapons, not kill weapons. They knock you down and make you vulnerable but they don't do that much damage.(Note: grenades will explode when shot, and none of the trailers have shown high-velocity launchers. It's possible that there's no TUNA – i.e.: Totally Unavoidable Noob Artillery – in this game.)
All weapons are theoretically available to all classes, but in addition to selecting your class, you'll also be selecting your body type (light, medium, or heavy) once you've gained enough XP. Heavies will have more health, and will be able to wield the biggest weapons, but they'll be slower and less nimble. The lightweights will navigate to cover and through flanking routes more quickly, and will get the full effect of the SMART movement system. If it all works out, players will have to adjust their combat tactics on the fly, and no one will have an inherent advantage just because he has more gear unlocked.
3. Shaving the Wookies
In addition to marginalizing kill-counts, Splash Damage has devised other ways diminish the returns on the point-and-click adventure game tactics that snipers love so much. Although there will be high-damage rifles that can be fitted with scopes, the developers say they've been careful not to create any superweapons. Nothing will drop a medium or heavy player with a single body shot, and light bodies will be tough to hit if they're doing it right.
Splash Damage wants to create more "intimate" combat experiences, and that means keeping your crosshair on-target for more than half a second, while both you and your opponent are moving. There's no word yet on whether headshots are insta-kills with some weapons, but with a game that's 8v8 max, and that allows sneaky flankers to vault over barriers that would be impassible in other games, there shouldn't be many opportunities to wait around for a certain subset of enemies to funnel into scope.
4. Melee is not > bullets
Brink has a knife attack, but the knife can only be equipped offhand when you're using a pistol. For all other weapons, the melee attack comes from the butt of the gun. Slashing, stabbing, and bashing will only insta-kill a lightweight character with no health buff equipped. Everyone else has to be softened up first.
That's what melee should be: an attack of last resort when things get truly hairy, or a finishing move to amplify the humiliation when you've already won the fight.
5. MP within the campaign
Brink is always 8v8, whether you have one human player or 16. You can solo offline with 15 bots in the mix. Online, you can co-op with up to seven friends against an all-bot team, or play against real, human players. No matter how you do it, the story arc advances as you play.
The game actually offers two campaigns: one for each faction. As either the Security forces or members of the Resistance, playing a round has implications in the larger narrative – a script without scripting – and that's something that few multiplayer games have done outside the MMO space. Given that Brink wants to make its bones as a shooter, we might finally have a game that evolves the genre past the desperately tired formula in which SP, MP, and co-op are all discrete units.
Brink's goal is to bridge those (artificial) gaps, allowing player vs. player combat to occur in a context that's deeper than "Americans vs. [insert name here]." Borderlands and Left 4 Dead did that to a degree, but their respective plots were rather thin. Hopefully, Brink will go whole-hog in characterizing the factions beyond just Red vs. Blue. The broader and deeper the story, the better. None of us need much motivation to shoot people in the face, but having more and different motivations to shoot people in the face could elevate this game.
EDIT: Brink's system specs are here.
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