Brink - What Happened?

[Music] hello everyone it's me Matthew and welcome to what happened all you drink fans yeah it's your time to shine it's finally time to hoist this kind of well-known FPS on our stage of shame or we'll be uncovering the dramatic shifts and development that befell this multiplayer single-player hybrid the engine problems the studio faced and the unforeseen acts of god or Bethesda that destroyed any chance of the game reaching its full potential oh hey none of those things really happened yeah the tale of brink doesn't have nearly the dramatics sudden swears or awful decisions as a lot of games we've covered in the past but whose only real sin was having sky-high expectations and an insurmountable amount of hype that couldn't possibly be delivered upon so we'll need to travel back to our favorite time period in the video game industry the one with the most studio closures dramatically raised budgets and razor-thin profit margins this is 2007 and the HD era of gaming was kicking off or kicking down whatever Splash Damage is a london-based developer that have a particular set of skills and that was making multiplayer suites for already existing projects we're talking with turn a Castle Wolfenstein then Wolfenstein enemy territory and finally doom 3 so yeah they were obviously in software Stan's something they didn't try to hide very much at all now the thing about all these multiplayer modes is that they were all fantastic and basically kicked off the then newish practice of farming out your multiplayer mode to another developer freeing up the original studio to focus on the campaign an example being gray matter for Return to Castle Wolfenstein but it was with 2007 enemy territory quake Wars flash damages first standalone release where they really started to turn despite the quick franchises wavering popularity with quake 4 quake wars garnered fantastic reviews and even some awards which was the poke in the bum for Bethesda to tap them for their first wholly original big-budget game in fact in 2008 both companies announced what was quoted as being a long-term partnership with brink being formally unveiled twelve months later Pete Hines the shredder - Todd Howard's kraang was interviewed in the Bethesda Technodrome about how this deal came about you can look at what Splash Damage is doing and say oh my god I think they can pull it off we should be talking to them and working with them on this and we are if I didn't already write the script and know what was coming up here is where I'd say in the formal announcement brink was pegged as a spring 2010 release of a Bethesda fast becoming one of the biggest new third-party publishers with your fall outs and your Elder Scrolls is--is combined with splash damages pedigree it was already being positioned as the next big FPS it focused on the conflict between two warring factions and a third more mysterious one that was never really expanded upon with its mandate being to blur the line between online and offline play which at this point would call of duty and its many many many imitators flooding the multiplayer space was shooting for something different that people would hopefully take notice of along with all this building hype Splash Damage also made it an important hire one Richard Hamm that some people might remember from our award-winning bubsy 3d episode I'm still proud of bubsy 3d at the time the young kids in their 20s writing reviews from magazines didn't have any idea what it took to make games to them their responses were justified to us it was [ __ ] and bubsy deserved better today things are even more cutthroat so personally I'm out I'm done with that [ __ ] so yeah that quote was given after Richard hams creative director duties on brink were done and yes he was a lead on bubsy 3d but he filled a similar role in this Syphon Filter Games Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and just prior to brink had a prominent role on fable 2 so you know is that his curmudgeon Yunus was probably due to some of the lukewarm reviews that brink posted at launch which were probably made more potent by not one but several delays the game suffered the first being from that initial spring of 2010 to the following autumn that's a product that we believe is a genre breaker it's a real killer app from a quality perspective we're pitching that along the same lines as fallout 3 which is how Bethesda's european marketing director decided to frame it now while he clearly just says quality brink is a very very different beast from fallout 3 even if you're just trying to compare their theoretical Metacritic says possess de likes to do so up to that point the house that todd built were almost exclusively putting out big story driven games which gave the impression to some that brink would follow suit also hey hey marketing directors please don't use the terms killer app unless you're drawn and certainly don't [ __ ] say shite like genre breaker anyway later that same balmy summer of 2010 where it came down that the game would then slip to 2011 with no real reasoning coming from either Bethesda or Splash Damage other than just simply confirming it this would now place brink 12 months after its initial target release date further increasing the anticipation which would surely be worth the wait now because of the tone I just used in that sentence yeah that wasn't exactly true brink had several issues at launch which isn't a surprise given all the new things it was attempting but nonetheless reviewers noticed them Paul Wedgwood splash damages former CEO and Founder humbly explains where he believes they faltered it was our first console game there are a lot of things to take on reported in tech for two PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 which it didn't exist on at all with some help from it of course so we just bit off too much really we didn't test it thoroughly enough before the release and there were three fundamental problems it had some issues with lag on day 1 of the release then there are texture loading problems and finally some AI problems as well they were all sitting there in a day one patch but we just couldn't get people to review it after the initial release if we could delete those first seven or eight reviews we'd be at 90 or something but it was too late so lesson learned yes upon release brink did get some fairly average reviews from well-known publications citing the problems above what's more is at the game from a narrative character and storyline perspective was not exactly what some fans wanted especially when coming from Bethesda it didn't really put the characters front and center like you know Bethesda's Rogue Warrior did what took you [ __ ] so long it also didn't really push the story into the spotlight but focused on the moment-to-moment gameplay with narrative crumbs sprinkled throughout via dialog rather than a glut of cutscenes nowadays people are more accustomed to that style with things like say destiny or overwatch in 2011 it was jarring and made the game feel a bit lighter was some feeling that it had a smaller scope because of it lead designer on Frank Neal Alfonso also gave his two cents on the games reaction and legacy people reacted differently to the way we approached our narrative some would say there's no story to speak of which I would beg to differ with but some loved the setting and the context we'd given the action there's a lot there for people to read into but we didn't spoon feed it to people which is maybe what some fans were looking for when the game is viewed as a highly contextualized multiplayer experience it does really well but if you view it as a single-player cinematic experience yeah it doesn't really hold up one of the other aspects that didn't really hold up was Brinks reliance on in-game dialogue to drive the narrative which is a problem concerning the many many lines that got repeated to off this now when you're playing an isolated multiplayer mode in a game with a separate campaign you might hear the same few lines of dialogue here and there things like I need help man down Frankham and etc but in brink well you'd hear those the entire game Brinks lead writer and stern explains do not leave writing to the actors write out all the alternate lines no matter how stupid you feel I felt really dumb writing a script that said medic medic need a Medicare need a matter really do need a medic medic here now I need I just really felt stupid doing that so I thought we'd write some basic ones down and then get the actors to do their own variations that was an absolute mistake Stern also revealed that when they needed to start inserting said lines into the game Splash Damage were scrambling to finish and there weren't enough coders and testers to make sure all that repetitive dialogue wasn't too repetitive in the end though he laments that the issue came down to him ultimately that's my fault that's nothing on the coding I should have written more varied lines the core game itself was a whole different story while some felt it was exciting and a breath of fresh air Brinks gameplay loop could have used more polish and focus testing about what worked and what needed more work Paul Wedgwood again breaks it down bring tried to be something new and different in several areas and in hindsight we perhaps strayed away from convention a bit too much in some areas now since you were always team with AI bots in single player when objectives would dynamically appear the bots would make their own decisions as the player cannot control them directly or indirectly this was necessary to get the bots to use the levels properly adjusting them dynamically created a rhythm that matched the multiplayer in a single-player game but it kind of makes the AI seemed stupid sometimes because they won't just go for the objective as much as they can at the very beginning the way the game worked at some times meant the player could play poorly and win like literally at some points they could sit in the spawn area and their team would go on and in or you could kick absolute ass and still lose [Music] the thing is even with all these problems brink really didn't capture gamers imaginations through the characters or the narrative something most hero based products do nowadays conversely there was never much to do in the game once you hit the level cap and there was only one significant DLC pack ever released agents of change but it released the same year as launch now despite this drying up of support with many players dropping brink within months or even weeks it was still a success for Bethesda and Splash Damage even if it wasn't enough to spur a sequel Paul wedgeworth commented on this I was walking out on stage and signing autographs for thousands of people at a time it was a crazy time the weirdest weirdest experience but it's [ __ ] it's not you that's made the game it's the team that's made the game and it's the team that's responsible for the success of it and brink was a commercial success it sold 2.5 million units it generated over a hundred million dollars at retail it was our fifth sequential number one which wasn't bad but it wasn't a critical success we really missed the mark with the initial release and that frustrated us a lot therefore after bring Splash Damage immediately went back to providing multiplayer modes for other titles such as Batman Arkham origins which I didn't even know how to multiplayer mode until I just said it they then followed up with dirty bomb another multiplayer focus FPS which was initially published by Nexon in 2015 but much like brink it failed to make any sort of impact the 2019 player base about where you'd expect it Nexon eventually through the dirty bomb rights back at Splash Damage but not before they were then wholly purchased by lay you the same Chinese company that owns Digital Extremes in 2016 along the way Splash has contributed to the multiplayer modes of both Gears 4 and 5 and are currently plugging away at Gears tactics which I also just remembered is a product you may or may not be able to buy at some point in the future going back one final time to brink almost seven years after its release Bethesda announced it was going free-to-play this is like finding out that I don't know gladiator sword of vengeance got an HD remaster on Steam which it did so yes Bethesda announcing for some reason that a 7 year old game has no microtransactions is now free so they can't even make money on it who are you what are you talking about that stuff I mean the original DLC packs still cost some money yeah but this is just it's something it occurred I guess in summation much like games that we've covered before such as Kingdoms of Amalur or LA noire there's no real fan backlash to bring it didn't receive terrible reviews and sold well and outside some aspects that needed more polish and maybe trying things that were a bit too ahead of their time the game had no real debilitating problems or scandals and like stated before Splash Damage is still alive and well which is a nice change of pace for this show because it's really rare that a developer that work with Bethesda was able to pull themselves back from the brink of closure if you want to throw another stinky suggestion into our squared circle let me know in the comments below or parkour your way to the flop house via P patreon to officially vote on our next subject see you next time and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 532,980

Rating: 4.931488 out of 5

Keywords: Brink, FPS, Bethesda, iD software, Wha Happun, What Happened?, Video Game Documentaries, Video Game Disasters, What Went Wrong?, Matt McMuscles, Splash Damage, Dirty Bomb

Id: NX-vkrrUHok

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Bluenosedcoop]

Their tech didn't match up to the ambition of the project, What they had planned was so far ahead of it's time but the actual game itself is one of the most buggy and laggy games i have ever played on launch, Very few games i ever regretted buying and Brink was one of them, Such wasted potential.

[u/shoryurepppa]

One of the worst parts of this game was how single player just felt like a MP match with bots. So disappointing

[u/Hippocrap]

I loved Brink, when it worked it was a really fun game. It's a shame that at launch the servers were completely fucked and by the time they fixed them people had given up on the game.

[u/WonderfulResult]

If ever a game needed a sequel to work out some of the kinks it was this. Lots of potential and I still enjoyed it despite the faults.

[u/zspartancats]

The best part about Brink was getting a cool looking hat for Team Fortress 2. It was the center piece for the try hard sniper.

[u/Warskull]

Brink was bad on so many levels that no one really captures what a complete and total failure this game was.

The game was rushed out incomplete with zero QA. The server browser didn't work. There was a map that upon loading would break the games audio completely, it would just cut out and not come back until the next map.

The maps were bad. Bad maps kills an online multiplayer shooter. It is the classic Splash Damage design of multiple objectives you push through, similar to Dirty Bomb if you played it. Except in this game the defense spawn would literally be right next to the objective, they would have incredibly short respawn times, and the offense team would have to run across a huge chunk of the map to get there. Most of the maps always went one way when pubbing.

The had the whole "body type" system. Playing a big guy and want to swap to a light guy to use some of the alternate paths? You couldn't. You had to literally leave the game and swap characters and attempt to rejoin. You had to quit the game to do the equivalent of swapping form Heavy to Scout in TF2.

Then the balance was atrocious, one guy vastly outperformed all the others.

Then the single player was litterally a bot match, except you had to do all the objectives. Oh and it was nearly impossible since your bots never touched the objectives. They intentionally programmed your bots to be useless because they wanted the player to feel like they were the hero. A number of the maps were downright impossible on easy because you had to kill all 8 enemy bots and try to complete the objective (which left you defenseless) before they respawned and got back. Remember what I mentioned about the defense spawning right next to the objective with criminally short respawn timers. Good luck.

All this for a full $60 game.

So the game was unplayable garbage at launch. Even if it had zero technical issues it was still a bad game. The game has a metacritic score around the high 60s. This is one of those few games that deserves to be in the 20s. It was that bad. I've played shovelware better than Brink. Literally every aspect of the game was bad.

[u/TheMagistre]

Whenever this game comes up, I feel like people completely forget the fact that this game came out during PSN outage of 2011. It definitely wasn’t the entire reason why this game failed, but I definitely feel like it had an effect and killed some of the initial hype momentum that the game had.

Edit: Y’all, I’m not saying that PSN is the sole reason the game failed. I clearly said it played a part though

[u/ovalcircle1]

The biggest gripe I have with the game is the absolutely garbage teammate AI. They were intentionally designed to not go for the objective so "the player would feel like a hero". BULLSHIT! More like "break your back to carry the team." Meanwhile the Enemy bots aggressively complete the objectives.

The comparison I can make is to Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. There, the bots actually complete objectives. You even have an option for them not to complete objectives.

[u/teabagginz]

I see a lot of people making excuses but I played that game at launch with little to no issues and the game was incredibly mediocre at best. Sound was the part of the game that sucked the most as every gunshot and explosion sounding like the poppers that kids throw on the ground. Also weird stuff like in order to beat the trials you had to do them right away because the enemies scaled and became impossible to deal with them and the time constraints (I had to wipe my save just to complete).