While at E3, we had a chance to attend a closed door demo of Brink, the upcoming class based shooter from Splash Damage Games and Bethesda Softworks, where we saw all manner of destruction, class switching shenanigans, smart mantling and quite possibly the beefiest turrets you've ever seen in a video game. Once the demo was over Todd and I had a chance to speak to Ed Stern, Senior Game Designer at Splash Damage Games and Richard Ham, Creative Director of Splash Damage Games. Both were very excited to explain what we didn't see during the demo and talk about how the class system works, how to effectively bribe players and the importance of player freedom.

GS (Brandon): With the class specific actions, I noticed that as the player switched between classes it seemed like you could take different actions against your co-op teammates...

Richard Ham: For both co-op and enemy, there's all kinds of things for combat popping up.

GS (B): So my question is, for every class is there one specific action, multiple actions or is it still being worked on?

RH: First of all, it's very much an RPG-Lite. As you're earning levels and leveling up there's a lot of new abilities you can unlock. You can choose to focus only one one class or spread out amongst all of them, but at any given point, right now at any given point, there are way too many things you that could be doing depending on what class you are, and right now we're kind of limiting it to six. We figure presenting more than six on that wheel at any given time is just too much to absorb. It's all variable based on what the enemy is doing. If you're an engineer and you're putting down landmines, that's creating new objectives for the other team to actually go find and disarm those landmines. That kind of stuff is happening all the time, for the most part based on what the players or the AI in single player is doing.

Edward Stern: But of course, the primary objective at each point, you can never do any wrong in this game. Oh, primary objective, I'll do that, oh, do I have to change class? Fine. We'll always make it easy for the player to do that.

RH: Yeah that's true. There's always that one core thing, whether it's blow up that gate or repair that crane and either you are the right class to do that so you can go there and just get to the front line, work with other engineers or whatever to do it. If you're not the right class you can either change to the right class, go to the command post as Paul (our guide through the demo) was doing, or there's actually an objective that anybody who is not the right class can do at any given time which is go stand guard at the space and basically provide support for anybody else and when you do that, which is basically what Paul was doing right at the very beginning where he couldn't blow that thing up but he was still helping out at the gate, he was earning experience just for being there and providing support for the rest of the team.

GS (B): Ok, so if I'm playing, and I've got seven other people, if I'm standing guard, I'm going to get less experience than if Todd is the one going to blow the door. So he's going to progress further. How do you balance the fact that we all can't lead, somebody's gotta be doing the grunt work. But you don't want that person to be doing so at the expense of moving forward.

ES: But you stand a much better chance of completing that objective and getting a team XP...

GS: Oh, so there's team experience?

RH: Of course.

GS (Todd): Now with the different classes, it looked like you had to go to a base station to be able to change up, when you're at a base station you can change them whenever you want, do you get better at a class if you stick with it? You can go to any class and immediately have the benefits of that class from whenever it applies?

RH: It's really up to you. You're earning a general type of experience that you can then apply to being any of the four classes or a combination of them or the class agnostic skills which are really kind of more passive things that are just kind of general abilities that no matter what you're doing, no matter what class you are you'll have these new abilities.

ES: So you're not earning engineer XP you're earning XP which you can then spend on engineering skills.

GS (T): So if you focused on engineering through the whole game, you could be better at it...

RH: Oh yeah, there's a combination of abilities that just make your base things better, as well as give you completely new abilities and new items to use.

GS (B): Is there a hit to changing, like if I decide ok, I want to change class do I take an experience hit?

ES: Not other than the opportunity cost that you could have carried on in that particular class. But we leave that to the players. They're much better investors in their XP than we are.

RH: And in fact, on the opposite side, if you have a situation where we really need a soldier, and nobody is doing that right now, there are actually experience bonuses. We'll bribe you! Are there no soldiers? Come on! If there's only one soldier, there's a certain amount, if there's two soldiers, there's less, if there's no soldiers there's the most. Once there's two of any given type on your team we basically stop giving you a bonus to switch over because, OK, two is enough to able to cover whatever it is.

ES: But generally, with all of these things, there's a sliding scale, so it's not like oh, right, you just banged that, so that's it you can have other XP or not, we're trying to make it so you're not quite as important but we'll still give you some because you did the right thing to help your team.

RH: The number one goal at all points is always ensuring everyone on the team has something to do, that they really do feel valuable and are contributing and that the rest of the team knows that through all the automated communication.

GS (B): So the demo we saw (the demo was from the viewpoint of the military force investigating reports of a resistance cell creating a dirty bomb), if he had picked to be on the resistance, he would have been on the other side of that battle?

RH: That's correct, yeah. And defending Container City from the encroachers.

GS (B): But it seemed like the story needed to move forward with them opening that container.

RH: Well that depends. We're not going too much into our story right now but I think Paul does mention it, so it's ok to talk about it.

GS (B): Well it shows the scene where they're like "Oh!"

RH: Well, basically, at the beginning of the game you choose whether you want to be a resistance member or a security member. And you go through a campaign playing on that side and seeing the entirety of the outbreak of the civil war of Ark from that point of view. So, for all intents and purposes we have two campaigns through the game. And it's really depending on what you do that kind of goes a long way towards the outcome of this first week of the civil war. And then go back and play the other side and see things from the other point of view and all of that.

ES: The game primarly is a shooter, an action shooter. It is not an interactive documentary about climate change. But, if you are interested, I mean I'm the kind of player that would just go through and read every little log and stuff, if you are interested in tracking that stuff and you followed the two different team factions, the things they get told about their objectives are like, there is no one truth. There's not like a here is the truth, this is what's going on, there's a good side and a bad side, because that just not realistic.

GS (T): History is written by the victor sort of thing.

RH: Exactly, yeah.

ES: So if anything, you do get to create what is...

RH: If you play through the game and gotten to that, the Container City level, it's about half way through both campaigns, if you're on the security side, it's very clear, it's black and white. We're going in there, there's a dirty bomb threat, they're in there, they're manufacturing these things, it's a threat to all of Ark, we have to shut this down.

ES: That's not what the resistance gets told.

RH: It's much more about, these guys they're encoaching, even we have nothing left in the world, they're still coming and stealing from us. We have to push them back into the sea. The important thing is having played through the campaign from both sides, you do actually get a clear picture of there is no black and white, it is shades of gray and, really the only way to resolve these problems is to really kind of come together and understand each other's point of view, but instead they just go the same old way of well, they're different than us, so let's go ahead and kill them.

GS (B): Is the SMART system always on? He [Paul] made it seemed like you had to press a button.

ES: It's always on all of the time. If you press the button...

GS (B): That's what I mean, that I have to press the button down.

RH: If you're not holding that button down, it plays...well actually our control scheme is pretty much Call of Duty. Call of Duty's second grenade button, we only have one type of grenade, so we've devoted that to hey, I've put myself into this enhanced mode and as soon as I let go, things go back to normal.

GS (B): And there's no penalty for using it?

ES: Oh no, not at all. I mean, some players, some form of player will just not be very ambitious in terms of jumping up and stuff because they can't aim at the same time, which is fine. We're putting a lot of work into making our maps work in such a way that if you don't want to...

RH: That's actually an important thing too. One thing Paul very briefly goes over during the character customization, I don't even think he actually changed them all, the top choice is by far the most important one. It's your body type. The model he was walking was actually the medium sized guy (during the demo we did see a collection of class and body types, think a range of sizes from Scout to Heavy in TF2), the normal guy, standard size guy. There's also the smaller, athletic one, and the larger "Hulk" guy. Making that choice is a very significant one, because it effects you in all the ways you would expect, you know, slows you down, gives you less hit points, all those varous and sundry things, but it also has a big impact on just how much SMART movement you can do and the more acrobatic you get, the more opportunities you have to get into those real nooks and crannies. The bigger you are, you kind of give a lot of that up, but a certain type of player doesn't want it any way, so they'll happily give that up to go for the benefits that the big guy has.

Continued on Page 2.