GS (B): Are there any class penalties like if you took like a heavy and made him a scout?

ES: We thought about it, but then I think that was quite a big change. We were thinking, well hang on, surely we want to dissuade players by indicating that's not a good use of their resources, but we shouldn't be telling them what they should or shouldn't do.

RH: I was at Lionhead for a long time, it certainly felt like a lifetime and one of the biggest things I learned from Peter Molyneaux was just to, not just accept the things, well, of course there has to be either very strict, classified abilities and lack of abilities or you have to put in all kinds of balances and I thought do we have to? There's reasons for it, but can we find other ways to do it? So we're actually trying to avoid those, and are playing much more with the carrot and less with the stick. We do have some experience penalties, but very few.

ES: Like team killing, that's a no-no. You'll lose XP for that.

GS (T): Outside of the human interaction is the single player and the co-op experience more or less the same in the game, or well is there a single player?

ES: We're really trying to...when you start the game up there is no online or offline...

RH: Or single player or multiplayer

GS (B): So it's drop-in, drop-out...

ES: We're just past that. Four player co-op is fantastic, we just don't think it's enough. We've got eight player co-op. We just thought, why not, we've got this. All the maps work from every direction with every kind of player.

RH: They have to, by their very nature.

ES: Because it's exactly the same for multiplayer. So it's not here's your single player, kind of on a rail game, oh, here's some themed arenas to run around in multiplayer. It's the same thing. You can get the good things from both.

GS (T): When you start out a mission, how long do they take to do when you're doing a four player co-op from beginning to end?

RH: We don't have a final timeline but we're looking between twenty and thirty minutes.

GS (B): Is there a difference in how the AI reacts if it knows you're doing it by yourself compared with seven other people because it'd be pretty easy to whup the AI depending on the scenario if you've got eight people working together.

ES: The AI does a lot of dynamic reaction but not necessarily specifically on those terms. It will observe the resultant behaviours and respond to them rather than oh right, single player mode. So we're not going to nerf the AI and these guys are going to do this. That just seems like a weird, hand-holding...

RH: I mean, the biggest thing the AI goes through is that at the same time that you can level up, they level up as well. As you get more and more access to new abilities and higher level stuff, you'll find, wow they're throwing a lot of that stuff at me as well.

ES: So the challenge for us obviously is that you've got so many different possible, potential profiles of player that we said we'll make them all fun and at the same time, and so that any of things could happen at any time.

RH: We tend to look at personalities for the AI that kind of emulate various types of players you've seen online, you know the crazy, over-the-top aggressive guy that has a death wish, the sniper asshole...

GS (B): Yay, campers!

ES: At this point, there is no camping in the game. There is a rifle that reloads slowly, but in terms of it being a sniper rifle...no no..it's quite a specific thing, we've tried to bring the engagement distances in, I mean, Quake Wars was way big, so sometimes it could get very sniper alley heavy. It's much closer in, and there's much more verticality in the maps so there's not nearly as much of that.

GS (B): Final questions, I understand that due to the alpha state of the game, the HUD and everything is not...

ES: Pre-alpha, pre-pre-alpha

GS (B): Right, it seemed like he was throwing turrets down, he was doing whatever he wanted to when he wanted to. Is there a resource limitation?

RH: There definitely are, yeah. It equates to a traditional mana meter and honestly, you're exactly right, we only got our GUI guy about a month ago and we hoped to actually have everything turned on but in the time he had we just focused on making the wheel look nice. There is the equivalent of mana. And we need to come up with a good term for it because we keep calling it mana and that doesn't fit.

GS (B): Well, you're coming from Fable so...

RH: Exactly.

ES: It is absolutely continuous with the Enemy Territory game, so there is a team limit, you can have so many mines, you can have an individual limit and a team limit and you can only have so many mines in place because if it's all mines it's just not fun and there is a power bar as in previous games that tells you how many times you can do class defining actions.

GS (B): Ok, so I can't just be switching willy-nilly, I gotta pick something and stick with it for a certain amount of time any way?

ES: The way we do it, let's say for example you've got three, we haven't set a limit yet, it's a rolling three, so if I put down one, two three and I put down a new one, it will say "Do you want to remove the first one?" So you've always got three in play and there's a whole kind of rock-paper-scissors thing that goes with that as the map goes on. Oh, that mine I left back there, I don't need that. I'll move that back.

RH: And that's an example of the really simple upgrades you can get as an engineer, ok, I can have four active mines instead of three, I can have three active turrets instead of one.

ES: When you start the game, you can do everything your class needs to do. I think there have been some cases when you start off and you think oh really, I can't fulfill my basic team function? That's bullshit, there's no reason to do that. So, you can do it better, you can do it more often conceivably, or you can do some extra things to help you do that but you'll always be able to do your class thing.

But that's not all! Once I transcribed this Q&A I realized that I forgot to ask an important question, mainly whether or not things like landmines and turrets disappear once the engineer who placed them changes class. I posed that very question to Ed Stern in a follow up email and he was kind enough to respond. Here is his response to the question, in full. Take it away Ed.

"Yes indeedy. Obviously, Brink is still pre-alpha and all manner of change may occur but currently we’re play testing with the system we had with our previous two games: there are per-player and sometimes per-team limits on the number of turrets/mines you can deploy, they don’t disappear if you die, but they do if you change class. Otherwise you end up with a somewhat over-lethal battlefield cluttered with dozens of turrets, mines, barbecues, hockey sticks, garden chairs etc. where nobody can get near the objectives without being killed. As ever, it’s about providing the most fun for the most players most of the time. Also, we like the emergent gameplay we get from those restrictions: it gives the player’s actions a definite individual and team consequence.

For instance, let’s say each Engineer can plant 3 mines, and there’s a team limit of 15 (numbers absolutely invented just now in my jetlagged head, may not correspond with reality, your mileage may vary). Once you’ve planted 3 mines you can go to plant another but you’ll get a warning that the game will remove the first one you planted. Bear in mind that may be exactly what you want to do: that first mine may have been planted to cause hassle on a route way back at a previous objective that you don’t need to defend anymore because no enemies are spawning there.

So you use your quota intelligently, and keep your 3 mines rotating, so they’re always in a place to cause damage to enemies. Good Engineers keep replanting their mines so they’re always in the way. Or, if you see that an enemy Operative is doing a good job of spotting your team’s mines (and you’re really sneaky), you plant your mine somewhere obvious where you know that enemy Operatives will be able to spot them, wait for them to be spotted (and for that message to be passed on to their teammates, generating a “Defuse/Destroy these here mines” mission for their teammates) and then plant new mines on the approaches to the now-no-longer-there old mines.

That particular example may not end up working in quite that way in the final game, but there really are few things more satisfying than winning that sort of rock-paper-scissors double-bluff with an opponent, and we’ll build in as much of that into the game as we can (as long as it isn’t baffling to new players). One of my personal favourite spoofs is to get into a firefight, pretend to run out of ammo, switch to pistol and run away around a corner looking helpless in the hope that an eager opponent will chase me…right over the mine I just planted : )"

Ed Stern, ladies and gentlemen, fountain of information and tricky devil on the battlefield. Thanks so much to Ed Stern and Richard Ham for taking the time to speak to us at E3 and for taking the time to answer questions afterward. Brink is slated for a release some time in 2010 for the PC, 360 and PS3.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .