Wedgwood: Repairing things, planting land mines, deploying turrets, giving people health, reviving them on the battlefield, hacking open side doors, capturing command posts… All these peripheral things that help improve the progress of my team or impede the progress of the enemy team.
Hamm: And any activity, any experience you have in life is improved if you share it with someone else. Going to the movies is nice even if it’s a little weird and lonely, but you can still enjoy the movie. Going with a friend, going with some associates you hardly even know, instantly improves that quality.
Going for a lovely walk along the river is nice. Doing it while you hold your girlfriend’s hand is beautiful. Games are the same. You can have a fantastic time. Hunker down in your dark cave playing a really beautifully scripted single-player experience and having all these wonderful action moments. But if you can have a way to share that with somebody else, it’s elevated into something that’s really meaningful. And we think that once players have had those experiences and shared them with other people, it’s very, very hard to go back.
So we talked a little bit about the mechanics a little bit. Let’s talk about the story and how that kind of came about. There’s a huge back story about the Ark. So can you get into that a little bit?
Hamm: Brink is set on the Ark, which is this artificial city floating out at sea. It was kind of a prototype for mankind’s perfect green future. Sustainable living, renewable resources, and it was awesome. It was literally the eighth wonder of the world. I mean, everything worked. And unfortunately, it came a little too late. The global sea levels rose, hundreds of millions of people were displaced all over the world, and a lot of them as refugees came to the Ark looking for refuge. One way of looking at it would be that the biggest mistake the founders of the Ark ever made was opening their doors and letting all these people in.
Evan: That’s a very cynical point of view.
Hamm: We cut to about 30 years after the big flood. After three decades of having to house these 50,000 people in a city that’s supposed to house 5,000, the founders were kind of, “Well, did we do the right thing?” Yes we did but, jeez, look at the trouble we’ve made for ourselves. We’re out of resources. We’re out of room. The natives are getting restless. They don’t seem to appreciate what we’ve done for them, what we sacrificed for them. And now they’re threatening to tear our entire society apart. We have no choice.
We have to defend our way of life. We have to keep this place afloat. That’s the attitude you have in the storyline if you choose to play on the side of security. I mean, you are The Thin Blue Line. You are all that’s keeping the place running. Sometimes you might have to stomp heads, but it’s in the greater good. And you always know you’re justified in your actions because if you don’t keep the place going, it will all fall apart.
What about the Resistance?
Hamm: On the flip side, you’ve got all these refugees who are kind of mockingly called “the guests.” Even thought they’ve been there 30 years, they’re still called guests. And that kind of says a lot right there. They are at the end of their rope. They’ve had enough. (More on Techland: Rumor: Remake of the First “Halo” Game Coming Next Year?)
They are living in extreme poverty, five families at a time, crammed into these little storage units. Unclean water. Lack of food. And working, slaving, to keep the whole place running. They’re the ones, if anything breaks down, who fix it. They got the know-how. Without them, the whole place is nothing. And meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, you got all those founders, who are living in luxury in their glamorous high-rise apartments and all that. Why don’t they share? Why don’t they give back? And they are to their breaking point.
And so they’ve decided, it’s time to take for themselves. So from their perspective, they are completely justified. From the Security perspective, they were completely justified because if you were to spend time with them and they’d say “Look, we have given up a lot. We are living in extreme circumstances too.”
All in all, it sounds like an incredibly grim turn of events. A real “we have met the enemy and he is us” scenario…
Hamm: The answers to all of these guys’ problems would be to put down their guns. Spend a couple minutes to actually look at it from the other side of the world, and see that, they should work together towards their goals. But as is so often the case in the history of mankind, it’s so much easier to fallback into those old tribal patterns where it’s all about me versus you.
That’s how we evolved as a species. That’s how we succeeded. That’s how we got to the top of the food chain where we are now. We are kind of to the point where it’s time for us to socially evolve beyond that. But Brink is all about a situation where they need to do it and they don’t. But that’s OK, because it makes for a lot of fun shooting.
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