How to Build an Awesome World: “Brink” Devs on Narrative and Visuals, Part 1

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There’s a lot of moaning about how so little though goes into the story and scenarios of most video games and the first-person shooter genre, especially, catches a lot of that criticism. Some of that grousing is justified, with all the grim, square-jawed super-soldiers and cookie-cutter corridor combat that gets churned out year after year.

But, much as they’ve done with the game design and ideas going into Brink, the team at Splash Damage is trying to make a gameworld that looks and feels different that much of what’s out there. In the interviews that follows, lead writer Ed Stern describes how he and the other developers working on Brink have tried to infuse the plot with character and the environment with a narrative all its own.

Brink hits Xbox 360, Ps3 and PC on May 17th for North America and on May 20th for Europe.

Ed, the story in Brink seems to be designed in a modular way, where you could almost play it out of order. Is that the case and, if so, is that intentional?

Absolutely, yes. One of the challenges with writing Brink’s Security and Resistance campaign storylines was that, while we assumed most players would pick a faction and then play that campaign’s missions in order, we didn’t want to prevent friends from playing with each other. That meant they had to be able to join each other’s campaigns to make their single player game instantly co-op or multiplayer at any point, so each mission and cinematic had to make sense on their own, in any order.

Also, with Brink, there’s genuine replay value in the maps and the cinematics. Even if you’ve played a mission before, there may be minor details in the cinematic you missed that only become significant once you’ve played through both campaigns or listened to an audio diary. Alternatively, you can just skip them and get on with running around and shooting stuff. That’s a completely valid way to play the game too.

(More on TIME.com: On the Brink: Hands-On with 2011’s Experimental Shooter)

There seems to be a lot of sociological commentary churning in the game’s environment and story. Where did you go for inspiration for that?

We want Brink to be sticky: both to draw players in and keep them imaginatively engaged, even when they’re not playing. The test of any character or scenario is whether it lives on in your imagination even after you’ve stopped playing the game, so we wanted to incorporate real world thematic content into the storylines for Brink for players to become engaged.

The Ark is a microcosm, where any and all real-world tensions and issues exist, in exaggerated crucial form. It’s a place where stories can happen, where people from all over the world are crammed onto a floating city with limited resources and extremes of material inequality. You don’t have to go far to find true tales of economic, political, moral, psychological or dramatic conflict. It’s all out there, and some variations of it went into Brink. Players are much more likely to have some sort of opinion about real-world issues than invented ones. No, wait, what’s the ratio of Wikipedia entries about Star Trek: The Next Generation to World War II? Forget I said that.

One of the things that’s interesting about Brink’s story is that it seems like information on either side, inside the narrative at least, can’t be trusted. Rather than the firm ideological certainty, either side seems like they’re not sure they’re doing the right thing. Why come down on this particular angle for Brink?

I’m tempted to say “Why not?” The choice between Right and Wrong is no choice at all, and dramatically inert. The choice between Right and Right, on the other hand, has much more potential. We deliberately avoided making Brink about Hero Cops versus Evil Terrorists, or Freedom Fighters versus Oppresso-Stormtroopers. Of course, Brink is still a game primarily about running around and shooting, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be anything else.

I always admire games that manage to include and involve real issues without reducing them to a scanty moral, or yet more antagonist-motivation boilerplate. Deus Ex was a notable success: it was the first game I played where I genuinely didn’t know what course to take, not just because I couldn’t divine what the game “wanted” me to do, but because I wasn’t sure in my own mind about the dilemma my character was facing. I’d love it if players felt similarly conflicted about the choices in Brink.

Also, we wanted to avoid the uncanny unanimity that many game worlds are forced into to make things clear to the player and move them forwards; when you go somewhere and everyone tells you the same thing, or you do something and instantly everyone is apprised of it. In the real world, no two people have perfect information or agree entirely about what’s going on, who’s to blame, and what to do about it. Why should Brink’s world be different?

(More on TIME.com: E3 2010: What We’re Looking Forward To)

Some of the required narrative mechanisms are begging to be given some spin.  Your faction commander will brief you while we load the map, but that doesn’t mean what he says is necessarily true, or that he’s deliberately misleading you, or even that the characters in that faction’s cinematics agree with him or each other.

Also, conflicts can arise for systemic, not just personal reasons. For example, in Container City the Security receives creditable intel that the Resistance are developing a bio-weapon; they can’t take the chance, they have to go in and grab it. On the other hand, the Resistance players are told it’s a vaccine. What if they’re both being lied to? What if they’re both right?

It seems like one of your jobs is to prevent ludonarrative dissonance–where what the player does doesn’t match up with the narrative drive of the plot. How do you accomplish such a thing?

It’s certainly our job to prevent ourselves from putting things in the game that don’t make sense – its inhabitants can and should disagree, but the gameworld can’t contradict itself. However, we strongly believe that once a player buys a game, they can do what they like.

Brink’s gameplay is like a sandbox – a rule set and a toolkit to let players author their own experiences. The players aren’t on rails, which is why there’s always a reason to go back and play the same map with different tactics, from a different faction, with a different body type, as a different class, with different abilities, and with different weapons that have been customized differently each time.

Our first game, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, is nearly eight years old with over half a billion matches played. A big part of that longevity and match count is down to the amazing work of the mod community. But some of it’s down to the inherent unpredictability and insane replayability of the gameplay.

In some cases, that means players doing things that don’t fit their fictional motivation, and nine times out of ten that dissonance is hilarious. There’s a rich vein of silliness in online games: players know that they’re playing a game, yet they become fully immersed in their environments and decisions. That kind of ironic oddness is part and parcel of the game, not an interruption of it. The real story of Brink isn’t the game’s plot; it’s the story of the player playing the game and the sum of those player-authored experiences that may be entirely unique to them. They’re even better when they’re collaborative, co-authored, and impossible to re-create: “Oh man, you remember that time I was trying to disarm that HE Charge, but then an Operative on our team threw an EMP grenade which slowed the charge’s countdown, but then Joe on the other team headshot me, but you revived me, then he shot you and I shot him and you killed him with your last bullet and I disarmed the charge with a second to go.”  We want Brink to keep on giving players those kind of watercooler moments, even long after they’ve finished the storyline campaigns.

The apocalypse is such a staple in genre fiction and especially in video games. What are you guys at Splash Damage trying to do differently with Brink‘s broken-down future?

Brink’s post-apocalyptic setting has to do several things for us: it has to be set somewhere players haven’t been before and show them something they haven’t seen; it has to inspire our character and environment artists and level designers and offer  a wide variety of environmental contrasts; it has to suggest cool map, objective and gameplay ideas; it has to be a place we have the team and tech to build, and that the PS3 and Xbox 360 and PC hardware can render; it has to be an environment that can narrate itself  and explain why the factions are fighting, and why they don’t just leave. If we’re lucky it also provides us with a striking and varied colour palette, and some instantly memorable and recognizable landmarks players can use to locate and orient themselves. All this seems to require scarcity and isolation.

Also, “post-apocalyptic” doesn’t necessarily mean “gray.” Brink brings colorful environments back to shooters in a big way, and makes the vivid palette memorable and significant; if you’re in an area of the Ark that’s bright white, you’re in one of the tonier original districts made from Arkoral, the Ark’s patented construction material derived from a genetically modified coral.  But as you go further downwind, to the bits of the Ark they had to build in a hurry from cannibalized ship steel for the tens of thousands of refugees who reached the Ark while fleeing rising sea levels, it gets more brown and dirtier until the Guest slums are bright red with rust, ready to fall apart and into the sea. Add all the colors of the sea and sky at various times of day and night, and Brink looks like no other game.

(More on TIME.com: Latest PS3 Firmware Update Blocks “Call of Duty” Hackers)

Usually, it happens the other way, but has there been an instance of getting a plot idea from something the art team has worked up?

It’s definitely a two-way street. The backstory leads the environment and gameplay, but sometimes it’s the other way round. Certainly our focus on evolving player movement with the SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system required certain routes, objects and obstacles, and our push towards deep player customization has had a pretty direct influence on how Brink’s world works. You see a concept image and know “this absolutely has to be in the game, so how does it fit in and what’s the reason for it?” Sometimes reverse-engineering the world and plotline to fit an image or gameplay constraint actually works out better than the original storyline.

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