News

Bethesda's Brink blurs the boundaries between single player and multiplayer shooters

By Dan Tennant
June 02, 2009 15:49 PM PST
Print
Email this!
Share
- Digg
- Yahoo Buzz!
- FaceBook
- StumbleUpon
- del.icio.us

Splash Damage, the developers that put together Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, have a new game in their sights: Brink.

Bethesda's Brink blurs the boundaries between single player and multiplayer shooters

The doors to E3's show floor have opened, and as the visitors pour in, info on new games continues to pour out. One such game is Brink, a first-person shooter under development by Splash Damage.

To be published by Bethesda Softworks Spring of next year, Brink tells the story of a floating city called the Ark, dispersed among hundreds of individual islands, that has come to the 'brink' of civil war. As one of the inhabitants, it's your job to figure out just how humanity will evolve.

The game's character development system will work across each of it modes -- single player, multiplayer, and co-op. You build a persistent persona that defines your ability as a gamer, and take it with you wherever you go in the game. What sorts of stats you'll be managing has yet to come to light, but such a system could allow players to get the hang of the game in single-player before stepping into multiplayer, without walking in woefully underpowered.

Curiously, the single-player campaign in Brink is apparently completely dynamic. The Ark is an open city, and depending on where you go, you'll get new missions and objectives catering to your role in your squad.

As for that world, Bethesda tells us it'll be a gorgeous one, thanks to a technology called virtual texturing, which enables much more precise detail on textures without hogging memory. If the screenshots we've already seen are any clue, Brink will benefit from it tremendously.