With a striking portrayal of an eco-friendly utopia lost to the sea set against multiplayer action, Brink is one of the most intriguing titles of 2010. Indeed, its resolve to be the first truly successful ‘mingleplayer’ FPS, seamlessly blending story, deathmatch, online and offline modes, could make it one of the most popular shooters since Splash Damage’s breakthrough title, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

Ahead of a greater feature on the game that we’ll be publishing in E208 on October 27, here’s the first part of our conversation with writer and designer Ed Stern about the challenge of writing for games and seeing Splash Damage grow from a ‘temple’ to Quake creator id Software to the master of its own destiny. You can read the second part of our interview here.

How hard is it to bring unique ideas to a modern shooter?
It’s hard; it really is. And it takes a lot of discussion and comparison and trial-and-error – or as I call it: error-and-error - because you’re working out what you need as you go. And I can see why it’s easier a lot of the time to just say, ‘Oh, space marines,’ because everyone knows what that means. It’s good for players and it’s good for concept artists.

But one of the cool things here is that we get to try new stuff. We are unusually fortunate as a studio. Things don’t always work and sometimes we have to cut them, and that will always take longer and require more work and focus. And we’re trying to innovate in several fields at once: the gameplay, the setting, the look and all of these things. I would probably not advise people to do this from scratch.



Presumably, a story like Brink’s can only be as good as the mechanisms for telling it.
Games are the least ‘writable’ medium conceivable, even assuming you’re in there from the start of the project. Take directing voice-over sessions: you’re in there, in a studio with an actor, and he’s got this printed out Excel spreadsheet. His job is to provide tone and context for the game. The two things he has no idea about at that point are the tone and context of the game. And unless you’ve got a writer there or a voice director close to the game, how on Earth’s he going to know?

I think voice acting generally is really good considering what the artists are given to go on. They don’t know if something’s vastly inappropriate in terms of context and scale. If no one tells them, ‘No, no – your best friend’s just been killed,’ then of course that line’s going to come over terribly.

But that’s also true of the writing. You know what you might be aiming for but you’re making it as you go along. We kind of lucked out a bit with the Brink cinematic we did for E3 because it seemed to work; it seemed to have a combination of some bits being kind of funny and some sort of silly, but it still worked in an action sense and was dramatic at the end. I’m really happy we managed to tick all of those boxes. The [final] cinematics won’t be exactly like that. It’s so weird reading something like Raising The Bar [the Half-Life 2 companion book], and you just think, ‘How on Earth could that game have turned out any different?’ The same with BioShock.

Yet have you seen the original, original BioShock?
Exactly. And it seems ridiculous because the great games appear monolithic; it’s like it was all one big solid block of win. And people say, ‘Well, wasn’t it all really obvious?’ And you feel like shouting, ‘No!’ It’s only at the end that you find out what the game’s about.

And typically everyone else gets to reiterate except the writer, so hopefully you’ve built in enough flex. Because by the time you’ve written something, cast it, done the motion capture and the voicing - that is as bulky and as complex a production as anyone’s come up with short of stop-motion animation. It’s the least flexible thing possible, unless you’re going to do each frame with an individually carved stone statue. It may even beat that.

So yeah, there’s a real urge to just be generic and play it safe, which is the exact opposite of something risky, edgy and tailored. A really nicely done cinematic is a thing of joy; very rarely is anyone put in a situation where they can make one.