Well, for one Brink turrets only have a limited field of fire, whereas Sentry Guns had full 360 degree spherical detection, but only 'patrolled' in 90 degrees. So it shouldn't be as much of an issue for that, but I agree with you entirely.

Friendly fire should be off. People need to be able to shoot at suspicious people or else disguising would be overpowered. Shooting at suspects already has drawbacks: whilst you might kill an enemy Operative, you could also be wasting, time, awareness, concentration, ammunition, and making a lot of noise.

Agreed, friendly fire is a game dynamic only for the upper echelon of skilled players. It ruins the game for everyone else.

From competitive TF2 experience, I'd say always keep it off, even with 'skilled players'. You can't have friendly fire when there are disguised people around. It's implausible and horrendously unbalanced as a game mechanic.

That would be a server command to turn on Friendly Fire or something like Voting for Friendly Fire in game..

I found it interesting that anyone can capture Command Posts. I figured those would be Operative specific missions to give them more to do as well as since they are the class that hacks into things.

Also find it kind of stupid that players can blow up Eng Mines once spotted by an Operative. It kind of defeats the purpose of having an Eng to defuse them if anyone can blow them up. The more I see on how mines will work in Brink the more useless they seem to be.

Operatives can always see them and will have a glow around the edging of them. On top of this they make it an objective on the objective wheel were they can select to find mines and it takes them directly to it. This mechanic makes mines pretty much pointless as they don't even have to find them themselves and can simply be taken straight to where they are (like that was going to be hard in the first place with how big they are and them glowing).

If that wasn't bad enough now you don't even need an Eng disarm them and they can simply be blown up. It's like why even give the Eng the ability to defuse them if they can be blown up. With it so easy for Operatives to find mines hardly anyone is going to be stepping on them so the least they could do it allow those that do to get blown up or once spotted they have to be defused by an Eng that way there is still a chance someone may try and run away from someone and step on one.

With all these huge counter measures in place for mines it looks as though they are going to be a pretty useless ability. Would have been better if they just made them where everyone could see them except they were smaller and took the Operative out the equation leaving Eng to be able to defuse if stepped on. Atleast this way mines would have a chance of actually being a useful ability and being effective but would also have countermeasures.

On another note the Operatives disguise ability intrigues me. It looks as though they have no reticule while disguised so lets say you want to drop the disguise and begin taking out the enemy how will that work. Just start firing and hope that where you are looking is where your reticule is aiming? Going to be very interesting to see games with friendly fire on since there disguise does not drop until they are dead.

Cool video. Everything is looking great so far.

They do need to hype up the Soldier class a bit, I think. Hopefully next video (if there is one) will accomplish that.

Not unbalanced at all when you consider that (unlike TF2 by the way) there are not OHKs and the disguised player is incapable of doing anything without then revealling himself.

The whole point of the disguise is to allow you to try and get away with being the enemy in order to advance your position, if the enemy can just spray everybody with a minigun whenever he feels like it, the disguise serves a very limited purpose that could then easily be achieved by just not entering into an area where players can see you. Suddenly there's little reason to risk disguising.

No FF also decreases the care required to use explosives and high spray weapons. While I'm fine with having options to turn it off for a room I disagree that it "ruins it for everybody else". I know plenty of players that have no problem having it on.

^^ Disgusting

Bad news nobody. This was apparently the final video in the Get SMART series. No more after this one. :sadvaultboy:

http://www.splashdamage.com/node/795

cool vid watched all of these so far.

It's funny cause that emotion is an FPS without smart.

I have a question. How do you know that you have stepped onto a mine? I mean if it's been spotted I wouldn't have been close enough to step on it anyway, and if it hasn't been spotted, is there a tiny beep or click or something that a well trained and attentive ear can hear so that they know not to move? When you are on top of an unexploded mine, does your guy call out, effectively creating an Engineer mission to save you due to the lack of public VoIP? How does this work? :confused:

Or everyone can ignore my post and not discuss it :facepalm:

Okay never mind, watched the video again and heard a tiny beep when they showed someone being taken out by a mine, soooo I guess my question is answered! :biggrin:

P.S. we should probably start discussing gotcha's post so no one feels ignored :sadvaultboy: or angry :verymad:

Great question.

Everything is looking and sounding pretty well balanced in this game except for the mines.
Not being able to see a OHK weapon on the battlefield is kind of a big deal and sounds like
it could potentially become a severe balance issue, especially since most maps have many
corridors and hallways. Hopefully you only get one mine per life and you cannot have more
than one deployed at a time (a previously deployed mine will disappear upon death).

I guess the effectiveness of mines will all depend on the intelligence and awareness levels of
this game's player base, and sadly these traits aren't in abundance in today's gamers.

Hopefully players will play this game and their class as it is supposed to be played and not
strictly for kills and stats as to boost their otherwise sad lives. The only problem with heavily
team-oriented games is that many players refuse to play as a team and complete the
objectives placed before them. Hopefully this game will be the exception.

I was unsure if there is an audible sound when an opposing class walks across the mind unsuspecting... is their a CLICK sound or something? OR do you have to be watching your feet as your entire the mine area.

Also, I think friendly fire should be defaulted to ON. Spy checking is something that should discouraged because it takes away from the gameplay as intended and there are other cues that can be used. Shooting your teammates or suspected spies should work against players, not for them. I am worried it will be difficult for people to cross over from the default off to the default on. It should be the standard gameplay versus the exception.

Ok, ok, Ill oblige you


After the command post is captured then its the operatives job to hack it, if not we would see a ton of operatives at the onset of every battle trying to secure the posts and thus gain the bonuses.



The defuse only really comes in handy if someone activates it. Why risk entering the activation radius or having to wait for an engineer when it would be much easier to blow it up. Could you imagine a group of soldiers and medics waiting around for an engineer to come defuse a mine, that would make them easy pickings.


It doesn't look like they are highlighted beyond an outline, I can't speak on the usefulness of them yet but I can see many a person falling victim to them.


I cannot speak on the usefulness as of yet, but you are assuming that there will be operatives running around defusing mines left and right. I highly doubt this will be the case, I think mines will catch more people off guard than you think.



Well, the reticule stays in the cneter of the screen so it shouldn't be too hard. And if a operative is getting shot at in disguise then Im pretty sure they will start shooting back.

Something I noticed but it could be just bad luck, but during the part with disguises the enemy engineer can clearly tell that the Operative is not part of his team, because he doesn't glow blue when targeted like the rest of his team. Hopefully they fix this.

Also if you watch the part with the engineer as he is placing a mine, if you look at the minimap there already is a mine on it and as soon as he sets the next one the first disappears. Most likely means you can only have one mine down at a time.

This would be disastrous just as it is in any other shooter.

With the relatively close-quarter maps and the fact this is a new title that seems to have a relatively steep learning curve
when compared to other FPS games setting friendly-fire to ON as the default would only discourage most gamers and might
create a more negative and slow pace to the game that the developers did not intend. This looks to be a hectic, almost twitch
style of shooter at times and friendly-fire would cause more problems than it's worth.

However, I would have no problem with friendly-fire being set to ON as the default so long as friendly weapons and explosives
did half the damage to team mates.



Actually, I think this will be fine. It seems any and everything included in this game has a counter to it. This is one of the
counters directed towards disguised Ops. If there were no visible counters then a disguised Op could ALWAYS flank the
enemy, kill some of them, and/or capture a CP or objective with the utmost ease before the enemy team figures it out.

It already has lots of counters.

1. Other Ops can see them (maybe)
2. As long as friendly fire is off you can shoot your team mates to check.

Considering that your wasting a pip, 15ish seconds to get the disguise, and have to do a thorough job acting to not get recognized, I think 2 counters are enough.

Finally back. So rather than quote and end up with a wall of text, I'm just going to start fresh.

1. Disguises: If it works like past SD games, the two tell tale signs are the players actions and the identifier above his head (i.e.: say someone disguised as me, and I see someone on my team with my name, well guess what lol..). The disguise is meant to be more of a way to sneak past in the heat of combat and not a surefire gaurantee that you'll sneak by undetected. Also, you still have your reticle, same as before, just the second you fire or use, the skin changes back.

2. Friendly Fire: Personally, I prefer FF as it encourages teammates to play more carefully and not go rambo style spamming nades into a firefight, but I do agree that maybee as a default for begginners, it would be better off to prevent discouraging them.

3. Op/Engy Discussion: The more players devoted to the objective class, the more likely you are to complete it quickly. Also, certain objectives allow stacking meaning that the more people doing it, the faster you accomplish the task. If past games are any indicator, I really don't see these being the most popular classes. While there are specialties you can focus on, you have multiple characters that you can level up, and while you can't change them during a match, you can definately prepare before hand depending on the maps sequence of objectives. Additionally, things such as placing turrets have cooldown times, and so do other powerful specialties (such as the medics lazarus revival/healing grenade). So they probably won't be as amazing as you would think; useful but not godly.

4. Mines: We really have to see. Again if past games are indicators, they're not that bad and usually very predictable as on there own you can get healed... usually if your hit by a mine, enemies will be nearby, which in turn means that mines will be near objectives, making them easy to scout out. I really think we'll have to see them in game, but going off the rest of the balance put in, really not worried.

Not sure if we were discussing anything else. Pumped for this game and this is the only way to keep sanity.

1. Agree
2. Agreeish, although maybe default off in games playing below a certain rank, and on in those above a certain rank.

3. Note that the two classes that are effected by having more are Ops when hacking and Engineers when constructing. Soldier planting is not sped up with having more numbers. And it still isn't a power concern, it's simply a numbers concern. The more there are of one class within the "preferred classes" the more often people who would like to play it one way will end up switching to play it another.

One thing I think will sway people over to Soldier is their passive (pretty sure) body armor ability. Being tougher than the other classes by default should be a pretty big pull.

I'm sure it'll all balance out in the end. I just don't think these videos, while highly awesome, did the best job of showing off the perks of the Medic and Soldier classes.

We got to see a security turret in this vid . It is blue and clean, instead of brown and rusted.

I'm wondering the same.

Very interesting info on the same matter: Operatives do not lose their disgusie when being shot at, but only when incapped. This means there is no simple spy-checking. You have to spend more than a bullet.


Well, just wait outside of the turret's line of fire, eh?

I doubt it's impossible.


The Vietcong.