» Sun Nov 21, 2010 12:24 pm
I voted "no". Here's a few thoughts on why.
Chiefly, I think the reason faction binding would be problematic is that there can be an imbalance of manpower and skill. What if the traits that make people want to pick one faction are also correlated with better teamplay instincts? What if one side has more people who want to play medic and engineer, and the other has more soldiers and operatives? What if one side is just plain more popular? It would be unbelievably frustrating to be denied the chance to play a multiplayer shooter against humans, just because you picked the popular side.
Then there's the artistic aspect. Brink is a game which, for all its exaggerated violence and warfare, has a lot of work put into the writing, and especially into the moral ambiguity of each faction's position. Without seeing the game from both sides, a player doesn't get the full effect of that element, and only gets to experience half the writing and cinematography regardless. That would be a deeply strange thing for a developer to want.
Finally, my personal take on games is that there should never be arbitrary restrictions. I'm a proponent of gameplay over realism, and I think games should place restrictions on you only to challenge you and make the game fair for others. I feel so strongly about this that I'm not even on board with the permanent tattooing or the inability to change a character's body type in-match, as odd as that sounds. (I'm fortunately not a tattoo type, anyway.)
I'm looking forward to playing both sides for their story, to being able to switch sides if my favored Security team is mashing the helpless Resistance, and to being able to join a game where only one side has slots open.