» Tue May 17, 2011 2:16 am
Basically, there's the option of playing solo or going online. Either way, you're playing the same missions, and following the same storyline. When you're online, you can play cooperatively with up to 7 other people, against an equal-sized team of other players and/or bots, playing the same mission from the opposite perspective.
At this stage, I don't think anyone can tell you whether single- or multi-player will be the preferred option, but given Splash Damage's past titles, I think the main developer-following interest will be from multi-player gamers. To balance that, though, they're also drawing a lot of Mirror's Edge fans in with the SMART system, who are mostly single-player gamers.
Multiplayer is either following the campaign (when your team wins, you move on to the next level in sequence, when they lose, you stay behind to try again), or single battles (where you choose the map/mission you're going to play and stick with it). Players choose which option they want, then are paired with teammates and opponents. Whichever option you take, the multiplayer has full drop-in drop-out support, so as long as a match has at least one player, that player can carry on, and any shortage of numbers below the 8 vs 8 requirement will be made up for with AI-controlled bots.
"Standard" game modes like TDM and CTF aren't in, but the game focuses on teamwork and objective-based gameplay - to the point where KDR and other common stats multiplayer gamers usually care about won't show up on the leaderboard - it's all about XP, which is mostly earned by making yourself useful to your teammates - completing objectives, healing/buffing allies, capturing and reinforcing Command Posts, etc. TDM doesn't fit what brink is trying to achieve, CTF and other similar things are incorporated in the sense that there are objectives in certain missions which may as well be CTF, King of the Hill, etc.