Brink – An Update from Splash Damage

Now that Brink has been released in North America, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of people create their character and join the civil war for the Ark. Seeing the game out there being played and enjoyed by so many is very exciting for us, and we’ve been hopping into multiplayer matches ourselves to get in on the action with all of you.

Before we dive into this blog update, we’d like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who’s been sharing their feedback about Brink. We keep a close eye on what all of you have been saying about the game and wanted to give you an update on what’s been happening on our end:

Xbox 360 Update

We’ve now put up our first game update on the Xbox 360, which went live at launch. It addresses several of the issues raised in some of the early US reviews of the game and brings with it some major improvements.

Most importantly, this update significantly reduced texture loading times thanks to improved hard-drive caching. It also improves client prediction when playing online – in other words, you’ll experience much less “rubber banding” in multiplayer. We’ve also fixed several issues that could lead to the game freezing, and resolved an issue where Brink would insist on playing all of the training videos rather than just the introductory one.
If you’ve not yet got the update, simply restart the game while your Xbox is connected to the internet.

We’ve also been getting new reports of lag when playing online, especially in matches with lots of human players. We’re all huge multiplayer fans here at the office and we know how important a lag-free online experience is. We’re urgently investigating this issue and seeing what we can do to improve things in that area. Stay tuned.

PlayStation 3 Update

The PlayStation 3 version of Brink has also received its first game update late Monday. It incorporates the same prediction fixes as in the Xbox 360 version, resulting in a smoother online performance. In addition, host migration has seen several improvements as well, and we’ve fixed an issue where the Ability Wheel sometimes displayed the wrong class abilities. This update also fixes several potential freezes and, like the Xbox 360 version, now only plays the introductory tutorial video at the initial prompt, rather than all of them.

Even though PSN is currently offline, you’ll still be able to get this update if your console is connected to the internet. Once PSN is back online, we’ll closely monitor player feedback for this platform.

PC Update

On the PC side, we’re pleased to report that we’ve put together our first game update, bringing two immediate improvements to Brink:

It greatly enhances the crash reports we’re getting through Steam, with more detailed information coming our way from now on. While this doesn’t sound very exciting for you as a player, it’s really useful for the Brink team as it’ll allow us to track down the underlying issues much more quickly and work on fixes for them – particularly stability issues relating to compatibility.

This update also fixes an issue where closing the game before getting to the character selection screen can corrupt your character data and make it unusable. Until the game update comes out, we strongly recommend not shutting Brink down during start-up to avoid this issue altogether.

Better yet, this update is already on the way to Steam and you’ll get it automatically through the Steam client as soon as it’s out.

In other PC news, we’ve also been working closely with the guys over at Bethesda Softworks to identify and solve any hardware compatibility issues that people have been reporting. For the AMD graphics card owners out there, make sure you’ve installed the latest AMD video drivers as that will solve a fair few of the visual and performance issues out there. Similarly, if you have an NVIDIA card and are experiencing issues with the game, make sure you’ve got the latest NVIDIA video drivers installed.

The next game update for the PC version is already in the works, and includes a fix for the FOV issue some of you have been reporting on the forums, among several other things. We’ll have more information to share on that soon.

Statistics Site

We’ve also seen a few questions about the Brink statistics website and what you should be doing with the VIP code that’s displayed in the game. When the Brink statistics site launches on www.BrinkTheGame.com, you’ll be able to register a profile on there and can then use the VIP code from inside the game to link your Xbox 360 gamertag/PSN ID/Steam ID to it. More details on all of that soon!

Lastly, please do keep your Brink feedback coming. It’s really useful to us and we really do check all of it. We have teams at Splash Damage and Bethesda dedicated full time to resolving any issues you discover.
That’s it for now – thanks for reading and see you online in Brink!