A Preview of The Available Abilities in Brink

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUv0MoP5Qs]

Behold! A small taste of the (seemingly) vast number of abilities available to unlock in Brink, the class-based shooter slated to drop on May 17th. It’s got molotov cocktails, imma-hack-into-da-turret-now, and the perhaps broken “Oh, did you kill me? I’m just gonna…revive myself now” as abilities. Like Black Ops, it seems that abilities change your appearance. This being the case, the number of options in appearance will be ridiculous.

Normally, this might be grounds for a compliment, but I can’t help but have Matthew Burns’ ‘Why We Don’t Have Female Characters’ in the back of my mind (as some of you might know, there are no female characters in the game, and the developers have excused it by stating that it was a choice between deep customization options or half-assed male-female options). A snippet, though you can read the rest of the satirical post here,

“Well, it’s hard to make female characters. First of all, in order to accommodate female characters in our pipeline, you’d basically need to re-code the entire engine from the ground up. Because the technology we have today just wasn’t built to be able to handle stuff like that. I’m thinking about it now and I have no idea how you’d even start making those kind of changes in our low-level architecture. The implications to our engine are just all over the place– the threading system, the frame buffer…

Then there’s the art aspect. Can anyone say they really know what a woman looks like? I mean we all have ideas. But we’ve tried them and they don’t work. Women are difficult to model because they have– they’re sort of put together– well, let me put it this way: male bone structure is mostly made up of ninety-degree angles. Right? Maybe a couple forty-fives here and there. But it’s simple, and that makes it easy. I guess I shouldn’t say easy, but I mean more straightforward.

Female bone structure, on the other hand, is extremely complicated. There are, like, n-gons and inverted matrices in there and everything.”