If any of you guys haven’t seen Dev Diary 4 for Brink, pop on to Youtube and have a look because otherwise what I’m ranting about won’t really make much sense. Bethesda have been doing these dev diary things to document the creation of Brink, but they already fell down at least for me, because it seems like they are trying to sell me the game, rather than tell me about it. If you don’t watch the weekly video blog for GPGnet (Chris Taylor), you really ought to. Not only is it exceedingly funny at times, but it’s very interesting and insightful when it comes to actually making the game. There are no flashy camera angles on programmers or mappers, no white background interviews where the developers say that the “environment kicks ass”, but just Chris Taylor walking around the office with a handheld camera following, talking to and watching programmers and mappers get to work.

Right, back to my original point and the title in question. The art style for Brink is very nice, I’m not going to lie about this to slag of their efforts. The whole pristine city on a perfect blue background is very very sexy stuff. However, the guy who made it a mix of what they call “photo-realism and cartoon exaggeration” soundbites, saying that Brink had somehow brought back colour to shooters. Now forgive me for stating the obvious, but we’ve had colour in shooter games for absolutely years. I’m not being facetious and saying “Yep, definately colour there, grey and black are colours”, but this whole idea of FPS games falling into a period of browns and bloom that everyone likes to think we escaped from, never happened. When everyone thinks grey, brown and grimey you think Gears of War which was released in 2006. When was Unreal Tournament 3 released, with a very similar grimey brownish grey colour? 2007. So with these two games, it’d be reasonable to assume that this period was the dark age (almost literally) for the FPS genre. However, Crysis was released in 2007. Team Fortress 2 was released in 2007. Mass Effect was released in 2007. All of these games have colour, often extremely vibrant. Be it looking across the bridge in 2Fort, sprinting across a beach in Crysis or walking through the citadel in Mass Effect.

What’s my point? The whole idea of a time where games where gritty and brown, and this whole escape from some sort of colour prison is all a fabrication. It never happened. This is why I find the sentence in question so obnoxious and just plain wrong. Colour has been in shooter games, and it never left shooter games. Borderlands, Mirrors Edge (perhaps not a shooter, but it has guns in it and is played from a First Person Perspective, and also can be played as one), even Unreal Tournament 2004. Colour! Even the Halo series! Borderlands! It’s not original to make a game vibrant anymore, and sell it as such, it makes it look nice as Brink does, but it isn’t the fucking revolution in gaming that they’ve made it out to be.

Ranting aside, watch the video, I’m interested to see if this was a massive overreaction by me or if anyone else picked up on the bullshit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUd6z5dJrY

I agree. These dev diaries are shameless adverts. The game is looking, graphics, gameplay and colour-wise, awesome and I am really looking forward to it, but the quote ‘colour is back in shooter games’ is unfounded and pretty stupid. A few seconds before someone even says it’s like we live there ourselves! In this photo-realistic, cartoon world.

I do admit, first time i watched is, before I read this, I didn’t really notice these things. I think I’m used to it. A proper developer diary would be incredibly dull and only full of problems with the game. This doesn’t work, that doesn’t look right, my boss is a tw*t etc.. You’ll only find out the PR stuff in the run up to the game and really, only until you are holding it in your hands and have played it for a long time can you really provide an opinion on it. As a consumer I expect no more and no less. I will only consider buying it anyway if the reviews are good. The dev. diaries only succeed for me to follow the game.

This is so weird, I literally turned off the latest Brink dev diary is disgust before I spotted this thread.

On your first point, I totally agree – these “diarys” are so fucking contrived and scripted the developers just come off as cheesy and fake. It’s bad enough gamers are forced to listen to PR half the time, but when developers start acting like snake-oil salesmen its taking the piss.

As for the lack of color in games, that argument has never made sense to me either. I enjoyed Gears’s restrictive colur paletee because it was immersive, realistic, and above all, it suited the the enviroments. Half the 2nd game was spent underground for fuck sake – there aint no rainbows down there! It was like everybody forgot about Quake all of a sudden. In fact pre-Half Life most FPS games were pretty dull looking – but who cares, it suited them!

No sir your right on the money with both points if you ask me. Part of the reason we first started the podcast 2 years ago was to rage on how much PR stuff like this was pissing us off. So you’re in good company!

Sorry to double post, but also worth mentioning they used that same desaturated filter on the to-camera peices on that video – the same ones that every dev diary use nowadays. Way to revolutionise!