Shrew: How have Splash Damage addressed what now seems to be the almost mandatory need to have “persistent unlocks” in a FPS game? By what means do you reward a skilled player that enjoys your game but cannot access new skins or weapons due to Real Life commitments / constraints. Why should a less skilled player, simply because they have more time on their hands to play game X, be rewarded by unlocking weapon Y?
Richard: We don’t want Brink to be a game where you have to put hundreds of hours in just to unlock everything in the game. We’re not big fans of the “grind,” and in fact we don’t include any systems like “score 100 headshot kills to unlock the scope for just this one gun.” In general, we’re pretty generous with our unlockables - for example, when you unlock a weapon modification such as a new scope or a silencer, you unlock it for all of the guns at once. For us, we first and foremost want to ensure that players are having fun all of the time. But we also want to create a situation where the more you put into the game, the more the game will give in return!