Brink gets fantastic-looking art and dev diary

Bethesda's published some superb Brink artwork alongside a new dev diary on the game's narrative.

Senior game designer Ed Stern dropped the new stuff on the BethBlog, revealing how developer Splash Damage came up with a new design goal known as "Instant, Deep, Complex," or IDC.

"Basically it’s the old axiom 'Show, don’t Tell'," said Stern.

"If we get IDC right, then when the player looks at a game asset they immediately and intuitively grasp where they are (that’s the “Instant” part).

"And the more they look at the assets, the more the cumulative narrative detail builds up, and the more they see how the game world works and how it came to be that way (that’ll be the “Deep”)."

The producer also reveals the inspiration for the Ark, a floating city gone badly wrong.

"After having spent a lot of time reading Geoff Manaugh’s brilliant architecture/futurism/infrastructure website bldblog and researching the sci-fi towers of the Burj Al Arab hotel, the Masdar Initiative, the buildings of Santiago Calatrava, Paolo Soleri’s visionary (and unfinished) Arcosanti, Patrick Salsbury’s Oceana and the Shimizu Pyramid, it became clear that some sort of seagoing eco-city would give us everything we wanted.

"It was familiar enough to draw on zeitgeist-ish current concerns, but distant enough in time and space that players wouldn’t have seen it before. We’d be building a location that was a constructed, confected place with plenty of geometry suitable for gameplay. Like any city, it would be a place where many stories could occur, but it would also have its own creation story," he further added.

Brink was apparently dated last weekend for a release on September 7, but Bethesda told VG247 on Monday that the date was purely "speculative".

Instead, the firm only confirmed the shooter would be out in the fall for PS3, 360 and PC.