The more videos I see of brink, the more I feel like the visuals for this game are childish. Dont get me wrong, I admire SD for trying to bring color into shooter. It is not like the designs bother me, but it definitely does not appeal to me. I can honestly say that the characters are memorable but I find myself wishing they were forgettable. And not only the faces, but the clothing too. Many of the clothing styles just seem cartoon-ish, like the bug for example. I wont criticize those who like it, but exactly who is it that likes it? I wanted to make a poll to see how different age groups react to the design in this game.

I made a decision to only include 'Like it' and 'Dont like it' choices and not a 'dont mind it' choice because the main point of this poll is whether you like the designs or you would have rather they went a different road with it. 'dont mind it' feels like a completely different concept. e.g. i dont mind american cheese, but i prefer swiss for my sandwiches

i think it looks awesome something unique =]

I don't happen to think that being artistic with your game's look means its aimed at children. Brink appears to be vibrant but gritty when i look at it. It forces you to acknowledge all of the ugly details by exaggerating them. Very similar to a graphic novel artstyle. You make it sound like anything other than realism is childish.

i like brinks style better, other games try too hard to look "realistic" which IMO makes em look worse.

The game looks great to me... im tired of the realistic shooters/graphics.

Lawl I'm the only one who voted for 30+!

I would say brinks visual flair isn't hyperrealism but rather heavily stylised. To answer your question yes I like it...It helps to give Brinks visuals thier own identity and stand out more because everyone else is going for hyperrealism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU9lv_WqK6k

Woooo 21-25 year old demographic represent!

On topic, I love the stylized realism. With the market clogged with all the COD clones out there I'm completely bored with the muddled brown "realistic" palette.

I like BRINK's graphic style, I think its cool. Games that try to be hardcoe realistic mostly fails and I think BRINK wouldn't look so cool with different graphic :spotted owl:

Wow, im VERY surprised with the results of this poll. I though that the 13-16 range would dominite in the 'like it' part, which it did, but anything above that i though there would be many more who would have preferred different artistic style. I would have preferred something more along the lines of army of 2 40th day, but that is just my opinion.

It's needs more gore, I think. Otherwise, I love the art style as it is, in fact I think it could be even more surreal looking!

Also: High-intensity graphics have a tendency to go so far that it starts to hurt my brain to look at it after while =/

I like the non-realistic graphics in shooter games. To many times ive been playing COD and I look at someone and dont shoot at them...Idk why but that never happends to me with toony looking shooters like TF2, or MNC. Because you can tell instantly what you are looking at theres no mistaking who is on the other team.

Age should really have very little to do with artistic style preference.

Personally, I like their artistic choices for BRINK and their reasons that I've heard stated. It allows for quick identification of players, while allowing for colourful, dynamic and slightly flamboyant environments.

I get pretty bored of "realistic" settings in games. I play games as entertainment, an escape from reality, not a virtual reality.

I beg to differ. I think that age is a huge factor in one's preferences, be it art or not. I believe that the older one is, the more he/ she would be drawn to serious, not necessarily realistic, visuals. Outside of this forum, most of my friends have told me exactly that: Brink's graphics dont bother them, but they find them a bit TOO cartoon-like. oh well, no point going against the majority.

Putting back the color shooters.

looks more to me like the 17-20 and 21-25 range are the ones rocking it. 13-16 is 3rd. The art style is awesome, unique and vibrant. They introduced what many games are missing out on these days, color. And aside from that, sure their character design is elongated and isn't completely anatomically correct, but its still awesome. They could have gone the normal route, tried to make it "real" and done/failed like other games who try that too. But no, they went the extra mile, and made something awesome. I agree that the characters and scenes are memorable, but not forgettable in the least. I am just about to crack that 20-21 age bracket, but I find it incredibly appealing and innovative, I too, like others, have gotten bored with the "standard" way to make a game look. That doesn't mean I'll stop playing or buying them, it just means, every now and then I want something else, something better. BRINK does that, and I personally am completely psyched for May 10th.

I think what they were going for with the cartoon-y feel was to stretch the boundaries between realism and unrealism (Is that a word? No? Then sue me I'm keeping it there). Meaning, In a realistic game I (If not most people) will see something unrealistic and say 'Well, What the f***?!' And getting frustrated. An example of that would be: A Javelin missile curving around a UAV and coming back to kill me like it had some vendetta against it's user pre-set into it. But with a cartoon-y game people will more-so look at it like 'Yeah, Ok, That's kinda odd but I'll accept it'. An example of that would be: In Halo 3 I managed to survive in a Warthog being hit by the missile thing a Phantom shoots and shooting it down with my turret right as the warthog decided "I go boom now". Stuff like that kind of leaves you going 'Woah, I just did that'. That's why the unrealistic, Cartoon-y games prevail in my opinion. It's because it's not shoving realism in your face that it'll be more enjoyable.

I think its more accurate to say that peoples preference in art is defined by how liberal or conservative or liberal a person is. I dont mean it in a political sense, just that some people like the old way, and other people like to see things going in a new direction. As people age, they tend to become more conservative, which is where the age correlation comes from. However, there are older individuals who are liberal and younger individuals who are conservative.

If you had everyone include if they were more conservative or more liberal in general, it would probably line up really closely with the poll. More closely, I predict, than the ages line up.

I think your bias in the quote above ("drawn to serious visuals"; implying that other preferences are less serious) shows that you tend to be a conservative person, which lines up with your lack of appeal towards the artstyle in Brink. Not that being conservative, or even having a bias, is bad; everyone sees things shaded by their own opinion, its just how people are.

One thing to keep in mind about this poll is that you polling age and nothing else - in your post you are assuming maturity and deepness of thought is a constant amongst the ages, the lower the age the lower the maturity of the person. While arguable, it is a logical fallacy to assume this with such a small pool to survey. The designs to me aren't childish, anything but. For my experiences, the last Call of Duty single-player campaign felt like a little kid wearing his daddies suit in front of the mirror, while from what I've seen of Brink the atmosphere within the single-player campaign is more of a Robert Redford in The Castle.

Once you get 30 votes in a given age group, you can assume that it is normal distribution, and relatively representative of the group at hand

If we ignore the age part of the vote, we have 50 people (more than enough for normal distribution) who show a clear preference for the current artstyle.

The group being polled, however, is "people who care enough about the game to actually come on the forums". The fact that this is the official forums is going to slant the vote in the favor of people who like how the game looks.

If you wanted to get a proper poll, you would need to do it at a generic gaming website, which would only include the group we care about; gamers (hardcoe gamers, granted, but it would be a better mix than you find here). You then could take the results of the poll and make a thread here about it.

Radically stylised =/= cartoon for kids

What? 30 votes? Try 3,000 votes over a sufficiently random pool of survey-takers. The OP didn't create the poll to see who liked Brink's art direction, he or she created the poll to see if there was a correlation between age and liking Brink's art direction. That would be fine in itself, but age cannot be directly applied to intellectual/emotion maturity. That the OP implied a correlation between age and intellectual/emotional maturity undermines the purpose of the poll and creates skewed results that will be interpreted incorrectly.

Discovered that the game is rated R16 here in New Zealand, restricted ratings going R13, R16 (also legal age for six) and R18 (also legal age for purchase of alcohol). Our ratings system, and overall laws, are a lot different than US of course. But tbh, R16 isn't exactly aimed at a "younger audience" often...

I (as a 13-16 yr old) resent your opinion that 13-16 yr olds are childish and easily amused by pretty colours.


Anyway (as has been stated before), the art style is more likely to drive off most 7-15 yr olds, who'll think it's a kid's game and reject it as a sign of their manlyness and maturity, before going off to arm wrestle and [censored].


(Yes, I am 13-16. So are most of my friends. We're just really self-aware.)