According to Splash Damage’s CEO and game director Paul Wedgwood, social interaction is the future of gaming. With the development of Brink, gamers are one step closer to a first-person shooter without bots or NPCs but actual characters within the game, multiplayer or single-player, that are all controlled by human opponents.

“I think we knew that ten years ago. I’ll go on the record and tell you that social interaction is the future of interactive entertainment,” said Wedgwood in an interview with CVG when discussing merging the single-player and multiplayer experiences in Brink.

“I can’t wait for every piece of AI to be replaced by a real human player. But, until that happens, I would at least love to see AI that was more autonomous in games that challenged you in compelling unrepeatable ways.”

As new hardware becomes available to console developers, games will begin to have the technology to meet the requirements for a full fledged MMOFPS.

“For a long time it hasn’t been technically feasible because you need super low latency connections for good shooter combat and that’s generally incompatible with 1000 people being on a server at the same time,” Wedgwood continued.

“There are enough solutions around now so that it’s reasonably feasible.”

“I know that there are some teams on the periphery working on ideas for this. I saw some video footage of something that I quite liked the look of, they deployed some harvester then they were bouncing around shooting aliens that were attacking them.”

“So I think there’s definitely going to be some cool stuff that comes around but I think the massively multiplayer shooter, one where we’re all engaged in the same continuous environment is the thing that’s going to truly impress me next,” he said.

Think back to some of the features that have evolved in first person shooters in just the last few years, with everything from cover systems and AI to destructibility and number of players possible in battles (MAG with 256 for console based FPS) seeing improvements. Brink looks to raise the bar in many gameplay aspects, shipping May 10 in US, May 13 in Europe for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC.