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Game Preview: Firefall (video)
With three letters, you can get most gamers' attention: MMO. With three more, you can just as quickly inspire skepticism and doubt: FPS. Ever since the MMORPG craze got underway, players and developers have been looking for ways to meld it with the FPS craze that's been going on since the days of Doom. Unfortunately, it's proven much more difficult than expected. The spectrum ranges only from high profile failures, like Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, to minor successes, like the Planetside games. That's why Red 5 Studios, a company built upon industry veterans from studios like Blizzard, has been hesitant to throw around the term 'MMOFPS' to describe its first game: Firefall. They say emphatically that it's 'a shooter first and foremost,' and that it also has MMORPG elements. It's more than an academic distinction; they feel that you can't simply cobble together two different genres. In order for the game to work, it has to do the shooter part well, with the relevant RPG parts (character advancement, a persistent world, crafting, etc.) added only in service to the shooter aspect. As Firefall takes shape in an open beta period, it's clear that this is the proper approach. Red 5's unfinished experiment is promising.
I stopped the video once the 2nd of two 60 second ads came on.
I read earlier today on The Escapist that they've basically suspended all PvP in the game. So it looks like they've got a lot of kinks to work out.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
They just decided to remove PVP from the game for the time being while they work out the kinks. I have been in the beta since the beginning and I'm not sure what to think. When the game first was unveiled, it seemed like PVP (normal fps multiplayer) was the main focus of the game. Fast forward to today, the CEO claims only 3% of Firefall players are playing PVP (I believe it). PVP definitely needs work, so this is probably a good thing - but I have to wonder how deep The9's pockets are (Red5's Chinese investors)....so far, they have allowed Red5 to completely change gameplay over and over....which can be a good thing, but I worry about how many people are getting burned out due to the game changing every few months. I read somewhere that they have spent more on this game than Blizzard spent on the making of WoW and Diablo3. I don't know if that is true though....if so, it should be worrisome because this game is nowhere near as complete as either of those games.
It also seems weird that they are spending all this money on marketing (million dollar statues, multiple RED cameras, advertising blasted all over PAX and other conventions) - without generating money.
I've been playing this game here and there since I saw their booth at AX...2...3 years ago? I can't remember.
It's an interesting game, and it is fun for a while, but the biggest problem is that there's not much to do.
The world is fun to explore, especially when equipped with jetpack/boots/whatever, but there's only so much of it.
Beyond that, it quickly becomes a grind, and as such quickly gets boring.
They introduced a good deal of dynamic events and such to try to keep it interesting, but they don't change much.
The end/world boss seems interesting, but every time I've attempted it the game lags so bad, seemingly due to the lack of optimization on the server end to deal with so many players in a compact space. I usually die long before I know what even hit me.
TL;DR: It's a good way to kill a little bit of time if you're bored, but if you're looking for a serious game to sink your teeth into, look elsewhere.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I've been playing it for about 2 weeks:
- The content that is there, mostly works. There's still some wonky stuff like Tornadoes getting stuck in cliffs, mobs that get stuck in geometry, mobs that spawn in strange places, etc.
- They've done something intelligent by making the ARES missions dynamically generated. While you may know the terrain of a particular cave / interior, there's half a dozen different missions that can play out in that location.
- The overworld is seamless and reasonably large (3-4km from end to end, about 1.5km wide). But they've hit the technical limits, so future areas will have to be done like the "melding pockets" where you have some sort of zone transition. (In fact, I believe they are currently going back and reworking the melding pockets to be full-sized or larger zones then they are in the current beta.)
- Resource acquisition with thumpers is something new. No cliched swinging of picks to tap off a few resources. Instead, you have to defend it against the local wildlife.
- The locations are very well designed. One cave feels different then another cave, most of the locations feel very unique. Whoever designed the world did a very good job of giving the different outposts a specific feel and then decorating them accordingly. Much better then the cut-n-paste dungeons or outposts from some other games.
- The chatter from Aero and Oilspill (in-game NPCs who talk to you over the radio) still needs a lot of work. They tend to natter on a bit much and if you complete a mission quickly, they may end up telling you things that happened 2-3 minutes ago or give you information that is not needed. That being said -- their lines are very well done, and you will get different lines in different locations based on the local design. It's a feature that I think is unique to Firefall.
- The gunplay is reasonably solid and has a decent feel. The enemy AI still needs work, but does okay.
All-in-all, it's not a bad way to spend 40-60 hours of playtime without having to pay a penny. And I've had enough fun so far that I went and plunked down $75 for the ARES starter pack. Although I'm not sure that I will sign up for a membership package where I pay $15/mo. The content is still a little too thin for that level of commitment.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
One word for you: Planetside.
Ignore the slight in the summary, Soulskill is just a jealous revisionist. Planetside is 10+ years old (predating Call of Duty, Battlefield Vietnam, Halo 2, most of Medal of Honor, World of Warcraft and the Source engine) as has happily ticked along with up to 450 players per continent (map) in hectic PvP battles that put pretty much every game released since to shame. Despite Sony proving it's possible to scale an FPS up that far, everyone else has been too scared to even try.
Firefall's PvP is 5v5. That's just laughable! Is this really what we're supposed to get excited about these days? The last three PvP FPS games I would have recommended to people were, in reverse chronological order, Natural Selection, Planetside and Counterstrike v1.6. Despite a ludicrous increase in the power of computers and the speed of internet connections since these games were released, the ambitions of developers are going backwards at an increasing rate!