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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.
Of all the hundreds of games that come out, a generic, free-to-play money grubbing MMO is the one that gets coverage on slashdot? One that really brings nothing interesting or new? And in spite of that gets an extremely positive summary that addresses no flaws?
It's like you think we're too damn stupid to see when content is replaced with ads. Can't you stop insulting our intelligence enough to mark sponsored content? Please?
The video has loud obnoxious ads which you cannot skip.
With three letters, you can get most gamers' attention: MMO.
More like you can get every game producer's attention, wondering how he can get a piece of that revenue.
The three letters that get most gamers' attention: FUN. Who cares if it's MO or not.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Slashdot - why is the production value of your in-house video content so poor? The cheap headset mic audio quality and low bitrate compression make this kind of content feel hackey and effectively unwatchable. I know video is new-ish for /. but you're not reinventing the wheel, and you've had a minute to sort this stuff out guys ... it's amateur hour.
I love the game, I sank some money in it already, but man, the game's having a crapload of issues. Between lost transaction data and buggy PvE missions, to bugs introduced to the game simply because some sub-team did something with the code right before the patch is released... They have lots to fix there.
Few days ago they announced they will completely drop the PvP part of the game (until further notice). I just hope this means more focus on the PvE part, which is nice... until you do that for 20 days and realize there's not much else to do.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The video is a loud obnoxious ad.
(Flicks through the Firefall Wiki)
5v5 map... 7v7 map... 12v12 map... 5v5 map... good god, that's pathetic. The first M in MMO is supposed to stand for Massive, not Matchmaking.