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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.
... Since MMOFPS = DRM fps. FPS games were never meant to be massively multiplayer to begin with. You have to take special care when you get greater then 32 players on a server all at the same time.
MMO RPG's aren't action oriented to begin with, their combat has been simplified down to click menu buttons to fit latency. FPS games are action games and are latency sensitive. The last thing someone needs is for crap latency/packetloss/flux in their game. Not to mention all the concessions they make in terms of gameplay to attract a casual audience. A big no thanks.