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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?
I stopped the video once the 2nd of two 60 second ads came on.
The video has loud obnoxious ads which you cannot skip.
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."
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.
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 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.
But it won several Oscars!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
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?
Both the Borderlands world and gameplay style would make for a great MMO and I sorely hope to see it done one day. The respawn rates, loot distribution, etc, have already been designed nicely around both a perpetual multiplayer and continuing singleplayer experience. Sure, they'd have to open the world up a bit more, make maps much larger than they already are, etc, but Borderlands seems a great contender for "could be an awesome MMOFPSRPGOMGBBQ"
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
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?
"the FPS craze that's been going on since the days of Doom"
A 20 year "craze"?
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!
Actually, it's even worse than I thought. It's not limited to 5v5, it's limited to no PvP at all because it was so terribly bad:
http://n4g.com/news/1354614/firefall-pvp-suspended-while-red-5-studios-completely-rethinks-it
(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.
Planetside was a great game that was slowly and unrelentingly trashed by idiotic devs. Looking back at its heyday I consider it one of my favorite video games of all time. But the devs didn't understand balance and/or were outright biased, so with every patch (and every nerf to anything that wasn't an NC-specific weapon) they kept losing more players. And rather than fix the balance problems, they tried to keep players interested with "Hey, look at this!"-type big ideas that bore the distinctive scent of corporate suits, rather than game designers. An expansion that kept players interested for about a week (I don't think I ever saw a real battle in the Core Combat caverns after the honeymoon period ended), a wtf-level retcon of the entire in-game universe from one world with ten continents to ten separate worlds (???), and of course adding mechwarriors. But crazy new shakeups don't fix a game whose real issue is a simple balance problem. And once enough players had left that full-scale battles became the exception rather than the standard, the entire purpose of the game (massive, army-on-army combat) was gone. I don't know, maybe it's shaped up since I last played (2005 sometime), but it definitely didn't seem to be heading that way.
Now, I'm not arguing with you that Firefall is any better. 5v5 isn't even in the same league as army-level combat. But I wouldn't consider "minor success" to be jealous revisionism. Planetside was driven into the ground, pure and simple.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
One word for you: Planetside.
Also, though it's not an FPS, and the multiplayer element has been 100% designed and implemented by fans...
Just Cause 2 Multiplayer
Fun fact: a bunch of the guys on the JC2:MP dev team are the same people who developed Multi-Theft Auto (GTA multiplayer mod).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese