Saw my housemate playing it on beta few days ago. From what I gathered, it's can be basically described as either Borderlands with a much bigger multiplayer platform or an FPS guild wars with guns. Nothing serious as a deathmatch contender, however for a beta game, it has a lot of gamer interest and seems like a nice casual way to play with friends, but nothing esport-like (kinda like medal of dutyfield AGHAGHAGHAGAHGA)
Looks amazing + I want a beta key when I upgrade my pc.
I will never ever ever ever ever ever ever play an FPS where letting go of a movement key makes your character instantly come to an absolute standstill.
I've been in beta for a long time. I was apart of the very small closed beta team about a year ago, so I've got some experience with it.
Initially, the game was slow, clunky and relatively crappy. Could it have succeeded as a casual, non-skill based, MMOFPS? Maybe. Let me reiterate however... it was bad. However, months and months pass and finally, they decided that their current combat system was crap. They revamped it in the latest milestone. It's faster, more skill-based and generally better.
Bad news, though, is that it being better than the previous shitty combat system wasn't very hard. The new system is better, yes, but it's still not great. It's still very low skill-ceiling (ie. most classes other than Assault have easy-to-aim weaponry) and the imbalances are still very prevalent. Also, leveling up the 'tiers' of battleframes is a monotonous turd of a process. Is the PvP fun? Yea, sometimes. Is it eSports? About as close to eSports as Shootmania pretends to be. Another company willing to throw tons of money at a game (1 million prize pool for 2013) and not have a game to back it up.
To summarize, Firefall has potential. I've been trying to push for more depth in the movement (ie. movement a la Virtual On, or Exteel; horizontal/ground usage for jets as a strafe mechanic) but it seems they are content with their current movement. It doesn't have a good mode like CTF, which works well with class based combat. Their maps are atrociously bad, as they seemingly have no clue wtf competitive FPS gaming feels like. They hired a Frag Doll (Rhoulette) to be their eSports person, for some dumb reason.
Anyways, it might be good down the road but right now, it's just another shitty FPS game trying to be an eSport title.
assault is the easiest class to hit with I find. Also, check their youtube video on the esports toolkit - some really cool features there for streamers. Which Rhoulette was working on...
Assault is the easiest to hit? Don't get me wrong, I didn't say Assault was 'hard', I said aside from Assault, the other classes have easy-to-aim weaponry. The Plasma Cannon is a joke to anyone who has played Quake. Air shots become a common occurrence once you understand the basics of it (speed and arc). But if you're trying to tell me Assault is easier than the joke that is Dreadnaught HMG, or Biotech Needler, or Engineer lazer, you gotta be kidding me. Not to mention, all 3 of those guns are more powerful than Assault's Plasma Cannon. If either of those classes want to kill you and they're half way decent, they'll mow right through your HP. Then, the problem of not having any decent functioning way of evading due to crap sprint mechanic, no effective horizontal usage of jetpack energy and a very limited control z-axis, you've got a bigger problem on your hands.
Regarding the eSport toolkit... great. Now I can spectate a supremely slow and boring game at different angles that don't matter. Don't get me wrong, it's a great step in the right direction, but having all this fluff and a game that puts me and anyone else to sleep doesn't save the game. If Rhoulette's job is to think up a toolkit, then that job could've went to anyone with half a brain. Is she supposed to be some eSport connection? I guess she's got tits so that helps in this industry.
Zoot, I like you, but don't you have something to do with Firefall in the future? Biases aside, maybe you should actually look at how crappy this game will be as an eSport.
Honestly, I've only played this game with 160 ping or more. I'm waiting for European servers to be around. Then I guess I'll be able to give a more informed opinion. I've only played the engineer and assault a bit, I've got a tier 2 recon.
I don't think the game is snooze-worthy at all. I think it could become dull if the only gamemode that's actively played is TDM - that could get boring after a while. Although the PvE stuff I'm fond of.
There are many things I like about the game, but there are also lots of things I hope they change/add. I spoke to one of the R5S guys today, and what he said definitely made it sound like the future was more exciting than the present.
I don't have anything to do with Firefall right now, but I like the game and I'd like to get involved :)
The PvE stuff means little to this site or discussion, does it? Although, I think the PvE stuff is just as mundane. Yay, jetpack into the air, shoot dinosaurs, thumper for crystite, repeat ad nauseum. Brutal.
What I said though was it has 'potential', but the route they seem to be going is the League of Legends way of eSport... funnel some money into prizes for the first year and see how it goes. I doubt the community will sustain this game, it's just not good enough and not fun enough.
When I say I like PvE, I mean I enjoy running around the beautiful scenery when I lose motivation to play PvP on 160ping.
Isn't the League of Legends way of eSport done by everyone now? Can hardly criticize them for that. I don't think we can judge it's success now. We'll find out next year how people take to it.
Yea, the way its done is the way League of Legends is doing it, just like DOTA2 and to an extent SC2.
However, the difference is that the successful, GREAT eSport games will be driven by the community. SC2 and DOTA2 will undoubtedly run and function without the primary developer support, for sure. Would LoL even be viable or considered anything but a casual game without Riot pumping in tons of money to get it into big tournaments? Probably not.
That's my point. Quake is 'dead' but keeps on living because of the great community it has.
Is it true F2P or just P2W hiding behind F2P? Example Tribes Ascend is 100% F2P but to actually get the good stuff in a timely fashion (read not grinding for months of play) you need to pay a substantial amount (arguably more than $60).
It's F2P. Currently, the only 'P2W' aspect is you need to pay to have more frame slots. Right now, it's set to 3 battleframes. You can purchase up to 2 more, I believe. Is that P2W? To some degree I guess it can be; situational at best, for sure.
They're trying to be an eSport game so if they have any semblance of a clue, they won't even fathom any P2W elements.
Firefall is okay, the trouble is that it doesn't really separate itself from similar competitive games. I played it months ago (before the introduction of PvP) - and the constant requirement to thumper in PvE turned into more of a chore than a fun and emerging game-play experience, mainly because at the time there was no alternative.
I decided to give it another go after watching the TDM tournament from Gamescom to see how the PvP played out. The community is awesome and they've been great at helping me find my way around the game and i was enjoying the majority of my time with it, but as expected I've become terribly frustrated with the balance issues that are always inherent within games that feature class based game mechanics... especially so when you introduce a death-match game-mode. Other games with similar mechanics avoid these issues by introducing various limitations to classes in competition, and different game-types all together... the latter of which i feel needs to happen if it's to hit a major tournament circuit next year.
It definitely has potential, and the development team have done an impressive job with implementing almost everything a client would need for hosting a tournament (not sure if demo support?). I'm still open to revisiting the game in the future, however right now I'd rather put my spare time into an already polished game than be one of many players BETA testing the balance to help tweak specific cvars in something that just doesn't sit right with me at the moment.
To be serious for just a minute though, we definitely need more developers like those working on Firefall (Red5 Studios), and even in it's current form one could argue that it is in fact competition ready. I really do hope it finds success as they appear to genuinely care about rewarding it's loyal competitive player base with huge tournament prize-pots, whilst offering the feature set to go with it.
For me however, I'm just going to reserve complete judgement until launch day where I'll revisit Firefall as a player first... since i won't commentate anything unless I've played it (and enjoyed it) at a decent level.
I agree. Like I said above, it has potential. However, Red5 isn't immune to the 'arrogance' a developer has. The fact they revamped the whole combat system (in a way) is pretty rare in a beta stage. The criticism, though, of the latest iteration of combat is generally met with ire from the developers. This is where I feel they need to continue to be open. Great, they changed a lot... but they didn't change enough, and I think that bothers them, especially the main combat guy Xenogenic. Maybe that's speculative but they seem very uninterested in further opinion/modification to the current combat. Maybe they're focused on the PvE milestone at the moment, as well.
Anyways, I made a post on the forum pointing out 3 (sorta 4) glaring issues with the game and thats: 1) movement depth 2) map design and 3) tiers, with the 4th one being balance, but that would probably come after. To defend Red5, they have already mentioned that they're hiring 'eSport map designers' (whatever that is) for some new maps. They might be doing a ladder/team PvP-only tier battle frame as well. The problem is the biggest, which is movement.
After a day of playing I believe that it might be a very good coop game, one day. Though it looks like it lacks a lot of content for specific groups. Well global events are cool but sometimes one would like to do this on one's own.
Also, it's a MMO so where are the sieges, battlegrounds etc etc?
Obviously the PVP concept is great but those casual folks love fucking around killing 12v4, and we can't.
What about killing system outside of PVP zones, like interrupting someone's minerals collecting? As it is now it feels like we're one big loving family.
The rewards from PVP are completely independent of your personal results, inb4 people adding and camping in spawn due to their retardness. (there should be some points for killing/dealing damage/healing etc etc which would eventually reward players)
I enjoy this skill-based point of view from devs, it already works fine compared to other MMOs, but they should focus more on casuals (PVE), more instances (maybe even some survivals?) etc, maybe some kind of open areas where mobs spawn on their own? Like this portal thingy but on bigger scale with friendly fire on.
It feels like the game could be Left4Dead, Teamfortress, Shootmania, WoW in one place. Oh I think it's already better then shootmania tbh.
There is MUCH work to be done. And I wouldn't expect it anytime soon as they (probably) have one team working on the game that could as well be 5 separate games.
The idea is great, however I'm not sure where they expect to find enough resources to finish it. Unlike TOR, I doubt they have 300m. On the other hand, games like Lineage2 were completely shit in its early stages.
If you expect Quake-like gameplay, dont even bother. I just hope they won't waste fucking loads of money on tournaments when they can create something really good.