Game Beholder

It has sure been a long time since Red 5 announced Firefall. Their very stylish sci-fi free to play first/third person shooter mmorpg (phew).

I’ve been following it for a while, and I just recently got an invite to the closed beta. Which as the developers say, is noticeably still undergoing many changes. But even as unfinished as it evidently is, I can safely say Firefall is an extremely fun addition to the online community.

The world is vast and vivid. And the design is fantastic.

The first thing to notice is that the game looks great, there is tonnes of personality in the world and the characters, although right now there is not much to introduce you to the actual events that have led to the action in the game. As with other MMOs, you get thrown straight into character creation, and while the personality of the characters (seems like a hybrid between gears of war and Borderlands), the classes and the variety of customisation options is far from weak, the game is currently not quite up to par with other games we’ve seen lately like Tera or GW2. However all of this could change greatly on release since they are regularly updating the options.

The class archetypes seem to fall into familiar places, there is a heavy damage Assault unit, The Dreadnaught: your average Brick shithouse, Strong and Heavy. A more swift and agile sniper / scout Recon class, a somewhat strategic /crowd control and support Engineer class, and a heavier support / healing class, the Biotech.

I know I’m the ultimate badass, the UI though, has a little explaining to do.

Right from the get-go, influences of this game become evident, and that’s not a bad thing. The striking pseudo cell-shaded graphic style, again reminds me of Borderlands but in a cleaner more outworldish way, with even sharper and more coherent overall aesthetics. Also with the inclusion of Jetpack boots as a standard on all characters a la Tribes, movement and combat make you feel awesome (although sometimes not quite as responsive as it should be) allowing you to hover around and drop punishment on your foes (or just visit a quest giver).

After a few quests it becomes evident that you’re gonna have to be smart with your abilities and your use of the jetpack to survive in the wilderness. Enemies are aggressive, fast and do heavy damage if you are not paying attention. And for once, night-time is actually a threat. You need to turn your flashlight on, and stay out of deep water, or you’ll be lost in the dark and dead.

From what I gather, the story re-tells the old fable of space mercenaries in a foreign planet enforcing a rather necessary terraforming/colonization programme, while the evil buglike native wildlife tries to make them dinner, but it is not currently explained in the beta. A lot of the plot surrounds the necessity of mining minerals from the planet with “Thumpers”, some form of sonic drills that extract minerals from the depths. Needless to say, the aliens are annoyed by this rude procedures, so they come out in hordes to teach you some manners.
This whole premise is hardly new, but it gets the job done, gives you a motive to run around, analyzing terrain, fixing water pumps, defending mining stations, recharging colony shields and resupplying depots (among others). At the end of the day, what we all want is to kill space bugs, and there’s plenty of that.

So you scan the terrain, call a thumper.. and shoot anything that moves.

But for all that shooting, we need bigger guns, and tighter mech suits, so the game takes care of that as well! Although I’ve only scratched the surface, there seems to be an extremely deep multiple tiered Battlegear weapon/armor/skill customisation system. With the EXP you get from quests and exploration, you can get unlock different upgrades made by different mercenary companies ? that expectedly have various effects. And you can also purchase various things and craft with materials mined. You can also Unlock other classes for your same character, having up to 3 different specific build slots available for free.
However, a lot of the customization seems to be tied to the old microtransaction trick (mainly aesthetic upgrades), so you might have to pay to get your character to look / play as you always dreamed.

I hear that a lot of the focus of the game is in PVP, which makes sense as a fps, and to boost popularity with competitiveness. I haven’t tried it yet, but  it would probably work well with the overall game mechanics…  so I can imagine it being a highlight of the game   (just put jetpacks on anything and its 10x awesomer)

Pajama Jetpacks… a dream come true.

At this point its hard to judge Firefall harshly considering there are clear ongoing improvements, but I did find some issues in a few areas that hopefully won’t crawl into the final release.
Graphically, although the game looks fantastic, it failed to perform properly, a clear framerate stutter endured throughout all graphical settings, even lowering the graphic quality, in fact it seemed to improve slightly on higher settings, which seems odd.
Also, although the quest system does get rid of some of the tedious need to backtrack to the quest giver and has some nicely voice acted sequences with pretty character portraits, it’s structure does little to improve the tried and tiresome fetch quest structure. I probably wouldn’t even notice this if I hadn’t been playing GuildWars 2, but this traditional system seems outdated and static by comparison.
Additionally, there is very little in the way of introducing the players to any aspect of the game, beyond a basic minimal initial tutorial, in the current state, there is close to no guidance into the diverse and somewhat complex systems of the game. What is worse, often interfaces, although stylish, make understanding even less intuitive.

The map is informative and stylish, but far less intuitive than it should.

An issue that I had that may be harder to tackle, was the complexity of the vertical navigation. It took me a while to understand where some vendors and upgrade stations were in the map, and often the amount of small icons and details tend to clump up unrecognizably.

Less frequently, the necessity of ammo in the gun, although obviously understandable often became a bore, especially when I was just about to finish a quest and I had to backtrack to a supply station to get ammo just to kill one other enemy to finish the quest. This added to the somewhat erratic lagging and twitching enemy behavior (causing me to spend more ammo than desired because the enemy inexplicably strafed a few dozen meters), and the unreliable character movement that sometimes gets stuck on unnoticed objects in the ground, made questing less enjoyable than it could have been.

In any case, Firefall seems to be improving steadily, and many issues have been fixed during my play period. There are many genuinely interesting ideas in the game, and it is overall quite fun to play. Hopefully we can see all the kinks ironed out by release.