The MMO space is a cutthroat corner of the industry. You’re either constantly changing, constantly evolving, constantly innovating – or you’re left by the wayside.
Some MMOs combat this by going free to play and relying on micro-transactions to survive. Others offer up a unique experience that can be had no where else knowing that a small, loyal fan base will be able to support them.
Firefall has decided to do both at the same time.
The developers of Firefall, Red Five Studios, are not blind. They are well aware of these paradigm shifts and have reacted accordingly. They were also kind enough to let me play about with it for thirty minutes so that I might tell you how so.
Firefall is a massively multiplayer online shooter. Now, before you start having trauma flashbacks to Hellgate: London and Tabula Rasa, let me tell you that Firefall is, first and foremost, a very competent shooter. The weirdness, wonkiness and just plain offness’ that made those other MMO shooters die well earned early deaths is not here. Firefall’s combat makes it feel like something you might readily purchase for $60 at Walmart for your Playbox McTendo.
That’s not to say that it’s perfect. Weapons don’t really have any of that almighty “heft” to them that modern shooter fans demand. If I had to make a comparison, which society says I do, I’d say that they feel as though they’ve fallen right out of Borderlands. They may look pretty devastating and distinct, but lack punch.
In fact, Firefall is a lot like Borderlands in a number of ways. The art style, for example, shares that pseudo-cell shaded aesthetic with Gearbox’s golden boy. More than that, the MMOFPS actually uses the good old ‘floating numbers over heads’ technique also featured in Borderlands. While you would expect that from an MMO, it’s a little bit eerie when the two games look so much alike. I should say that they’re hardly identical. Firefall forsakes Borderlands comic book crosshatching, for instance, but you might be forgiven for mistakenly gunning down the wrong one in a dark alley.
Where Firefall pushes out on its own is in the way that its world works. The game’s overworld is obscured by both a fog of war, which can be pushed back and explored over the course of the main game, and a deadly, toxic cloud.
This cloud is how Red Five intends to canonically justify new game content. When the studio completes a new piece of content, with a new area to explore, players are actually tasked with a supposedly massive quest line. This line will task players with dispersing swathes of the poisonous shroud in order to access the wealth within.
While the majority of the game is designed for either group cooperation or solo play, there are some interesting competitive components as well.
According to Red Five, there is a more traditional PVP mode in which players combat one another in arenas cut out of the world. I didn’t get a chance to play this part, but it’s what the Red Five representative told me next that has me the most interested.
While the feature isn’t active within the beta just yet, there are plans for a subset of ‘wild zones’. In these areas, players may open fire on one another without pretext or warning. The way it sounds, these areas should function much like nullsec in the ever intimidating EVE Online. In EVE Online, exploration of these lawless sectors is incentivized with high rewards and even higher risks. We’ll have to wait until the game is finally released to find out, but if Red Five can manage to balance the penalty of death with the prospect of appropriate reward, this could be a very cool feature indeed. I can almost imagine a sort of ‘EVE Online lite’ cropping up around this specific feature if it’s done successfully. That could draw the attention of players that find EVE enticing, but are too scared to try it themselves.
Firefall is as I said; a very competent shooter. However, the trappings that the developer has built up around it in order to cope with an ever-changing marketplace are incredibly promising. Wether or not they (and the game’s low price of absolutely free) can justify its existence remains to be seen. I, for one, look forward to trying out a lot more of the beta and finding out for myself.
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