Firefall’s Mark Kern has spoken to PC Gamer about how he wants Firefall to not fall into one of the industry’s current pitfalls. You might know his work – he has previously worked on Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and was a team leader on World of Warcraft. Now he is developing Firefall, an FPS MMO, with Red 5 Studios.
“We’ve got to break out of the mould,” he said. “If I see another action MMO combat game with exclamation points over quest givers, I’m going to commit seppuku! We’re pouring so much money down a very stale formula. It’s an illusion to say that ‘Oh, that’s safety’. It used to be safety but it’s not anymore.
“Gamers are ready to try different things. It’s time to take risks and I’m really looking towards the independents to try that. I want to see the Notch of MMOs. Please don’t spend $200 million on another WoW clone because it just doesn’t do anybody any favours and you’re going to lose your shirt.
“I used to draw [a venn diagram of] what I’d call The Circle of Suck. Tabula Rasa came out and Hellgate: London came out, and I drew one circle that said ‘MMO gameplay.’ I drew another circle that said, ‘shooter gameplay.’ Where they intersect – that little sliver – is full of suck.”
Kern’s idea is that an FPS and MMO hybrid will not work with equal parts of both genres. Instead, Red 5 has concentrated on the shooter aspects of the game, and after getting it to satisfying levels , progressively and selectively adding MMO elements.
“Let’s take the idea of open world sandbox play and feature hundreds of players instead of four or eight player co-op,” he said. “Let’s take towns, crafting and resources and combine it all together. And that group would be a much more fun game when we started playing it than anything we’d tried before.”
Firefall is slated to come out in December 2011 on the PC for free.