Firefall is an upcoming MMOFPS from Red 5 that has, as CEO Mark Kern joked during a Skype interview with Eurogamer, undergone so many changes that it's almost a sequel of itself.
"The internal joke is it's more life Firefall 2," he says.
Almost everything about the game has been somehow tweaked or enhanced, from mining and crafting to level progression, to hit-box detection, customization and special abilities. In a rather long blog post on the game's official website details, significant changes have been made in just about every corner of the game.
Kern explains that the changes were "player driven," saying that feedback from players who experienced the beta helped shape the myriad of alterations.
"So we decided to open our beta very, very early and this was very unusual because most betas are when you're content complete, feature complete and there's no time to really change anything except a couple of numbers here and there. We decided that we wanted to actually mitigate our risk, get to the fun quickly and find out what's working and what's not with our customers as soon as possible," he said.
Kern explained some of the nuances of the changes, including how the team went about unifying the shooter aspects of the game with the MMO infrastructure: for instance, rather than having gradual improvement like most RPGs, FIrefall contains tiers. When a player reaches a new tier, new equipment becomes available to them.
"What we're trying to do is provide more tactical options to players. More ways to play their class and use their skill to figure out which style of customisation of their battleframe suits the way they want to play. That is much, much more difficult than simply increasing the amount of damage and health at every step. Having worked on WoW and having worked on this game, I can say that this game is far more challenging to balance."
Kern confirmed that there won't be an open beta, but said, "We pop out more and more invites until we've reached a large population on it… One day we'll drop the beta tag and then anyone can download it."
This is preferable than having "huge surges" in player numbers that could then prove a "technical nightmare" for both the developers and players.
That being said, this new and improved Firefall will be playable at Gamecom from August 16 to 19 in Cologne, Germany. The Electronic Sports League will be running the first ever European Firefall beta tournament where one lucky winner will walk away with a grand prize of 10,000 euros.
More details here.
