Firefall [official site] - the sci-fi, jetpacky, free-to-play, fight-the-Chosen-and-reclaim-the-Earth MMO - is shutting down today (7 July). The announcement came via a post on the game studio's website on Wednesday and notes that although the PC iteration of the game is ending they're now working on a mobile version.
"With heavy hearts, we regret to inform you that after much review and analysis, Red 5 Studios have decided to suspend the Firefall efforts on 7th, July 2017," reads the announcement. "Thank you for being an important part of the Firefall experience and for your loyalty and dedication to the online community."
]]>You know, I'd sort of assumed that Firefall had been finished and released then quietly faded into the background noise of video games. That's probably because it's been in open beta testing for an entire year, and I don't know anyone speaking about it. Come July 29, developers Red 5 will declare their free-to-play shooty jetpacking MMO finished and officially launch it. While many launches after lengthy betas seem to be the equivalent of someone yelling "That's it! I'm done! God! Nuts to this!" and walking out, this one will be fairly substantial, bringing an update that Red 5 say will "quadruple the amount of world space."
]]>When we last left promising yet embattled MMO-shooter Firefall, things had taken a turn for worrisome. Its PVP mode had gone down in flames, and CEO Mark Kern was given his walking papers/flying jetpacks at the end of 2013. Even with a solid core concept and admirable ambitions, the game had spent years tumbling all over the place in a wishy washy development cycle, and there was no "end" in sight. Meanwhile, Kern's departure signaled that change was afoot, but was it good change or a turn for the worse in an already twisty saga? Well, now we at least have something concrete to go on: Firefall has secured another $23 million in funding, and it will finally launch for real this year.
]]>The Firefall forums recently updated with the news that the PvP aspect of the game is going to be shut down, pending a rethink. Bossman Mark Kern explained that the PvP aspect was attracting just 3% of the playerbase, and therefore action had to be taken, with a focus on the PvE game: "People want more content, fewer bugs, and more polish on these world systems. For these reasons, we have made the tough decision to suspend PvP and take the system offline so that we can rethink it and relaunch it. PvP is an important part of our game, and we want to get it right."
]]>Here's a fun Firefall fact: everyone on RPS has access except John. For a while it was funny to chat about the game in front of him, talking about the fun we had gliding all over the lumpy land, dropping into battles against the giant bugs that roamed the cartoon landscape, setting up Thumper parties in the middle of nowhere. But eventually it just became awkward, so we stopped. The good news for him, and everyone else, is there's no longer a barrier of entry into Firefall: the free-to-play MMOFPS combo today dropped into open beta, so everyone can join in. There's a ridiculous live-action trailer to celebrate this fact.
]]>If you search the RPS archives for the phrase "Firefall open beta," you'll get 17 trillion results. That is not an exaggeration (well OK, maybe slightly). It feels like Firefall's been running scattered open beta weekends since the dawn of time, but now the real deal is nearly upon us. Soon, any man, woman, or child will be able to strap on a jetpack and lord their airborne superiority over lowly giant ground bugs - bitter acid tears pooling in their subcutaneous emotion sacs as they shudder with quiet jealousy. Also on the docket: expanded story content, which you can see in action after the break.
]]>Thrusting and athletic jetpack MMOFPS Firefall will be offering you another free go on its carousel of skill-based combat delights on Friday June 7th, which will see the start of the game's last event before the fireworks of its July 9th open beta. I've rather enjoyed the limited amount of this game that I've played so far, so I am deeply interested to see what the ramping up to a full open beta will mean for it. If you haven't checked it out yet I would recommend doing so.
]]>I'm hoping that Firefall's co-op PvE focus will prove to be the antidote to my months spend exploding dudes in the purely-PvP Planetside 2. I checked out Firefall's closed beta some months back, and very much liked what I saw, and I also met some of the team last summer and was impressed by Scott "Tribes" Youngblood's take on it all. I think this game could well be a Rather Big Deal indeed.
Come July 9th, you'll be able to decide for yourself. That's when the open beta will commence. I've jammed the latest gameplay trailer below, because that's what I do.
]]>Someday, Firefall will come out. Maybe. Or perhaps it'll forever lurk in the bug-riddled shadows of beta, only emerging on weekends for a refreshing hover about town. For now, we can only hold out hope for the former, but at least take solace in the latter, given that the gravity-loathing MMO's penciled in the whole of humanity for a quick flying lesson this weekend. Get an idea of what you're in for - set to music that suggests you're both flying and winning a gold medal in every Olympic sporting event at once - after the break.
]]>That other MMOFPS, the one with jetpacks and PvE, is starting to open up for testing. Firefall will have three open beta weekends, starting this weekend, where anyone and everyone is invited to leap in and try the game for themselves. Red 5 explain: "These Beta Weekend stress-tests will be completely unlocked with no keys required – allowing everyone to participate in the Tribe’s Closed Beta push. Additionally, each 48-hour weekend will incorporate a community unlock, exclusive contest and unique theme to teach new players what Firefall is all about." I've been dropping into the closed beta in the past few months, and I'm very excited about it - more so after chatting with Scott 'Tribes" Youngblood at Gamescom last year. I really think they know what they're doing with this one.
Jetpacks vs giant alien insects footage below.
]]>Firefall, Red 5 Studios rather fancy jetpack MMO (one of the project leads is the excellent Scott Youngblood, who worked on the original Tribes games) is heading for some beta weekend plans. They explain: "Firefall’s upcoming Beta Weekends are scheduled Nov 30-Dec 2 and Dec 7-9. These are North American and European 48-hour stress-tests with players encouraged to find bugs, test various features and help the developers improve the beta by providing feedback."
You can sign up here, with the now-traditional pre-order "founders" pack option alongside it. Recent video below for motivational beta-sign up purposes.
]]>Firefall. Among the made-up words I've met in my many travels, it definitely stands out as quite, er, aggressive. I mean, there's fire and falling involved. Both tend to perform their designated actions in fairly short order - leaving behind little question as to what happened and usually also some form of smoking crater. And yet, for all that, Firefall the game is taking its sweet time en route to release, polishing up an extended beta with no intentions of going live (or even into open beta) until its good and ready. But now, you can at least drop in for a brief stay in Red 5's colorful world of shooting and looting. And by "drop in," I mean never actually touch the ground for more than three seconds at a time, because jetpacks.
]]>I haven't dipped into Firefall since my excursion back in April, but I think now might be the time. Yesterday's patch has radically altered the game, as you can see in the update video below. Movement has been significantly changed, one of the classes has been dropped, a new one added. The biggest change, however, is that they've removed the traditional levelling system (one thing I felt sat awkwardly for the game) and instead given you experience points that can be spent on your battleframe specialization as you see fit. As Red 5 had promised at the start of this beta, they are genuinely changing the game based on how players respond to it, and I think they've shown some impressive responsiveness and agility. I look forward to seeing where they go next.
]]>The past few weeks have seen us take a whirlwind tour of Firefall's massive summer milestone update, and it's been quite a ride. Laughter, tears, happiness, and muscular men with jetpacks have all flown freely in equal measure - but mostly, it's wrapped day-to-day life in a warm blanket of stability. Empires may fall, stars might blink out of existence, and The Hobbit will definitely get hacked into three still-quivering chunks, but at least a reliable stream of Firefall videos gave our tiny, insular world some semblance of order. Today, however, the Recon battleframe's here to deliver us back into the arms of cruel uncertainty with the final video in the class series - which, I suppose, is pretty fitting, given that the Recon seems to exist for the sole purpose of ruining everyone's day.
]]>Oh thank goodness. My life is saved. I, of course, recently bet it on the assumption that more Firefall videos would drop this week, and became quite disconcerted when maniacally grinning mercenaries started showing up outside my house with calendars counting down to Friday. Happily, however, I've been saved by the Dreadnaught, who sounds like the cheeriest of fellows. Bask in his muscular, minigun-toting glory (read: a hail of unstoppable bullets) after the break.
]]>After giving us a glimpse of the assault battleframe's quick-drawing, rapid-firing revamp, Red 5's now taking a leisurely fly-by trip through Firefall's entire summer milestone update. The short version? No class is safe. From having their space stockings stuffed with tons of neat presents! So now we're onto the Engineer and the not-a-Medic-anymore Biotech. Yes, they've renamed that one. Apparently constant use of poison is grounds for having your medical license revoked. Who knew?
]]>Soon, the Firefall you know and love/haven't actually played/have never heard of and know nothing about will be gone. Like a caterpillar entering a cocoon, the high-flying MMOFPS will soon emerge from the "biggest patch in Firefall history" as a sleeker, more graceful butterfly. With a jetpack. Among many other things, that means the Assault battleframe (the separated-at-birth brother of the Warframe) is in for an overhaul. In short, it's about to become a lot faster and get some cool new toys to boot. Watch it do assault-type things after the break, as is its wont.
]]>The beta for jetpackin' online shooter Firefall has been in progress for a while now, and I posted some impressions on it over here. Since then Red 5 have been busy collating feedback from players and are now getting stuck into tweaking and rebalancing the game in light of all the data and suggestions they've received from the community. They're overhauling the development and specialisation of the battleframes, which will have far-reaching consequences for the kinds of choices you'll have to make as you play, fight, and gather resources. Check that out below.
]]>I think they should have had a go at explaining it in semaphore, but instead they've gone for the fashionable route of a glitzy video which shows off the space-time rip story that serves as a backdrop to Firefall's territory-conquest alien-world crossover activities. Go take a look at that, below, and then at my preview, which is the most handsome preview you will read all day.
]]>Red 5 are keen to stress that the current beta for Firefall - their free-to-play jetpackin' shooter - is not one of those betas which is essentially a demo for the game you will be soon be playing, but is instead still very much a work in progress. That means my impressions should be regarded as commentary on an unfinished thing that is subject to change. That said, I've got a feeling this game could end up being quite significant, and – despite its clearly unfinished and underpopulated beta state - I've found it to be rather interesting. Read on for vital thoughts.At this point in the proceedings, the most immediate and striking thing about Firefall is the world that Red 5 have built. While it remains to be properly furnished with a variety of PvE content, what is already in place suggests enormous potential, as well as demonstrating astonishing beauty and virtuoso visual design. The world which you and a small army of jet-packing chums will be exploring is huge and enormously detailed. Currently there are two hub areas, a sort of Apple-designed military base, and a tropical beach resort. Outside of these bubbles of comparative safety (which are nonetheless riddled with dangerous aliens and enemies) there is a devastated world that sprawls off in every direction, quests and events littering the landscape for you to find.
]]>I love this sort of stuff: Red 5 Studios talking about the world-building process within Firefall. You get to see a bunch of the tools in action as they create the game environments, and the team talk about some subtle details of how the game has been put together, like the living processes in the game, cut & pasting entire cities, and the PvP maps being incorporated into the open world. Worth a watch.
The video also teases that the beta will be expanded "soon", so I'm looking forward to getting in on that.
]]>I've been waiting for a large-scale sci-fi MMO shooter ever since the original Planetside, and it looks like 2012 will do it's best to provide. Before I fuel up Firefall's jetpacks, or scrawl penises over Planetside 2's map, it looks like I'll be dropping into Line of Defense: of all those games, it's the first with a release date, end of June, so I'd imagine the beta form that I just signed up to will deliver me from orbit to the action a tad sooner than the others. You know what? I've just noticed all those are free-to-play*. I mean, I knew that all were, but lumping them all together makes it quite the thing. As is the not-at-all-MMO-but -rather-shooty Tribes: Ascend. I wonder if I'll ever need to pay for a shooter ever again? Line of Defense trailer is herein, btw.
]]>Here's a sneaky way to get a hold of a lot of Firefall footage. Developers Red 5 Studios are hosting a competition for their fans, asking them to create a trailer from unreleased footage of the free-to-play shooter. So while you can totally get involved and whip out Windows Movie Maker templates, if all you're interested in is watching 10 second clips of the game, all you need to do is download the files and have a peek.
]]>There's a bunch of new content appearing in the Firefall beta, and Red 5's bossman Mark Kern has been wheeled out to explain precisely what is going on in a new dev diary video, which you can see below. Basically signing up gives you a chance to sign up, and then to invite others. Kern also does some clever stuff with a map made of lasers. I'm genuinely interested to see how the PvE world works, which is what Red 5 are beginning to roll-out properly now. If there game can give players a genuine sense of urgency in fighting the NPCs, rather them just being a conveyor-belt of MMO-style targets, then it could make for an interesting proposition. I'm a bit less interested in the PvP because, well, Planetside 2, or Tribes Ascend. Anyway, there's some new footage in there, so take a look.
]]>Firefall developers Red 5 are going further than simply expressing their denunciation of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in words. On January 18th, the studio will close the Firefall beta and website for 24 hours in a show of protest. More drastically, the developers are also refusing to show the extremely promising free-to-play multiplayer shooter at E3 this year because of the organiser's support of SOPA. Commendable. More below.
]]>Not content with the impressive CG versions of their main characters from multiplayer open-world shooter Firefall, Red 5 Studios have gone a bit overboard on the cosplay and brought in pros to play the parts of a couple of their armoured cartoon soldiers. I don't think the jetpack actually works, so he won't be making a Jingle All The Way entrance to PAX or anything. Yes, it's more than faintly ludicrous, but I couldn't help playing into the hands of this bizarre promotional strategy: seeing a grown man and woman enthuse about wearing plastic space armour is something we should all witness. As, you know, a warning.
]]>There are the jetpacks, of course, which instantly drew out a nod of approval, but my first impressions of Firefall were only of mild interest. The marketing campaign has been rarely effective though, not because of increasing bombast or social network integration which would be more likely to make me ignore it's attempts to inflitrate my life, but because it has increasingly taught me what it will actually be like to play. The latest developer diary is another convincing burst of information. It sits before me and tells me how the various classes will work and, most importantly, why that will be fun. Observe.
]]>It was years before I stopped writing "jetpack" on my Christmas present list, when my parents sat me down and told me that they didn't exist. Also that I was adopted. That second bit wasn't true, but I really wanted jetpack and they were trying to soften the blow. I've never forgiven them for taking my jetpack dreams away. But a new Firefall trailer is adequate recompense. It has jetpacks in an open-world that's built to take advantage of the vertical movement. It's pretty as a picture to boot.
]]>Red 5's Tony Park (who runs the Singapore studio) has been talking to Gamespot about the art style of Firefall, as well as showing off some gameplay footage and touching on the PvP and PvE aspects of the game (below, with some new game footage, and some old). The shooter-MMO, which has talent from both Tribes and World Of Warcraft directing it, is currently undergoing closed beta-testing, and is scheduled for a December launch. I am quite keen to take a closer look.
Amazingly incongruous music, too.
]]>Most of the footage I've seen of the hugely ambitious and massively multiplayer shooter Firefall has made me nod approvingly at the scale and design of the world, which not only looks the part but also seems a place it'd be fun to soar through, raining death from above, and probably from the front, sides and back as well. Lo and behold, there is a new trailer that takes a different perspective; instead of whooping about size and numbers, this one zooms in on an individual piece of kit, giving a better idea of individual skills. It takes the form of an advertisement for the heavy weapon specialist's Dreadnaught frame and it's one heck of a sales pitch.
]]>UPDATE: PAX trailer added. And what a handsome trailer, below. (That bit at the start with the cliff! You'd better be able to do that...) Information about the beta can be found here, and there's a sign up here. I remain pretty excited about this, even in light of Planetside 2 possibly being awesome. It's going to be fascinating to watch some prime MMOFPS candidates duke it out in the coming year or two.
]]>Unhinged, semi-airborne shooter Firefall, which looks a bit like Borderlands meets Tribes meets Brink meets WoW meets Unreal Tournament, has only gone and done the new trailer thing. It is fun to watch! It is also Firefall's first big show of footage since announcing contentious author Orson Scott Card would be writing this sorta-MMO's story. But never mind that: this trailer has some remarkably upbeat music. It has some grand views. It has a giant spider-robot. It has men and women flying over vast terrain. Terrain! Music to any PC gamer's soul.
]]>Firefall devs, Red 5, have revealed that their Tribes-a-like online shooter has its story written by Orson Scott Card, he behind the SF novel Enders Game, and other games including the exquisite Shadow Complex. Some will greet this news with enthusiasm, as it means the already promising action MMO will have something deeper than "the man shoots the other man" as a backstory. Others will start scrawling protest banners.
]]>Red Five Studios have taken some time to answer community-derived questions about their forthcoming free-to-play Tribes-but-an-MMO game, Firefall, and have posted it up as a developer diary, which you can see below. They talk about the nature of the world's openness, PvP, autonomous vehicles and robots, and a bunch of other stuff. Go. See. Judge.
]]>Red 5 Studios' jetpack-based free-to-play shooter Firefall is making me sing with excitement - and look at this previous coverage for judgement, not this trailer - and no less after watching this new PvP trailer. While I am most interested in the scale of the world and co-op play vs monsters, this player combat (although entirely staged) looks like it might have some Tribes-like value to it. Also: class-based. Hmm! Go take a look.
]]>Red Five have been abroad in China to demo their persistent world shooter Firefall, and they've come up with a bit more footage for the purpose, which I've posted below. The impressive dropship flyovers here give us a bit more sense of the scale of the game world, and the battles going on below make me recollect fine evenings spent haring about in PlanetSide. The more impressive stuff, perhaps, is the world design as a whole, including the freaky creatures which inhabit it, and the environments you will be fighting through. Tribes Universe was certainly a welcome announcement last month, but I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on Firefall.
]]>Earlier this week I had a chance to talk to Matt DeWald, community manager at Red 5 Studios, the company making Firefall. It's a shooter that promises to do new and unusual things to the free-to-play space. The game was the big surprise at the most recent PAX event in Seattle, with its blend of cartoon good looks, Tribes-like shooter action, and a persistent world. Perhaps most intriguingly, Red 5 is the company that Mark Kern and William Petras went on to form when they left Blizzard. It seems to have both the vision, and the design pedigree to be a really big deal. I asked DeWald to go into some of the details.
]]>Ooh, I just noticed GameTrailers grabbed a developer walkthrough for MMO-shooter hybrid Firefall, which I've posted below. It shows a bunch of the weapons and abilities in action, explains how the missions and freeform stuff works, and goes into some detail on the game's hub areas. The footage explains how those provide you with new weapons and equipment, and shows how battles take place around them. It's worth noting that it's going to be a cash-item driven free-to-play game, but developers Red 5 have said that the cash items won't produce unfair benefits for individuals. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out, and we'll be talking Red 5 soon, so we can get some more detail on that and the rest of the game.
But going back to what I was saying about the quality of free online games appearing on PC now, well, when you see stuff like this, it's beginning to feel like a big deal. If Blizzard really are making a shooter for their next MMO, as was rumoured last year, then they must be looking at games like this with great interest.
]]>It's late at night, and it seems the logical time for news of a free to play Tribes-alike shooter to appear in our inbox. It's Firefall. It's being shown at PAX. It's got a beta sign up over on the official site. It's being designed by veterans of Tribes and World Of Warcraft. It's looking pretty good. There's ten minutes of game footage embedded below. More on this soon, I am certain.
Oh, and watch the whole video. This one escalates.
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