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| I was wrong about this game. It got better. (Firefall) by WITTGENSTEIN 01/11/2014, 10:43pm PST | ||||
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| Back in February/March 2013 I bought-into a "Founder" account with this game and found it to have a great concept and flawed execution. It had been in development a LONG time and it was clearly fucking spinning its wheels while on the horizon NOTHING was upcoming except more visual aesthetic bullshit that the game didn't need. There was only one zone, and two activities with some half-assed attempts at missions. The dynamic "invasion" aspect was mostly just occasional boring raids.
When I left the game, I told the guys on the general channel who were white knighting it why. This game was fucking dead. It had been in development since 2010 with a polished alpha to show for itself. Nothing really clicked together and the Tiki-styled resort starting area was just god-awful for a series that portrayed itself as being IN THE FUTURE. Wow, what a difference 9 months makes apparently. First of all, In december they canned Mark Kern, the CEO. Apparently it wasn't due to the game having been stuck in development Hell though I wouldn't be surprised if that played a part. They've completely tweaked how the game works. New zones have been added. Every ten-twelve steps there's a new public quest (ala Guild Wars 2) to go jump into. Thumping was the best part of the early beta experience and still is. But now they've embraced the public quest aspect and everyone who participates gets a score of the mineral loot. Get a group of 10-15 people together and find a good killzone, then just drop thumpers all day long and have a bug shootout. It's awesome. New zones have been added aside from the starter area. One's a thick jungle sorta like what was shown in the old trailer preview, another's among a bunch of rusted, iced-over ships in the Antarctic. Plus they've actually designed areas as instances for squad-sized groups to fight through. Enemy capturing of watchposts now culminates in invasion of town hubs, where you can deploy automated defenses and have to hold out against a ten minute siege or lose the town hub. This isn't a perfect product, but it's definitely closer to what was promised initially. All the classes have been redone with new abilities to make them more unique. The Dreadnought used to have a retarded ability to lock themselves in place in exchange for a slightly higher rate of fire. Fuck that, it's gone now. Replaced with a limit-break style zone of death where the more targets that are within close proximity to you the more damage you do. Engineers now get a 10-15 second mannable turret they can spawn when they're in trouble, as well as a larger variety of turrets to field and even a TF2-style ammo/health dispenser. Instead of the old XP license tree system they now have a three-part Mass/Power/CPU system not unlike the gearhead-centric garage from Armored Core games. It's simplified, but I love the whole tweaking aspect. You can even allocate unused power to squeeze 1-4% more out of your guns or your jumpjets. And the best part about all of this is it's fucking free. I'm not going to lie, there's still no "endgame" besides maxing out your mecha suits, but the MMOFPS styling to it makes that not as much of a dealbreaker for me as it would be otherwise. Just log in for a few hours, have a thumper party, kill some stuff in an abettoir, log out. |
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