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Krisnatharok
PC Builder, Gamer
Premium Member
join:2009-02-11
Earth Orbit

Krisnatharok

Premium Member

Review: Firefall falls flat

said by Wired :

Firefall Could Have Been Great, But Poor Design Holds It Back

The worst part about Firefall is that you can feel the potential bubbling beneath the surface. This is a game that could have been something special, but a plethora of minor issues hold it back—not just from being great, but so much so that it’s actually not very fun.

Created by Red 5 Studios, Firefall’s launch at the end of July was nearly four years in the making, having been officially announced at the Penny Arcade Expo in 2010. The free-to-play game combines the combat of a class-based first-person shooter with the world, level, and mechanics design of a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. In other words, think Borderlands plus World of Warcraft plus jetpacks.

In this way, Firefall is nothing like Halo, Call of Duty or Battlefield, the standard multiplayer deathmatch shooters. Instead, Firefall players progress through the game by completing quests, slaying monsters and gaining experience, as in MMOs like World of Warcraft, Rift and Guild Wars 2.

But this MMO-based design model is where Firefall falls flat...

What do you guys think? It didn't capture my attention very long... I wanted to like it so much, too.

TheBionic
Funkier than a mohair disco ball.
Premium Member
join:2009-07-06
united state

TheBionic

Premium Member

I enjoy it alright, but I don't feel compelled to login and play. I usually play it when I have an hour or so to kill.

Rogue Wolf
An Easy Draw of a Sad Few
join:2003-08-12
Troy, NY

Rogue Wolf

Member

said by TheBionic:

I enjoy it alright, but I don't feel compelled to login and play. I usually play it when I have an hour or so to kill.

That's about how I feel about it. It's a gorgeous world, really wide-open, but utterly empty everywhere besides the few populated "town" areas, and you're basically left to create your own fun- which is neither terribly easy or long-lasting.
Criticals
join:2010-05-30

Criticals

Member

Yea i tried this demo. I didnt like it. Questing to super traditional. Even by traditional standards it was like Wow from 2004 questing. The shooting was good but sort of laggy at times. I feel liek it shoulda been an FPS too because the character models felt extremely generic. I kinda wished they would have went the route with Wildstar and just embraced weird. The world felt like it was trying to be too grounded for a space game.

Gundy
Premium Member
join:2002-10-29

Gundy to Krisnatharok

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to Krisnatharok
The whole 'your character looks the same no matter what armor model you have on' is a huge bummer. Granted you can get a few cosmetic items from the cash shop but the whole idea of an RPG is to look different from everyone.

And the linear questing is garbage. Go kill this, return, go kill this, return, go harvest this.. etc..

The thumping deal is cool if you can get a group together it can be pretty chaotic. But I feel like that even gets pretty stale. And don't get me started on the class abilities.
graniterock
Premium Member
join:2003-03-14
London, ON

graniterock to Krisnatharok

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I think it's a fair review. Although for some reason I am having a lot of fun with it regardless and I see it being my main game for when I have an hour or two spare time. Maybe it is just that I see the potential and I am hopeful the developers will respond.

On reddit Firefall developers had this response to a more damning review from IGN. They have taken the criticism well and hopefully the game will come around. I think I this point it's not worth writing the game off but it is certainly fair to set it a side for a bit and try it again after a few major patches.
quote:
The complaints in the review are totally valid. I appreciate the understanding that a new game can't compete with a game that has been out for 10 years. That expectation does cause some consternation, but the complaints mentioned in the review are not about overall content availability, but about the quality of the content that is there and the repetitiveness of that content.
All are totally valid viewpoints. These things are not "easy" fixes though. We've already been working on fixes for the past couple of weeks. Ultimately we're looking at complete rewrites of some underlying code to handle dynamic spawning better, adding multiple new jobs to alleviate some of the pain points and provide higher quality content, and reviewing all of the reward mechanisms to make sure that players do not feel like their time is wasted.
It's an on-going process. All feedback is appreciated.

»www.reddit.com/r/firefal ··· irefall/

Xioden
Premium Member
join:2008-06-10
Monticello, NY

Xioden

Premium Member

It's really not a new problem though, the game has basically boiled down to Thumper farm until an interesting event spawned somewhere for years now.
StubbyinKCMO
join:2008-11-15
Kansas City, MO

StubbyinKCMO to Krisnatharok

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Was in the beta for the last 2 1/2 years or a bit more. Lost track really. But after the milestone update in February 2014 (in case this thread lasts longer than it should), the game went to crap and most of us left. It turned into WoW grindfest.

Used to be fun to log on and play for hours...whole craploads of teams trying to kill mobs of things and protect the thumpers to get the mats needed to do anything. You had to get mats to build everything. Then milestone hits and everyone was like WTF is this shit? You could UNcraft everything then. The PvP went away. The PvE sucked then. They said they boosted all weapons and oh by the way, the gun you had maxed out was now completely useless as its damage model/RNG was incompatible with the current engine/way of figuring out damage. So you had to start with base everything again. But since now thumping took MORE time and effort to do, it was a total donkey ball sucking waste of a game.

Ask anyone who played in the previous beta before it got released on Steam and see if they did not thoroughly enjoy the game up until the February milestone. It didnt help matters when most of the original design team QUIT over the direction that the game was heading, back in December 2013. No more E-Sports, everyone looked the same, PvP was locked out until the milestone dropped because they didnt know how to calculate the damage since you could craft up some wicked nasty weapons and use them as low level pilots. Thus a BUG or exploit depending on how you looked at it.

Just an all around crapfest that I invested real money into (about $150 founder pack) and I still have about $40 left in red beans that I couldnt give two shits about anymore as I dont want that abortion of a game on my hard drive to go spend that last bit of money on virtual shit that does nothing anymore.

So if IGN and most of the other reviews have said its a load of bullcrap, then why doesnt the CURRENT design team just roll back to the way it was before they decided to mess with something that was working just fine and draw all the people back to the game? Now that its on Steam it should be real easy to push out updates/rollbacks. Used to be that you had to download 5GB file every couple weeks since the updater wouldn't just get the files you needed to update, it would do the whole game file as a .bin. Those were the nights....Couldnt wait to see what got patched in and go play it first.

Can you tell I miss the game that COULD have been? And revile the game that is currently out???