Firefall

For reference on the PvE content problem in game:

Imagine if WoW released withonlySTV as it's world land mass. Then imagine that there were a limited amount of repeatable daily quests spread throughout STV, and that hitting mining nodes caused groups of mobs to spawn and attack you. Any upgrades to your character would be marginal and only bring you slightly above the baseline that new players start at.

That's it. That's literally all the content there is in game right now. The equivalent of random daily quests in an extremely small area, and an overly complicated crafting system that upgrades the player in the most mundane of ways (20% damage over a starting character. Hooray!) The game seriously needed another year to a year and a half before open beta, with a heavy focus on content creation in order to make a good first impression. Because the level of content in game now is just going to lead to catastrophic failure under the scrutiny of an open beta.

Yeah, I've become more and more disillusioned with the idea of this becoming good the more and more they fail to deliver on any kind of content.

The lack of content would definitely be a problem at release. What exists right is quite good and extremely fun. The tech is solid, I know of know other open world style shooter that plays as fluidly as Firefall. Luckily their content isn't of the linear, labor intensive, consumptive variety found in most MMORPGs, this makes rapidly expanding the amount of content much easier as long as the baseline (what we are testing now) works well (it does). I am still optimistic that there will be more than enough to do at release since I've already played this somewhat thin beta much more than any traditional MMORPG in the last 5 years.

What you are saying out the power curve is utterly meaningless. In this game a 20% upgrade on even one piece of your equipment is a massive improvement, especially for something like your main weapon. This isn't WoW with a 5000% power curve, and a constant treadmill of abandoning content. That is a ludicrously expensive and wasteful use of your development money and I am glad they aren't doing it. Have you played much? Did you actually upgrade your gear and see how much of a difference it makes? Or did you just look at the numbers and make a snap judgement devoid of any meaning? After carefully crafting and upgrading all of my gear I am able to relatively easily complete content a couple of tiers above what I was barely able to start earlier.

The crafting/constraints system is also excellent. It requires you to make tough choices about what you craft and how it interacts with your other equipment. More is NOT always better, this is an amazingly refreshing change from your standard "more numbers" skinner box chasing nonsense that plagues every EQ/WoW clone for the last 8 years.

As for the PvP thing, you will never please everyone, the whining about having PvP be "unfair" was utterly endless so they changed it. I am personally glad it was changed as I am not very interested in Firefall PvP, and now the boards aren't clogged with the the whining over PvP (now it is mostly about durability).

I am still cautiously optimistic about the game. They are developing intelligently, and I have already gotten much more out of it than nearly any MMO for the last few years.

Denaut_sl said:

The tech is solid, I know of know other open world style shooter that plays as fluidly as Firefall.

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Where does this game fall between WoW and its ilk, Tera/GW2 and Planetside/Defiance(? didnt play that) as far as the action combat and shooter elements are concerned? Is it mostly instanced or a large (stranglethorn was HUGE) persistance world?

Mr Creed_sl said:

Where does this game fall between WoW and its ilk, Tera/GW2 and Planetside/Defiance(? didnt play that) as far as the action combat and shooter elements are concerned? Is it mostly instanced or a large (stranglethorn was HUGE) persistance world?

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It's a shooter with jetpacks; projectiles, 3d collision, the whole 9. It is sort of like a PvE planetside in a zone I'd say is about the size of 2 Stranglethorns, although it is a bit hard to compare to be honest. The zone is semi-persistent, as in there are instances but the game will always try to log you into the same oneif it can but will send you to another one if that instance is full, you want to join a friend, or the instance crashes.

Denaut_sl said:

What you are saying out the power curve is utterly meaningless. In this game a 20% upgrade on even one piece of your equipment is a massive improvement, especially for something like your main weapon. This isn't WoW with a 5000% power curve, and a constant treadmill of abandoning content. That is a ludicrously expensive and wasteful use of your development money and I am glad they aren't doing it. Have you played much? Did you actually upgrade your gear and see how much of a difference it makes? Or did you just look at the numbers and make a snap judgement devoid of any meaning? After carefully crafting and upgrading all of my gear I am able to relatively easily complete content a couple of tiers above what I was barely able to start earlier.

The crafting/constraints system is also excellent. It requires you to make tough choices about what you craft and how it interacts with your other equipment. More is NOT always better, this is an amazingly refreshing change from your standard "more numbers" skinner box chasing nonsense that plagues every EQ/WoW clone for the last 8 years.

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The developers share your thought process here, and it's also why the game is never going to have much appeal at all. Not many people want to bust their ass and go through a grinding treadmill to make equipment that's marginally better than what you start with. It doesn't matter if 20% is a big improvement relative to other gear, the point is that you're giving people aterriblepayoff for time invested. Grind for 20 hours and have a character that's virtually identical to the starting character? Do you seriously think that's the sort of thing that appeals to many people at all?

People need a pay off for time invested. That payoff needs to come in the form of access to new areas (ie: I level up, now I get to see cool new zone X), or a character that's clearly becoming more and more awesome as you play him. Firefall offers neither right now, which is why people aren't going to feel compelled to invest any time into it. The fact that the awful progression is combined with literally no content just makes a bad situation even worse.

If you don't give people a payoff for investing time into your game, they won't play your game. Simple as that.

edit:

Also in regards to the content stuff. Complaining that people consume content rapidly isn't an excuse for literally having miniscule amounts of content. It's nice to try to design reusable content, but that just slows the rate of content consumption. If your business model relies on putting out a tiny amount of content, and then saying "It's okay, ITS REUSABLE!" then your business is going to fucking fail. No matter what model you go with, you still need tons and tons of content. Firefall has had a bigger development budget than original WoW, and currently has less than 1/50th the content vanilla WoW (no hyperbole here either) had. That's not really acceptable under any circumstances.

I've had this sitting on my pc for some time now. months.

Man, the art design is beautiful at times. Bars, etc. pina colatas, signs activating when near.

I am totally lost about 10min in though. Starting tut. fine great. get out in the open world and... first it says hit 5 to use the hammer. took about 5min to find hitting C opens up a radial where I can switch to hammer, THEN hit 5 to hammer.
do that, find a spot I can thump. do it.
Now it says, go do a dynamic event, and aid others at purple icons on the map. ok, well these purple icons seem to be other players dropping thumpers. go and help. nothing. Voice over implied I get something for helping others. I get nothing, and the "complete a dynamic event" is sitting up there.
what am I missing?


UI in general is meh. it could really use a hit ALT and use mouse to click on things, ala tera, DCUO, gw2.


Hrm, restarting seemed to help. sidebar is now showing all "events". reward ui for helping others seems messed up. but I do seem to be getting stuff not listed in inv or in the notification menu, when I go to crafting.

And crafting makes alot more sense now, with someone pointing out materials needed to be refined first.

with map working, crafting making sense, I think I have a general idea of what is going on now at least.

For a new player, its not quite clear why some thumpers spawn 10x as much npcs at first. higher tier thumpers of course. but if you just start, the nuance between a "level 1" and "level 10" thumper is not exactly obvious.

Caliane_sl said:

I've had this sitting on my pc for some time now. months.

Man, the art design is beautiful at times. Bars, etc. pina colatas, signs activating when near.

I am totally lost about 10min in though. Starting tut. fine great. get out in the open world and... first it says hit 5 to use the hammer. took about 5min to find hitting C opens up a radial where I can switch to hammer, THEN hit 5 to hammer.
do that, find a spot I can thump. do it.
Now it says, go do a dynamic event, and aid others at purple icons on the map. ok, well these purple icons seem to be other players dropping thumpers. go and help. nothing. Voice over implied I get something for helping others. I get nothing, and the "complete a dynamic event" is sitting up there.
what am I missing?


UI in general is meh. it could really use a hit ALT and use mouse to click on things, ala tera, DCUO, gw2.


Hrm, restarting seemed to help. sidebar is now showing all "events". reward ui for helping others seems messed up. but I do seem to be getting stuff not listed in inv or in the notification menu, when I go to crafting.

And crafting makes alot more sense now, with someone pointing out materials needed to be refined first.

with map working, crafting making sense, I think I have a general idea of what is going on now at least.

For a new player, its not quite clear why some thumpers spawn 10x as much npcs at first. higher tier thumpers of course. but if you just start, the nuance between a "level 1" and "level 10" thumper is not exactly obvious.

Click to expand...

You've already seen most of the content in-game at this point. The only thing left for you to do is to repeat that content many, many times over in order to obtain marginal stat boosts (ie: small numbers, no interesting effects). What you see at (effectively) level 1 is the exact same you see at level anything. And it's not much to see at this point.

ZProtoss_sl said:

The developers share your thought process here, and it's also why the game is never going to have much appeal at all. Not many people want to bust their ass and go through a grinding treadmill to make equipment that's marginally better than what you start with. It doesn't matter if 20% is a big improvement relative to other gear, the point is that you're giving people aterriblepayoff for time invested. Grind for 20 hours and have a character that's virtually identical to the starting character? Do you seriously think that's the sort of thing that appeals to many people at all?

People need a pay off for time invested. That payoff needs to come in the form of access to new areas (ie: I level up, now I get to see cool new zone X), or a character that's clearly becoming more and more awesome as you play him. Firefall offers neither right now, which is why people aren't going to feel compelled to invest any time into it. The fact that the awful progression is combined with literally no content just makes a bad situation even worse.

If you don't give people a payoff for investing time into your game, they won't play your game. Simple as that.

edit:

Also in regards to the content stuff. Complaining that people consume content rapidly isn't an excuse for literally having miniscule amounts of content. It's nice to try to design reusable content, but that just slows the rate of content consumption. If your business model relies on putting out a tiny amount of content, and then saying "It's okay, ITS REUSABLE!" then your business is going to fucking fail. No matter what model you go with, you still need tons and tons of content. Firefall has had a bigger development budget than original WoW, and currently has less than 1/50th the content vanilla WoW (no hyperbole here either) had. That's not really acceptable under any circumstances.

Click to expand...

Content treadmills suck. They are extremely expensive to make, require constant maintenance, and are consumed nearly instantaneously. The string of MMO corpses from here to WoW proves that it is a LOSING STRATEGY. Yes, there is not yet enough content, but if such a small amount of content can keep me entertained and invested more so than any content treadmill for the past 8 years, then there is something it. Especially since the nature of the content is quite modular and much cheaper/easier to make than traditional content. They are creating PvE that interacts with you and with the world, instead of just sitting there waiting for you to kill it because NPC #8735 told you to.

Firefall has NOT spent more money than WoW, which cost about 100 million. So far it looks like they have spent about 20-25 million tops (that is the amount invested in them by a Chinese company). Now, that is probably a little too much, but it seems to have mostly been spent on their tech, which is utterly unmatched anywhere in the industry. What is there is fun, interesting, and dynamic. The core combat is fast paced and exciting, a far cry from the tab targeting whack-a-mole offered by nearly every other PvE game. They have their core, which is the hard part, now they need to expand on it.

You continue to harp about numbers, but you are clearly clueless as to the nature of those numbers. A 20% increase in the DPS of your main weapon has a HUGE effect on your gameplay. It doesn't matter that it is "only 20%" the net effect is fairly drastic. Different games have different tolerances, small numbers can have big effects in the context of one game while huge numbers can have virtually no effect in another. Your point is meaningless.

Look, I get it, you like making numbers go up and filling bars. Great. There are 2348626 MMORPGs out there for you. I like fun, compelling gameplay with an element of decision making. I also like progression, but it needs to treat me like more than some rat in a cage banging a button for that next hit of cocaine.

Caliane_sl said:

I've had this sitting on my pc for some time now. months.

Man, the art design is beautiful at times. Bars, etc. pina colatas, signs activating when near.

I am totally lost about 10min in though. Starting tut. fine great. get out in the open world and... first it says hit 5 to use the hammer. took about 5min to find hitting C opens up a radial where I can switch to hammer, THEN hit 5 to hammer.
do that, find a spot I can thump. do it.
Now it says, go do a dynamic event, and aid others at purple icons on the map. ok, well these purple icons seem to be other players dropping thumpers. go and help. nothing. Voice over implied I get something for helping others. I get nothing, and the "complete a dynamic event" is sitting up there.
what am I missing?


UI in general is meh. it could really use a hit ALT and use mouse to click on things, ala tera, DCUO, gw2.


Hrm, restarting seemed to help. sidebar is now showing all "events". reward ui for helping others seems messed up. but I do seem to be getting stuff not listed in inv or in the notification menu, when I go to crafting.

And crafting makes alot more sense now, with someone pointing out materials needed to be refined first.

with map working, crafting making sense, I think I have a general idea of what is going on now at least.

For a new player, its not quite clear why some thumpers spawn 10x as much npcs at first. higher tier thumpers of course. but if you just start, the nuance between a "level 1" and "level 10" thumper is not exactly obvious.

Click to expand...

The new player experience still isn't that great. It doesn't help that the game is quite different than most MMOs you sign up for. If you like shooters, PvE, and open world gameplay the game is worth sticking with. I recommend trying out different battleframes to see what you like and then purchasing one of the advanced frames in your favorite class.

Denaut_sl said:

Content treadmills suck. They are extremely expensive to make, require constant maintenance, and are consumed nearly instantaneously. The string of MMO corpses from here to WoW proves that it is a LOSING STRATEGY. Yes, there is not yet enough content, but if such a small amount of content can keep me entertained and invested more so than any content treadmill for the past 8 years, then there is something it. Especially since the nature of the content is quite modular and much cheaper/easier to make than traditional content. They are creating PvE that interacts with you and with the world, instead of just sitting there waiting for you to kill it because NPC #8735 told you to.

Click to expand...

This is a pretty hefty strawman. Noting the extreme lack of content is hardly advocating for a shitty themepark MMO. The point is that you can't use "LOL CONTENT CONSUMED ANYWAYS" as a some sort of magic excuse for why there's literally close to zero content in-game right now. It's great to try to come up with models that make content-creation longer lived, but in the end of it regardless of what model you choose you need to make an ass ton of content. Period. You can do things like make it reusable to buy yourself more time to make that content, but people aren't going to repeat the same things forever. Strategies like reusable content have to be used in conjunction with a mass content creation strategy. Anything less is going to lead to bored players with nothing to do.

Firefall has NOT spent more money than WoW, which cost about 100 million. So far it looks like they have spent about 20-25 million tops (that is the amount invested in them by a Chinese company). Now, that is probably a little too much, but it seems to have mostly been spent on their tech, which is utterly unmatched anywhere in the industry. What is there is fun, interesting, and dynamic. The core combat is fast paced and exciting, a far cry from the tab targeting whack-a-mole offered by nearly every other PvE game. They have their core, which is the hard part, now they need to expand on it.

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You're way, way off on the numbers. I'll just say that you can look at some of the known albatrosses in their spending (soccer team sponsorship for 3.5 million, esports bus, etc) to realize that the amount of money poured into the game is far more than you're quoting here. It's a financial disaster.

You continue to harp about numbers, but you are clearly clueless as to the nature of those numbers. A 20% increase in the DPS of your main weapon has a HUGE effect on your gameplay. It doesn't matter that it is "only 20%" the net effect is fairly drastic. Different games have different tolerances, small numbers can have big effects in the context of one game while huge numbers can have virtually no effect in another. Your point is meaningless.

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You continue to not get the point that to the average player, there is no "real" improvement. You can make progression more horizontal without making it completely ass terrible and boring. Progression that does stuff like give auras, procs on hit, situational activators, and so forth. For the amount of time that players are stuck grinding in game, the improvement is minor, and the payoff non-existent. Your character doesn't feel like a badass after you spent a ton of time gathering materials /crafting- he just feels weak and shitty, barely improved over the very start.

Look, I get it, you like making numbers go up and filling bars. Great. There are 2348626 MMORPGs out there for you. I like fun, compelling gameplay with an element of decision making. I also like progression, but it needs to treat me like more than some rat in a cage banging a button for that next hit of cocaine.

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It's great that you individually like a system that doesn't offer anything at all for time invested. Guess what? Most people don't share your opinion. It's why the game has horrific player retention, and it's why the game has remained incredibly small despite giving out tons of keys/spending serious marketing cash on a beta. There's no long-term appeal in a game that has zero content and doesn't allow you to progress your character in a significant way. And given my personal experiences in giving out some keys to people for the PvE side of things, there's not much short-term appeal in the game either.

Bottom line is, games need to have a vast amount of content, and they need to reward players for the time they invest into the game. That reward doesn't necessarily have to be an endless mudflation, but it certainly needs to be a reward that has an "oh shit, this is awesome" effect on the person when they get it. Firefall has no content, and it has no reward. And while there was still promise that those things could get fixed given enough time, the July Open Beta assures that the game is going to be fucked at this point.

Dev's fucked up a little in this game (lol, alot). The genre is screaming for a GOOD PvE shooter and these clowns have dumped far too much time into PvP and esports. If they'd focused more on the PvE world and crafting side of things the game would be much more interesting.

Given the teso thread, why do I get the feeling denaut is working on this game?

Sabbat_sl said:

Dev's fucked up a little in this game (lol, alot). The genre is screaming for a GOOD PvE shooter and these clowns have dumped far too much time into PvP and esports. If they'd focused more on the PvE world and crafting side of things the game would be much more interesting.

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I'm not sure how much you can blame on the PvP side of things (besides the fact that the PvE crafting was constrained by PvP for some degree of time). They don't have many people working on the PvP content. In fact, even the PvP maps that exist right now are simply copy/pasted areas from the open world. If anything, I think they've put more marketing around the PvP side of things because it's one of the only things in-game that's vaguely presentable at the moment.

If anything explains the state of the game in regards to stuff like content being non-existent, it's probably this:http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Red...ws-E266907.htm

With no one in any sort of producer role to crack the whip on vital features (ie: PvE content), stuff has come out at such a glacial pace that even Blizzard's content developers look speedy by comparison. Now they're in a situation where The9 has hit financial troubles, and wants to get a returnnowon a product that's clearly not ready for the spotlight yet. It's unfortunate really.

I do see alot of good things here.
horizontal advancement is good.
many battleframes, as well as multiple loadouts for each is very good.
20% increase as noted. same kindof thing you see in tribes for the most part.

The mining nodes, tornados, etc are basically the same as Rifts in rift. Dynamic spawning content has been one of my talking points on mmos for a while. But, atm, from what I have seen, it has the same flaw as Rift.
not taking things far enough. Even rift has epic rifts, and crafting rifts. This game needs that at least.
killing the same bugs over and over is a bit weak.

Its been in beta for some time. I would be a bit concerned with its current state for having been so long. but I don't know the model of course. maybe its doing a LoL or path of exile..

cinge_sl said:

Given the teso thread, why do I get the feeling denaut is working on this game?

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That would be hard to do from Europe

The game needs more content, there is little doubt of that. But the moment-to-moment gameplay is solid, and for once a PvE MMO had combat that didn't bore me to tears within 5 minutes.

ZProtoss_sl said:

I'm not sure how much you can blame on the PvP side of things (besides the fact that the PvE crafting was constrained by PvP for some degree of time). They don't have many people working on the PvP content. In fact, even the PvP maps that exist right now are simply copy/pasted areas from the open world. If anything, I think they've put more marketing around the PvP side of things because it's one of the only things in-game that's vaguely presentable at the moment.

If anything explains the state of the game in regards to stuff like content being non-existent, it's probably this:http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Red...ws-E266907.htm

With no one in any sort of producer role to crack the whip on vital features (ie: PvE content), stuff has come out at such a glacial pace that even Blizzard's content developers look speedy by comparison. Now they're in a situation where The9 has hit financial troubles, and wants to get a returnnowon a product that's clearly not ready for the spotlight yet. It's unfortunate really.

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This is basically the exact feeling I get whenever I log in.

The talent is there. The ideas are there. There's no one to pull them together, though.