Hello ARES Pilot, Thank you for your participation during the Firefall Beta! Here at Red 5 Studios, we are all very excited about the upcoming LAUNCH on July 29 and we would like to invite you to join us for EARLY ACCESS TODAY! Journey back to Firefall and experience the new game content like never before: Fight through brand-new epic Raids Explore new areas, including Sertao Collect new equipment to outfit your Battleframe Discover new items in the Red Bean Store Fight alongside the best MMO community around And much more! To celebrate Firefall’s journey to launch, we are gifting our most loyal players a FREE Pre-Launch Package which will include: A Red Panda Pet 7-Day VIP Access An Exclusive Title: "Unbroken" Make sure to log into Firefall for early access between July 15 and August 5 and claim your free gifts.
If people are playing, grab me. I would like to join you guys. If I am not in the middle of something else I will.
Likewise, I have had the FF beta since 2011 but NEVER grouped with anyone outside of pvp! Would love to get some group action going on.
Oh hey, people are already talking about this. I was about to make a thread. Came back yesterday and found that my Firecat had been auto-levelled to 40, so I kitted up and went to the new zones. Really liking how it feels right now, though I feel like thumping is (once again) punishingly difficult with not a lot of reward. You have to have blue-purple level items or play in a group of 3-4 just to thump for resources to craft blue-purple level items! I'm told that it's much faster to gear up through drops anyway.
So, put some hours into this over the weekend and played with Gihzmo and Squidget (not a guild member) last night. My summary- they dun goofed. The good: It's still fun to jump around and shoot stuff? Drop rates are kind of good on the mobs. Permanent durability loss is gone. Good riddance. The OWPvP area looks pretty cool, haven't tried it yet. The interface, inventory, and crafting is all much smoother and faster than it used to be. They finally added more content! The bad: The content is now all level gated. If you're level 20 there is one point of interest and area to go to for quests/thumping. Sure you could go back to lower level zones but why bother? The drops won't be any good and you'll get less XP and you don't need those resources. In my opinion this is one of the things that Beta Firefall got right- I loved the truly open world. Seeing it go completely the other way is disheartening. Stats have been reduced to one stat, power, which is a straight % buff to your damage. Everything gives power, from weapons to abilities to modules (basically gems you slot in your abilities). You should always slot as much power as you can all the time forever. Other stats on modules are things like 10% to cooldown, +1 spawnable turret, etc. There is very little to customize as you level up. If you've got your ideal abilities at level 12- well guess what, they aren't going to change for the next 28 levels, you'll just gain variants with more power. Crafting has been grind-ified into complete uselessness. It requires 10-20x more resources to craft something than it does to just buy it off the in-game auction house due to frequent drops. Crafting material drops are very rare for anything beyond commons, and the thumping system has been reworked to the point that now you pretty much thump for the monsters, because you will get dozens and dozens of item drops off them before you get the resources to build an item. When you do build an item, it gets randomly assigned stats. Or you could just... buy it. Diablo 3 world problems. Thumping doesn't make much sense. You cannot extract green or higher resources without dropping a higher-tier thumper. But as usual for Firefall, the level of challenge you'll face varies immensely. At level 20, Personal 3 thumpers were a complete snooze for 3 of us, but a Squad 1 dropped literally 10 chosen drop-pods and about 50 chosen on us twice in a row- there was no way that we could hope to fight it. Then at level 40 I was struggling to finish a Personal 1 even, with so many monsters spawning that I basically just started farming them rather than the thumper. The dynamic ARES mission system has been mostly gutted in favor of a job board system. That'd be okay- personal missions! Except that it likes to spawn missions with objectives a kilometer apart, up a mountain, both ways. You walk and walk and kill 5 guys and walk and walk. And there's no dynamic stuff in between so the world feels intensely empty. There are no more chosen invasions or watchtower fights. Both of my favorite frames were heavily nerfed. Firecat basically lost the best AOE ability in the game, and now plays like a regular assault. Bastion's turrets got an invisible nerf (I guess? I didn't see it listed) that causes their turrets to despawn every 2 minutes regardless of combat or damage state. Plus their HP was reduced to next-to-nothing. This makes the engineer incredibly frustrating to play, as every time you turn around your fucking multi-turret has vanished or been destroyed again. Not the end of the world but... really puzzlingly frustrating. The game is pretty rife with exploits and cheats. In the first two weeks there've been level grind exploits, aim-botting, and infinite item farms. They're getting stamped out as fast as they become popular but as usual, the cheaters are sitting in their epics and the game hasn't launched yet. TLR; I feel like they took a big gamble on changing basically every system including the ones that didn't need gambling on, and it didn't really pay off. Beta Firefall was awesome- the only thing I'd have changed would have been to remove permanent durability, and add more areas/group content/missions. The huge crafting grind has basically eliminated the system that kept me invested in the game, the thumping-and-crafting all over the world with a group of 2-3 buddies. I'm not particularly compelled to do endless 700m+ walking missions, just for the prospect of getting some more levels so I can do them again. The thing that made Firefall less than popular was an incredibly slow-burning development cycle, and constant needless reboots and redesigns of every game mechanic. It was a game that couldn't decide what it wanted to be. The core of the game though- thumping out resources around the vast open world with horizontal progression- was always really solid. I don't know what made the devs think that another reboot and redesign of the game was the key to success, especially when they stripped out the thumping and replaced it with a soulless level grind, but that's what they have here. I certainly wish them luck with it, I know they've worked hard. But I can't see myself booting it up again, and I say that as someone who invested well over $100 into it back in the day.
If you look at all the changes, essentially what they have done is gone more of a traditional MMO style. The crafting is not required, it is an alternate advancement from the normal drops from jobs and dungeons. I do agree with a lot of what you are saying though. I am not sure how I feel about the leveling system yet. I think you are right, it makes the world feel smaller since you are limited to certain areas at your level. Overall, I would like to see thing bring back more dynamic open world content, specifically the chosen war front. Coming into the game as if you had not played it before I think it will appeal to newer players more then it did before. It is much easier to get into. I think many people who have been playing FF for a long time miss the old thumping/crafting because, that was really all there was at one point. The game was still fun, but it essentially came down to crafting. I will certainly be playing once in a while, I am not sure how much though.
I wasn't firefall's biggest fan to start with, but that sentance just killed what interest I did have. After the update, I was thinking about picking it back up, but now I'm not sure I even care anymore. That's sad. As I said, I wasn't its biggest fan, but I did see the potential in it. Another traditional MMO is something we don't really need.
Well there's a reason I was playing Firefall and not GW2... though GW2 is a lot of fun at times. If they took the GW2 model and gave out modest level rewards when playing down-leveled in the other zones, that would make the world a lot less confining. I could take my 40 frame out and not worry about missing good loot as I ran around the level 15 zone with friends. The war front is sorely missed. The most fun I had this weekend was when we accidentally spawned that chosen invasion of sunken harbor by trying to run a squad thumper. I guess I don't see what's terribly appealing about the game to new players, though. You're looking at an enormous level grind... and then what? Firefall's missing that "Hook" that gets you into a game, especially one that requires such a time investment.
I think you may be reading too much into that line. I still think it is worth a shot. The traditional MMO is reference to the leveling/crafting/questing. The combat and feel of the game is still there.
Gave the game a try since it went public today. It's kind of a mixed bag that I've seen so far. Leveling feels grind-tastic more because you're spending 5 minutes shuttling from a to b to actually do parts of a quest. It wouldn't be that bad if there was was a bit more to do between points, but there's a lot of empty space where pretty much no monster roams. The visual designs look exceptionally polished compared to the weird slapdash way that Missions are laid out. it's a 700m run from a to b, with another 800m to c for pretty much every mission, and the world felt very empty between those specific points. Thumpers are probably where all the fun is going to be. I stumbled into a group thumper, and the game suddenly got exciting and tense for a good 10 minutes while players flailed around trying to do whatever they could to survive. Fun as heck, and It's clear that its meant to be a mainstay of content. Not having to change characters to level different classes is a big plus though. The whole experience evoked a feeling of nostalgia from a similarly themed game called Tabula Rasa. The controls felt more fluid than tabula rasa did, but it was a fun experience over all. Not something to focus on, and I probably wont put money into this game, but a good diversion for a group of friends looking to shoot space bugs together.
Yeah the thumpers have always been where it's at for Firefall. They just need more incentive to actually drop them as far as in-game rewards go.
As I said, the big thing that is mission right now is the dynamic events from previous builds. It used to be that you could not go 100 feet without running into some kind of event. I think it will be coming back (They have said it will be) I just do not know when.
Yeah, I am incredibly disappointed with the direction they took crafting. I thought the 1-1000 resource quality scale and associated crafting system were really interesting! This consequently makes thumping and scanning for minerals less rewarding, in my opinion. Combined with the linear progression levels and previously mentioned lack of dynamic events, the game disappoints me at release. I was promised an innovative MMOFPS and feel like I got something more conservative and uninteresting. However, I will continue to play every once in a while because the game world still intrigues me and the act of thumping with a group is still enjoyable.
