Firefall Content and Beta Rollout Revealed
Firefall is the highly anticipated free-to-play MMOFPS from Red 5 Studios. Headed by former World of Warcraft developer Mark Kern, the game is currently in very closed beta, but the developers have put together several dev diaries to hold fans over for now.
The latest one contains details on the beta process and, most interestingly, the content rollout for the game. Beta invites will apparently be distributed in a similar fashion to Tribes: Ascend; that is, if you get an invite to play, you will then get invites to send to other people when the dev team wants to expand the player base. This simple system helps prevent the servers from getting overloaded, which can happen when massive waves of invites gets rolled out all at once.
The most intriguing tidbit of information comes in how content in the game will be received. Everything will be up to the players to explore and uncover new territory. The example given is that the game may start in a 10-square mile area of Earth, and over the rest of the Earth is the Melding. (I won’t go into full backstory for the game, but you can read more here.) The Melding is similar to fog of war in RTS-style games, but just trying to explore these unknown areas won’t do anything; the world is actually blocked off. Players will have to work together across multiple servers to construct Melding Repulsion Units (MRUs). These MRUs will push back the Melding to reveal more and more world to explore until eventually, the entire Earth will be playable, open-world area.
This all sounds very ambitious, but if it works in practice, it could be a lot of fun for players. While other MMOs like World of Warcraft have held server-wide events similar to this before, they’ve been nothing to the scale of what Firefall seems to be shooting for. Ultimately, this kind of thing aims to do what an MMO is really supposed to do: get people to play together to achieve a shared goal.
Firefall has no release date as of yet, but you can sign up for the beta at the official website. Be sure to keep tuned in to KBMOD for more details as we get them!
nipnops
DanI put the OO in Swagoo. One of the founders of KBMOD. I stream on Twitch as well as writing and editing for the website.
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