Firefall Development Update - Part 1

Community,

On behalf of the entire tribe at Red 5, I would like to thank you for your continual support in joining us for the beta of Firefall and your ongoing offering of ideas, feedback and suggestions. We take your feedback seriously and strive to incorporate what we hear from all of you into future improvements to the game.

In early April, we reached an exciting milestone for the product by turning on our game servers for 24/7 operation. This was a huge and scary step for us as it would be the first true test of Firefall’s stickiness.

After six weeks of testing, we have observed and heard some really great things. We have received a lot of really great feedback from the community and have taken the time to really think through our next steps for the game.

At a high level, we picked up on some pretty consistent themes:

Skill ceiling: Competitive players reached a level of comfort with different combat options that gave little room for growth with practice. There is a strong desire to raise the skill ceiling and to reward players for practicing skill-based moves over a long period of time.

Matchmaking: Who you are paired against can make or break the experience completely. In a perfect world, players should be matched against other players of equal skill-level with similar gear. The outcome of any given match should be 50/50.

Vertical progression: For being a skill-based game, players were feeling like we had too much vertical progression. Simply being higher level gave you a real competitive advantage over other players.

Player choice: Despite having 1,000s of pieces of gear in the game the progression road map feels very linear and gated purely by levels. By the time you earn your second ability you also are given a second ability slot. You’re not actually forced to make a choice on which ability to equip until you’re dozens of hours into leveling a battleframe and have your fourth ability module.

Class definition: Certain classes have been lost in translation from the moment they were designed to implementation. We need to better define what role a battleframe is meant to play, and how that role interacts with other battleframes. We then need to use that definition in the creation of all weapons and abilities for the given battleframe to make sure that everything feels cohesive and unique.

We were so eager to get direct feedback from the community that we invited 10 of our most active, most competitive PvPers to join us in the office on May 10-11. These are guys most of you have seen or played against and most have clocked in over 500 games of Firefall. If anyone has experienced the inequalities between levels or battleframes, these guys should have some great perspective.

On their arrival, we spent some time talking about the Red 5 development process and our focus on being community-driven and our iterative development methodology. I then shared with them a glimpse of some of the changes we have in store for the coming 2 months.

We spent a lot of time with them, playing the game, and holding a level 15, maxed gear, tournament with some of the devs. Following, in traditional Red 5 fashion, we held an in-depth feedback session where we were able to ask these community members countless direct questions and to hear unfiltered feedback.

The following are the critical changes we are working on based on feedback from all of you as well as this group of players who visited us earlier this month.

Where are we going?

Give players interesting choices to make
Raise the skill ceiling
Increase the skill requirements for weapons/abilities, new skill-based weapons/abilities, review core mechanics
Create more stickiness in PvP

Add tiers and horizontal progression, matchmaking improvements, skill-rating, spectator mode, more map types, and maps
Create stickiness in PvE

Rarity of resources, crafting that matters, character customization, dynamic content, trading, openworld scalability
In the next blog, I want to cover some of the ideas and features we are considering in order to raise the overall skill-ceiling. After that we’ll go into more details on tiers, matchmaker, and crafting. In the meantime, feel free to join the community and let us know what you think of the ideas you’ve seen so far.