Update on our Latest Firefall Milestone

Hey everybody! If you happened to miss our announcement over Twitter, we want to let you all know that we’ve recently begun work on our next major Development Milestone for Firefall! So what is the focus of this milestone? Well, we know that in order to provide the very best gaming experience possible, we have to deliver on an engaging PvE (Player-vs-Environment) experience. That is the focus of this current milestone – to expand on Firefall’s PvE content with dynamic new content that you haven’t seen before!

What is a ‘Milestone’?

At Red 5 Studios, our development cycles are broken down into different milestones, each with their own focus or general purpose. During each milestone, the development team is broken down into smaller “Feature Teams” who are each assigned to create something that helps to support the overall milestone goal. While development teams traditionally are told what to develop from a general design document, our feature teams are tasked with overseeing their feature from conceptualization, design and testing (the “finding the fun” phase, as we call it), and ultimately through the implementation in the game itself.

For this milestone, we have several different Feature Teams that are working on the creation or support of current and future PvE content:

Chosen Warfront – The Chosen Warfront team is currently working on creating new, dynamic encounters with the Chosen to make the war a part of the daily life of New Eden’s residents. The goal here is to expand on the patrols and incursions that are in the game currently and to have the Chosen dynamically change where battles are taking place, what areas are under attack, and making sure that you are constantly on your toes looking out for Chosen attacks.

Creatures – Our Creatures team is hard at work creating amazingly diverse environmental biomes to give each area of the world a unique feel with creatures that match the environment, as well as populating the game world with all-new creatures.

PvE Content – This is the team that’s focused on creating more missions and dynamic encounters across New Eden. They are responsible for making each point of interest (POI) feel alive and have content for you to enjoy.

PvE Player Direction and Rewards – In short, they’re looking at ways to make sure that you’re never confused as to where you need to go, or what there is to do near you. They will be using UI, content, and rewards systems to spread users out around the open world.

PvE Core Combat – As the name implies, the PvE Core Combat team is charged with improving the core mechanics of PvE combat to provide a more diverse and immersive experience. Expect to see new, or modified, abilities that will allow battleframes to be more effective in open world content.

Login Dashboard – Yes, we are looking to improve the current login dashboard that you see when you first boot up Firefall with news and announcements about the game, and what’s going on in the game world itself.

Exploration and Achievement – We want you to have fun while exploring the world, and this is the team that’s working on ways to encourage and reward exploration. They are also adding more achievements to the game along with ways to share and view those achievements.

Stability and Scalability – Not all of our teams are elbow-deep in our design tools – some of them are working hard on making sure that the game remains stable, accessible, and playable. This team is also responsible for finishing the work required to bring EU servers online.

Localization – It’s important that we cater to as many players as we can, and our great localization team is always hard at work keeping things fresh for our French and German players.

Matchmaking – We’re constantly looking to improve our PvP content, and while this milestone has a heavy focus on PvE, we aren’t taking a break on perfecting our matchmaking.

As we push onward through this milestone, we’ll be keeping you updated on our progress with new blogs and videos highlighting everything we’re working on during this milestone and beyond. And don’t forget that you can still pick up a Founder’s Pack – just head over to the Founder’s Page to learn more!

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http://www.firefallthegame.com/2012/09/12/update-on-our-latest-firefall-milestone/