Quick Look: Firefall

Oh yes.. my bad.. got confused by their clever ruse.. 2015 is a much better game...

Brad @26:30: "...let's maybe not thump for a while..."

*laughing* right?

I've watched this for 6 minutes and the words "borderlands" have not been said yet. Am I crazy, or does look like Borderlands? Like everything about it screams borderlands. Before he said what it was I thought it was a borderlands mod or something.

God damn those violin strings every 60 seconds. Might as well make a phone ringing noise part of the BGM.

EDIT: figured out it's the jetpack noise. Terrible.

Ah, yes, I confused the two MMO sci-fi FPS's with weirdo control schemes.

Seems alright.

Next your going to tell me that Huxley is a game that is going to come out

This game seems like if it cam out before borderlands 1 it would be received much better.

Best thing about this quicklook was the thumpin. Time to get my Dune fix!

It was weird watching this video while playing firefall. The pacing of the beginning of the game is really off, seems like the devs wanted to ease the MMO players in. I've played on and off for a year or more, just to check the major patches. As @donos said, there was a major shift in the game focus.

The main idea of Firefall was (and I hope it still is) the playerbase pushing the Melding back (the weird purple smoke wall). Instead of dumping all the lore just watch the older trailer where you see how it started. It's some kind of PvE attrition war effort to expand the map. The game has an older school type of combat (quake, UT, Tribes) and the world is well detailed and ripe for exploring players. In older versions I've seen Sunken Harbor getting invaded by the AI (with artillery, dropships and more) and if the players couldn't defend it, the city was absorbed by the fog.

Some stuff got scrapped in the process, like the competitive multiplayer arena matches (with CTF, TDM, etc); So @schnoo and @bones8677 are correct, used to have that, even now you can find posters of "Live PVP Matches" near Sunken Harbor. There were racing events, with other players or in a timed-mission style like a rally track. Skills and stats were an act of balancing the power/cpu you could have in your battleframe, which was a more thoughtful and flexible progression, and crafting was a essential part of that.

As a sidenote, I guess the server was overloaded (or a crappy ISP on the client side) at the time of recording: The AI not responding, the weird Aranha behaviour, the dialogs/textures downloading must have been the source of the problems described by the narrators. The game seems to download a bare minimum of stuff so it's not like SW:TOR with its 40gb download. The network options show some streaming bandwith sliders where you can adjust the kbps destined for gameplay, textures and so on.

Well. That's Firefall alright.

There is something weird with the lighting in this game. Some areas look much darker than they should judging from the surroundings and skybox.

Also, refining iron ore with a molecular printer? That's crazy!

"Yeeeeaaaa buoooooyyyyy"

That was a Giant Bomb moment, brought to you by Giant Bomb's Bradley Shoemaker

I was interested in this. But then it took this long to come out. And that went away. That shotgun reload is horrible to.

@jeff You put 100 hours into SWTOR? That surprises me. Do any of the class quests actually become worth it story wise in the end? Like are they actually interesting? Kind of the only draw of that game for me was the Bioware single player stuff about it haha.

Huh. That... wasn't what I thought this game was at all. The bright colours and tropical setting is neat, but really just makes me want to have liked that last Tribes game more than I did.

It doesn't seem that interesting to me but I'm not exactly interested in Destiny either, so maybe I'm not the best arbiter for online world shooters.

I've been hearing about this game for so long. I was hoping to be more impressed by it at this point, but it still doesn't grab me much at all.

I tried this out yesterday, somehow got into the beta but now I can't login anymore (until 10 am PDT when it is officially released).

Having played both this and Destiny, this seems a lot more fun for me in the long run. Destiny might've been more fun if it really was an MMO.

It's funny, with this and Destiny out and about, neither game looks great in comparison. The shooting/melee in this doesn't look as satisfying compared to Destiny. But the faux-MMO trappings of Destiny look cramped compared to this game's open world and more traditional tons of MMO stuff to do.

Was that dude humming Cotton Eye Joe at one stage?

Right!? What was the DEAL with that? Who worked on that animation, looked at it and went "yep, I'm done" and who is the equally bizarre individual who singed off on the fever dream that that is an acceptable animation to include in a release product in 2014

I think I would have really liked this game if I had more time and less money to spend on games. That's part if why I liked Borderlands so much. But with my life now I don't think I could dedicate enough time to it to really get into it.

I don't think the giant PAX booth was worth it for this game.

Just noticed that Jeff dropped $100 on the Deluxe-Whatever pack he mentioned in the video. Gross. I hope he can expense that like he did with the Star Wars Angry Birds game!

So how many space spiders should you shoot in this game to get a Pax booth either in the game or in the next Pax? Also with this out now, wonder if they will keep putting booths up. First year of it out I think they need the booth to just prove to people it exists.

You guys broke the most long-standing tradition in all of mmo quicklooks...

You didn't /dance

@onkel said:

Nope, that's the Use/Interact button.

MMO Quick Looks are the best Quick Looks. FYI Aranha is literally Portuguese for spider...At least they weren't rats?

Combat abilities go on the mouse, non-combat abilities stay on the keyboard! Mouse 3 is grenade or special ability, mouse 4 is melee or other special ability. E is for use. E will always be for use. Even if F is for use, it's secretly just E in disguise.

I might give this game a shot when I'm really bored. I like to shoot things and unlock abilities. This looks like it has some shooting and abilities. It doesn't look particularly good, but it's free, so it's worth a few hours to explore.

Legs go on the left hand/keyboard and arms and head go on the right hand/mouse. Running, jumping and crouching is on the left, shooting, reloading, interaction and melee is on the right. The only exception is having flashlights on F sometimes when I run out of mouse buttons. Why would you stop running to reload when you could just click the middle mouse button?

When i was in beta closed and otherwise you could fight any mob the mob your were fighting was your level no matter what level you were. Infact there were no levels and you could make parts to upgrade your ARES Frame.

Not that it bothers me to much I still like the game still play it for a bit every day thankful my ARES frames are all in the high 40's :)

What's up with all the names in portuguese?

That makes a ton of sense and I wish I could subscribe to it, but if I'm in a hurry, that's what the W key is for, and R is closer to another finger so that's not a problem.

In other news, I tried this game after seeing a glimmer of potential in this quick look. Four hours later I uninstalled it. This has got to be one of the most tedious, least polished games I've played in a long time. And the last part kinda blows my mind considering this thing was probably in development for close to ten years, right? I mean, the company was founded in 2005 and this is their first release. I get that it's hard to make a big ol' game that has so many different parts, and I get that the longer something takes to make, the more scattered the end product is going to come out, but... I fail to see any reason to play this. The shooting is barely more interactive than your typical action MMORPG, the character customization and loot drops are barely there, the class abilities, at least for the first four hours, are not interesting in the least, 50% of the time spent in missions is either sitting around defending someone who doesn't need defending for an arbitrary length of time, or just traveling between objectives. Why does one quest tell me to travel 1000 meters north to talk to a dude, then the dude immediately tells me to go kill something 500 meters south of him? Is that just to make me feel like I'm wasting time so that I'll want to spend money to speed the process up somehow? Or is it just incompetent mission design?

It actually reminds me a ton of Borderlands. A lot of things do. The post-apocalyptic theme, enemies consisting mostly of crazy humanoids, dogs or giant bugs, the whole thing where missions are way too far apart... but at least Borderlands gave you a vehicle and had lots of loot drops and the shooting actually felt good once you got some better guns...

So now I'm installing Borderlands 2 instead. Thanks for reminding me that I had that, Firefall.

I'd like a concept page for games where someone says "We've got company" or some similar phrase ironically implying a friendly social call when enemies show up. So I can make sure I don't buy any of them.

It takes place in Brazil.

Have a feeling there's going to be a bunch of devs looking for new jobs in a few months..

thats great!

Seems like a watered down Borderlands,it just needs to add more punch to the weapons and more enemies. Did the beta not tell them this?!!?

Ps. Also if they insist on playing MMO's, they should try th "MM" part..... :P

Now, this is not in defense of Firefall, because holy hell has that game (and that dev studio) had a rough ride to where it is now. But watching quick looks like this and the other ones they've done in the past always really makes me wish they had someone on the team who knows their shit with MMOs. They freewheel in completely incorrect speculation sometimes or just completely miss/gloss over things to the point where you just want to grab the screen and shake it some times. It happens from time to time in general, but seems to happen consistently with MMOs because I don't think anyone actually plays them/has interest in them on the team, but they do them anyway. I mean,Jeff being exasperated and dismissive is humorous when the game is just bad/not great I guess, but after a point it's like, why are you forcing yourself and the viewer through this? I mean if you act sarcastic and bored enough you can make any game look like shit.

This honestly looks a lot better than I expeccted

Yup.

I really don't get why people thinking playing games you don't have to pay attention to are worth playing. If you're just going to zombie mode a game, why play at all?

You know, I don't even disagree, I'm the same. I hardly have time to play anymore, so I want my games to be as involved and awesome as possible.

And yet some people just enjoy playing like that, it's a bit like smoking a cigarette, you know? Giving your hands something to do while you're having a conversation or listening to a podcast.

Because it's fun? I like the grind. Still have fond memories of watching a TV show while playing WoW for hours. It's just good old fashioned fun. Sometimes that's enough.

Extremely disappointed to not hear any Dune references, after they've been talking about Thumpers for 20 minutes already...

I love the look of the game. It's kind of a cross between Crysis and Borderlands, which I'm totally ok with. However, everything that surrounds the visuals, like...well...the gameplay, just doesn't seem that interesting and isn't appealing to me at all.