A Look Inside the Firefall Beta
Firefall has been my game of choice since I started playing it last night. I can’t put it down. It feels like that first person shooter mission that I never wanted to end, that I wanted to go on
forever, except this game does go on forever. It essentially is an endless mission. The game hands you an objective, or you choose to travel to one, and when you complete it, it hands you another. Sometimes the objectives build on each other, other times they seem like random encounters.
Objectives are big or small, for single players or dedicated squads of players. The great thing is though, that you have access to it all. If you chose to play solo and you come across an objective that requires more players, other solo players will eventually show up, if they aren’t there already. The game also seems to generate missions based off of how many players have recently responded to local objectives. So if there are 15 solo players that seem to be mobbing together and hitting local objectives, the game will make those objectives more challenging instead of just something that such a mob steamrolls over.
There also appear to be no safezones besides the small 10×10 foot respawn buildings. Once a player steps outside of the safezone, he or she could potentially be attacked by any amount or type of NPC. The Chosen, which are the games antagonizing force, can invade entire player cities and take it over.
It has definitely been a very entertaining experience playing this game and I’ve only played it solo! I’m looking forward to getting a few more Lone Gamers on, squading up, and kicking some Chosen butt! But I’ll save that for next week.
While the game is a blast, it is still very much in beta. Red 5 has been working hard to tackle bugs and the game has come a very long way from where it was over a year ago. A lot of the players in the game are complaining about bugs in a tone that leads me to believe that they feel the game is a finished product – that definitely is not the case. It seems like a lot of players expect the open beta to be relatively bug free.
I’d review the game, but that isn’t fair to Firefall because it definitely is not a completed game. There’s a lot more to come for the game, to include several rounds of bug fixes, server and client performance passes, and plenty of content and gameplay additions, I’m sure. I look forward to it all. Firefall will be installed on my computer for some time.
What experiences have you had playing the Firewall beta?
And now, without further words, the promised Firefall Beta screenshots, with plenty more to come.
