We sat down with James Macauley, Executive Producer at Red 5 Studios, to get the skinny on their upcoming free to play title Firefall which was announced earlier this year at PAX. The game is slated to be released sometime next year on the PC.
Co-Optimus: The art style is great. It's good to see devs getting away from Gears of War Brown, Fallout Green, things like that. Do these brighter colors signify a brighter mood to the game? Or is it going to be another moody post apocalypse, or alien invasion affair. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just glad to see purple and blue.
James: First of all, thanks. We spent a lot time zeroing in on the art style of Firefall and are really excited about where we ended up. We are fans of Manga and Anime – you can see that in the design of the battleframes. We didn’t want to be photorealistic, so we created our own custom “Manga Shader” to capture the essence of Firefall.
The game world is alive, varied, and colorful – which as you mention, seems to go against the recent trends in gaming. Though Firefall takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, it is not your typical everything-is-nuked apocalypse. Here, Earth has been transformed by the Melding - an aggressive energy storm that has engulfed the majority of the planet. Both flora and fauna have rapidly evolved giving the world a vast range of environments and creatures. This offers a great backdrop to the story of Firefall. Though we’re leaving most of the story for you to enjoy in-game, there is definitely a mix of moodiness and hope. Not everything has to be doom and gloom.
Co-Optimus: With that beauty, what kind of system requirements are you targeting? How scalable will the engine be?
James:Honestly, we haven’t finalized the system requirements yet. We’re still optimizing, and ensuring that Firefall is compatible with a wide array of systems – not just upper end PCs.
Since Firefall is an online game designed for a global market, we also need to make sure that it runs just as well on bargain gaming rigs as it does on the top-of-the-line system in your home office.
Our non-photorealistic art-style lends itself nicely to having visual quality knobs we can turn based on the available hardware while still having a visually pleasing gaming experience.
Co-Optimus:You just announced Natural Motion support for animation. I've seen this strongest in player animation for simple things like climbing stairs, leaning against walls, and contact with other objects. How will Firefall utilize it?
James: We’re fans of the team over at NaturalMotion, and their tools are great. Morpheme has allowed us to optimize our animation pipeline and focus on other technologies to make the game the best it can be.
One huge advantage to using a package like Morpheme is that it gives virtually full control over animations to the animators. This means our animators do not need to work with programmers, every step of the way, to implement new animations or to change how different animations blend which equates to faster iteration times and high quality animations.
We also will rely on Morpheme for some of the more advanced animation blend support for things like foot placement and head looks. We would like to explore some of the other physic-driven animation blends such as leaning against walls or “bumping” into objects as time permits.
Co-Optimus: The battleframes look intriguing. How are these connected to classes? Do classes depict the battle frame or vice versa. Can you have a tank looking body but put it in a scout battle frame, or can you take a slinky looking female and make her a heavy tank?
James: Battleframes are central to the class system in Firefall. Your character’s class is defined by the equipment that you wear. Each battleframe can be leveled independently, and will grant you access to new weapons, abilities, tech modules and calldowns. All of these items will impact how your character plays and fights.
In addition to being able to trick out how your character plays in a given battleframe, we also want you to be able to customize how he or she looks. For example, you’ll be able to customize the paint job on your battleframe to match your army’s colors or to go lone wolf with your own unique look.
Since being able to instantly read your enemy is so important we will have some limitations on how much you can mix and match the visuals between each respective battleframe. Within a given battleframe, you will have ample opportunities to tweak how your character looks.
Co-Optimus: Being an MMO, how exactly are the co-op aspects of the game going to work? Will there instanced missions for groups of players to take? If not, is there a chance of griefers stealing kills or worse yet, killing you?
James: Firefall at its core is an online multiplayer shooter. We are taking co-op gameplay to a whole new level where you share the experience with hundreds of other people. We have a mix of instanced and open-world missions that you will be encouraged to run with other players.
We truly believe that gaming is better when shared with others. Thus, we’re adding a ton of support to Firefall to make it easy to play with your friends as well as to team up with perfect strangers to run different missions or to compete head-to-head in multiplayer.
Given that much of our co-op experience takes place in a shared open world, we definitely think about ways players could grief others and plan to address these concerns through good gameplay design and tech support. For example, scaling the spawn rate of a certain mission-related creature based on density of players in the area or rate of creature death.
Co-Optimus: What's the maximum group size for a co-op "squad"?
James: First of all, Firefall has two main social groups. Your army is your large scale, persistent team or clan. You can work together with others in your army to advance your army technology which will give you access to new abilities and calldowns, special missions and resource collection improvements. You will also be able to compete as an army in multiplayer tournaments.
Firefall also has smaller, temporary groups called squads. You’ll be able to join up with 4 other players (total of 5), who could be friends or perfect strangers, to run co-op missions, collect resources or complete in multiplayer matches. You’ll share experience gains and advance through missions together with others in your squad.
Co-Optimus: How will the classes play off each other for strong co-op support? I assume we'll have roles like medic, heavy gunner, leader, etc.?
James: We want to make sure there’s ample content for lone-wolves who want to have a single player experience, but you brought up a great reason to play with others – the ability to share your battleframe’s strengths.
We’ll be talking in great detail about additional battleframes over the next six months, but your assumption is correct that we want to make sure there are classes that support every gamer’s style of play – those who prefer to hang in the back and support the troops, as well as those who like to get up-close and personal. We are regularly exploring ways for abilities or weapons to have a synergy with other battleframes.
Co-Optimus: Will there be gamepad/controller support? Any plans to bring the MMO world of Firefall to any of the consoles?
James: At this point, we’re focused on one platform in order to make that experience the very best it can be. For launch we’re targeting Windows-Based PCs.
That said, we have talked about what it would take to bring Firefall to different platforms. This would take a great deal of effort and is something we would need to explore more later on. There are clearly some new obstacles we’d have to overcome to get a free-to-play game on the current consoles.
Co-Optimus: It really seems like the freemium model for games is taking off. We've covered quite a few quality titles that are free with microtransactions - it's good to see the US finally adopt these types of games that have typically been so popular in the East. When did the decision come to make Firefall follow this model? Who did you have to "convince" to make that happen?
James: As you pointed out, the free to play model is already proven in the East. When we started developing Firefall, our top priority was to make a solid gaming experience. It wasn’t until this last year that we got more serious about finalizing our monetization model.
When you go free-to-play you are opting to give up a lot of upfront revenue with box sales. But, we really were confident that players would love playing Firefall and would be willing to spend money in our in-game marketplace. So, we opted to reduce the barrier to entry by eliminating box sales and going free-to-play. By going this route we saw the potential of having a much larger gaming community around Firefall which ultimately is what’s going to make the game.
Honestly, once we internalized the plan to go free-to-play, there really wasn’t much convincing of others to be done. Our partners are all very familiar with this business model and were very eager to give us support for this direction.
Thanks for your time James, and thanks to Chris from Promethium Marketing for setting things up - we look forward to Firefall when it hits next year!