Firefall Founder By Accident

I played a fair amount of Firefall over the weekend, which they are still saying is in Open Beta, driven mainly by boredom with everything else I’ve been playing. After you go to an Internet guide and read up on what it is you’re actually supposed to *do* in the game, it’s a bit more fun.

Of course, that means the game itself is not providing any bread crumbs for the player, which one could argue is poor design. Previously I would log in and play around with battle suits during character creation, then it would set me down in the starting zone of Copacabana and I’d think to myself, “Okay, now what? Nobody is giving out quests.” Then I got bored running around looking for somebody to give me something to do and exited.

Funny story. I’m only playing Firefall again because I accidentally became a Founder. I actually wanted to get into the WildStar beta, because everyone’s talking about how it’s going to be the next great MMO, so I went searching to see if there was a way to pre-pay and get into the beta, like so many other games let you do. (Because game “betas” are usually just a way to get people to pre-pay for early access, as opposed to giving the developers a chance to test the game.) So I did some searching and found a page to become a founder and happily forked over $50 to unlock the beta … then I realized I had actually been on the Firefall website, not WildStar. And even more annoying was that I already had beta access for Firefall, and had already decided it wasn’t for me.

But after reading a quick guide and playing the game for a few hours, it turns out that there is more of an RPG element to this game than I originally expected. I thought it was just a Tribes clone, but there’s actually a big PvE element as well. It’s sort of a CoD-style of character progression, though. You don’t get loot from monsters exactly, but you get pieces and parts from which you can make or buy loot back at the towns. (“Loot” in this game is in the form of upgrades for your battle suit or whatever it’s called.)

I seriously doubt if I’ll play Firefall for very long, but maybe I’ll get a week of entertainment out of it.