Firefall's In Trouble?

5 August, 2016. 370 words.

Imagine my surprise one morning when I was listening to the MassivelyOP podcast on the way to work and heard Justin and Bree mention that Red 5 had laid off their whole studio (or something like that). I completely missed this news.

That’s the Firefall guys! Wait, I’ve played Firefall! I like Firefall!

There are basically three MMORPG-style shooters that I play, and they are Defiance, Planetside 2, and Firefall. I don’t play them often mind you, just like, once every couple of months. If that. But the icons are always out on my desktop, waiting patiently for me to click on them.

Now one of them has a questionable future.

I always kind of liked Firefall because it reminded me a bit of Tribes (the original one). It’s a pretty nice shooter, fast, responsive, easy-to-control. Not overly complicated. At least for running around shooting PvE mobs. I’ve never done any PvP in it, but let’s just assume that it’s deeply flawed and unbalanced and everyone hates it. (That’s the default Internet position on every game.)

It’s also a pretty nice-looking game, too. The progression system was kind of interesting. It was one of the first shooters I can ever remember playing that had story quests like an MMORPG. (Defiance might have been the first.)

I used “kind of” a lot up there, which kind of illustrates the basic problem with Firefall. While I think it’s generally a good game, and I had kind of a favorable response to it, I kind of never felt like playing it.

It didn’t take very long to run out of new and interesting things to experience. All of those story quests were kind of the same: Drive or run to a place and kill stuff. The thumpers were cool and made for some fun area-wide group activities (without having to join a group), but again, after a while, they were all the same.

Still, it’s a shame to think it might be shutting down. It’s one of those games that I might pop into for a short time here and there for a quick and easy shooter experience. (As opposed to something like Overwatch, which would be a hard and stressful shooter experience.)

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