Coming Soon: Orcix, Goblinix and Trollix

Well, that's about enough of Firefall for now. If it's still around next year (which I doubt) I'll look into it again. After finding a bugged mission, I chose to travel to another one only to find my aerial mode of transportation was bugged and everyone else knew it would get bugged because it's been bugged for some time. Then my character fell through the world, which was about the most exciting thing that happened to me since I came back. Meanwhile the crafting system still isn't in and won't be for... well, probably for however long it takes to fix the gliders too.

This is what happens when you blow your entire budget on redoing the same pointless cinematics ten times over.

But it's those cinematics I want to really talk about, or rather more generally Firefall's aesthetics. The bouncy crayon-box plastic doll look of Copacabana may not be for everyone but three years ago it certainly succeeded in declaring itself new and fresh among the endless re-iterations of elves and orcs cluttering RPGs. Not all that new, really, but given an entire generation's worth of lowered standards, providing slightly different giant bugs to set on fire will get people's attention. Better yet, the token evil humanoid NPCs weren't your standard dumb troglodytic brutes spewing broken English to make the player feel superior to them. Though still bland enough not to scare the idiotic masses away, the Chosen in their initial presentation came across as mysterious, intelligent foes whose inscrutable machinations left plenty to the imagination. They showed little to no interest in interacting with their prey.

It should come as no surprise that as Firefall increasingly WoW-ed itself, the Chosen too began to approach orc-normal familiarity. Instead of growling out a few cryptic phrases as they trample you to death, you're treated to lengthy monologues by cackling Chosen villains torturing poor heroic damsels in distress. Oh noes! Someone call Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Not that it's the only change. Your technician, Aero, no longer seems to have a troubled past. Oilspill, the swamp-rat mechanic who formed the other half of your NPC adventuring party, was side-lined in favor of a blond-haired, blue-eyed dependable soldier archetype, to which was added a libidinous old moustache-twirling rogue whose dialogue would make Weregeek's El Pantero blush... except El Pantero was created as a hilariously bad pastiche of such Zorro-esque cliches, while whatsisface hitting on the token heroic tough chick in Firefall lacks any such self-awareness.

Still, it's the Chosen who seem to have taken the brunt of the duncing. Yes, they degenerate from slightly creepy, mysterious embodiments of the unknown to endlessly monologuing Snidelies, but that's not enough. How can you decisively drive home the point that they're now no different from goblins and ogres, that Firefall is becoming a warmed-over World of Warcraft?

Meet Ogrix, your designated punching bag for a couple of lengthy early missions, the big stomping fat guy who AM NOT TALK GOOD ENG-LISH !

See, it's important to remember that games these days don't get dumbed down for lack of knowledge of better choices, but because of a concerted effort across the industry to lower the audience's expectations, to control the market, to prevent competition. Aesthetics are absolutely a warning sign of a game's overall quality, and vice-versa. This change in the Chosen was implicit the moment Firefall's resource acquisition started getting simplified. When you see an online game adopt WoW-ish features or lack thereof like a lack of a player economy, a lack of meaningful long-term persistent map objectives, a lack of anything which might mentally challenge customers, make no mistake: Ogrix is right around the corner.

It's a Whole New Fall Game

Firefall spammed me bragging about all they've updated and inviting me for a month-long "VIP" session so despite being busy with EVE at the moment I decided to visit and see what they've done with the place. Before I get to the visual aid, allow me to provide some background.

I'm not entirely sorry I looked into Firefall. The original concept included some good ideas (or at least slightly different, which counts for a lot in today's homogenized MMO market) and the utter trainwreck it gradually became makes a quaint object lesson in game resign. Red5's "recent history" on Wikipedia alone would warn any would-be developers off relying on a single investor (especially the part where they're not paying their employees) as it becomes apparent that the project's gradual, repeated redesign was likely a result of a corporate overlord visiting a few times a year and demanding more WoW-bell.

Though Firefall had an occasional good point here and there to set it above some of its competitors, especially in its second or so incarnation, it betrays the curious failing of being simply the worst-managed business investment I've ever seen among games. Yes, there are a lot of bad games out there, but in most cases you can see method behind the madness, some Machiavellian (or Bond-villain) scheme for fleecing customers. You can see the corners being cut for profit, the attempts at inducing gambling addiction or some kind of dependence on the game's stimuli in its customers, the... ida know, boobs or something, but in any case that something quite blatantly is meant to benefit the product's peddlers. True in most cases, but not for Firefall.

It's been remade in at least four major installments that I can place. The first time I jumped in it revolved on arena PvP fights. The second time I saw it (the most promising version) I spent an almost pleasant time searching for resource nodes to craft objects for a player-based in-game economy. By two years ago it had become a "kill ten rats" daily mission-running routine, but at least it was still mostly open-world. Now it seems an endless sequence of instanced missions laden with cheesy cinematics, but I'll get into that in some later post. In between these various major stages it managed to trip through a slew of arbitrary reworks of its player classes, resource system, missions, etc. I'm not talking here about the sort of redesign suffered by most WoW-clones, in which later updates gradually dumb down the general tone of "endgame" content. Firefall has redesigned the same elements again and again... and again and again and again. Missions, voiceovers, cinematics, zones, anything and everything has been randomly removed or replaced with a side-grade of itself, usually repeatedly. Every time I've come back to the game I've had to replay the introductory mission sequence and it's been altered every time. Years of development seem to have been gratuitously flushed down the drain.

So I kinda knew not to get my hopes up when I clicked their latest spam. Sure enough I couldn't even patch the game but what the hell; an uninstall and overnight reinstall later, I was in, baby! Well, partly in. Just the tip. I was stuck at the loading screen through several reboots because they'd once again redesigned the class system, deleting the player's core classes after you reach a prestige class, and the system wouldn't accept my choice of prestige class and kept GOTO 10-ing on me. Finally though I was in, and rushed to the crafting stations to clear some space in my overloaded inventory... only to find out crafting had been disabled until the next no, wait, until two major patches later. Well, at least they're setting goals for themselves like highly effective computer people are apt to do. And redo.

Keep in mind I logged in because they officially invited me after a year and a half of well-earned absence. This, all this, is what's supposed to inspire me to return to the game. This is them showing off.

Then it was deja vu all over again running through some introductory crap about bandits and ogres, and then (wait, this is the kicker) I tried to spend some of the amusement park money that came with my offer of a month of VIP time.

Check-mate, good sirs. I declare myself defeated. I've seen and ranted about a lot of shitty games but even in the darkest depths of misdesign hell, when every other feature is broken, when there's no balance and your items get deleted and the servers crash and your character's suddenly naked in a volcano, you can bet your sweet ass the cash shop and PayPal links still work!

Nope, not in Firefall they don't.
I cannot begin to fathom what's going on with this thing. The project's been off the rails for so long it's probably being pulled by Jed Clampett's mule at this point. I'm tempted to say its investors destroyed it (as is often the case) but who the hell would still be sinking money into this thing after five years of stagnation, ditches within last ditches and backsliding? Maybe it's the programmers themselves creating a sinecure for themselves. I'm just enjoying an occasional gander of the freak for my two bits.


___________________________________________
edit 2019/07/29:
Fixed a couple of typos.

Firefall did go officially go belly-up some years after its obvious death. May it long serve as an object lesson.

Firefall's take on the polar bear in a snowstorm

 All chiaro, no oscuro.
 
Seriously, whichever graphic artist thought blue and white text was the perfect choice for something you have to read floating against sky and clouds - you're fired. You are so freakin' fired.

Pack up your construction-paper art school diploma, board that dropship to hell-knows-where and get lost.

Fire-fall lazorz! pew-pew Planetside

I hopped into Planetside 2 today for twenty minutes; that should about do it for this month. However, twenty minutes was long enough to get exposed to a near-lethal dose of mass-mindless blabber, including a recurring theme over the past year or two "hey, didja hear about that game Firefall, it's kinda like this one!"
And of course whenever I've hopped into Firefall I've heard the same about PS2.

Never mind that one is a strict PvP faction war without resource collection and the other a PvE, largely solo resource collection grindfest. They both use twitchy, fast-paced FPS mechanics and are both set in vaguely syencefyctiony locales, so hey, that must be all there is to it.
No, sorry. A slice of bread is not the same as a chicken wing just because they're both off-white and edible.

However, this does bring up a couple of points.

Un
Though the online game market is finally edging out from under the desperation to copycat World Of Warcraft as closely as possible, WoW's detrimental influence will be felt throughout at least the next decade in ways I can't even conceive sitting here so close under its looming shadow - but likely the worst of these is the irrelevance, the complete trivialization of player action. It seems ridiculous that the average FPS-er wouldn't care whether he's shooting a techy-lookin' gun at another player or computer-controlled "baddies" until you realize that they've been taught it makes no difference.
Resources and monsters instantly and randomly respawn in Firefall. Bases flip in four minutes in Planetside 2. There is nothing to plan for. There is no intelligent authority (like player guilds in olden-days MMOs*) to decide whether you're pulling your weight or not. Repetition is everything. Under those WoWified conditions, yes, it really makes no difference whether you're shooting at a live or simulated entity, especially in the context of FPS. Ever since Unreal Tournament... let's say 2003, bots have easily been as twitch-capable as human players.
Computers are faster than us. We are still (narrowly) better planners. Without a greater context in which to place the action of the moment and without repercussions for player actions, those little deadheads in PS2 and Firefall can't really be blamed for their inability to discern between man and machine.

Deux
WoW's legacy also includes the decisive shift toward fantasy themes. Don't get me wrong, fantasy is always easier to slap together than science fiction ("it's magic" being all the logic demanded) and even something like Firefall is actually science fantasy. Still, given that the concept of an MMO stemmed from cyberpunk's popularization of decking into the matrix, the early MMO scene divided itself pretty evenly between SciFi and fantasy. Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Lineage and Everquest shared the stage with Anarchy Online, Earth and Beyond, Project Entropia and EVE:The Second Genesis.

However, the industry's attempts to copy/paste WoW's market appeal after 2005 also included a complete dedication to the cheap elves-and-goblins Tolkien knock-off setting ripped off from D&D and Warhammer. To players who have grown up with the past decade's utter fanatical devotion to pointy ears and green skin in MMOs, yes, that must seem like part of the definition, and when two well-publicized multiplayer games hit the market handing out plasma rifles and dropship rides that superficiality weighs much more heavily in the comparison.

So. I may scoff at the younger generation's ignorance but I really can't blame them for it. It's all they've known. Don't hate the players, hate the game.
Hate World of Warcraft.





*Challenge me on this, I dare you. The concept of a guild or clan has been another one of WoW's victims.
^Trois?

Firefall

While yammering away about three-dimensional and unconventional game environments last month, I realized I'd already encountered one good recent example of a more creative approach. Unfortunately, it's a good example of a bad game, showcasing some interesting features while slavishly adhering to industry standards in most respects.

Firefall's development is a bad joke by this point, lingering in "open beta" for a year with few improvements made in the meantime, after another year of closed beta beforehand. Not quite vaporware but still a soggy, flimsy mess. Instead of functionality and core content, much of the budget seems to have sunk into flash and glitz, into advertising, celebrity appearances, social media tie-ins and fancy scripted missions to impress new players. Unfortunately, actual objectives are very limited in scope and while there's some variety of objects to point a big honkin' machine-gun at, gameplay depth is a bit harder to come by.

Believe me, I'm cringing at the irony of criticizing a game for lack of (figurative) depth while praising it for (literal) depth, but the truth is that Firefall ain't all bad. It was marketed as an MMO and comes much closer to deserving that title than any WoW-clone or other theme-park game. Resource gathering is a group endeavor and the best items come from player crafters, not drops. Though there are no player structures and no territory claiming, some resources can be used to expand the playable area and cooperating in keeping enemy NPCs from claiming territory is a core activity. Battle-lines do shift minimally, despite this being a PvE game.
The main problem with Firefall is its target audience. The game's clearly marketed toward ten-year-olds, through everything from the upbeat, no-worries atmosphere to the twitch gameplay requiring no strategic planning. Quests randomly pop up everywhere around you and anyone can join in. Ammo and health packs drop constantly from enemies, negating supply logistics. Big friendly markers tug you this way and that, never stressing you out by asking you to plan. Anyone can resurrect each other. It is created for players with no attention span. Fast fingers, slow brains.

But if you can stomach a bit of that, it's worth seeing what they've done within those limitations.

Yes, that's yours truly gliding across a sunny South-American paradise. Gliding. In keeping with its ADD-brat focus, Firefall gives everyone short-range jump jets, and you're forced to jump, skip and hop constantly in battle to avoid damage. This turned the game's short-lived PvP system into a ridiculous, aimless, constant bouncing around to shoot at the first thing that moves.
But however annoying the endless bounciness gets, the dev team at least managed to make it slightly more than a simplistic twitchy gimmick. The game map makes full use of those jump jets, with many quests being set in vertical caves and objectives resting halfway up cliff-sides. During many events, players must seek higher ground to evade the constantly spawning mobs below, and focus the boss monster from atop hilltops and towers. What's more, if you make your way to high ground you can glide your way across various scenic vistas. Even the dropships shuttling players to and fro across New Eden allow you to bail out whenever you want and glide the rest of the way. In some spots you can circle around repeatedly making strafing runs at the monsters below using this same glider mechanic.

And Firefall is refreshing in other respects as well, like the scenery. Instead of temperate scrubland and warehouses, the game's main map is a subequatorial beach. Much of the action takes place in vertically-layered caves. Alternate locations include Antarctica and an island in the Sargasso Sea. Even the music is more reminiscent of dreamy adventure games than FPS twitch-fests. Clearly a good bit of effort was put into avoiding the usual shoot-em-up tropes... in terms of aesthetics at least. Though, it must be noted, you still machine-gun down plenty of zombies.

However, the list on the right in that image above also shows the game's greatest (and very predictable) weakness. You get told what your "current activities" are. You're pushed to do daily quests like killing fifteen of this and of that. Instead of being left to make your way in this new world, you get thrown into a chain of heavily scripted story missions. Firefall has a very solid foundation in terms of physics or resource flow and surprisingly coherent art direction, even if it's not my style. Unfortunately, its desperation to draw in the mindless leet-kiddies results in simplistic, shallow, constricting game mechanics. I have only so much interest in working on my hand-eye coordination by trying to shoot one constantly dodging giant mosquito after another, or repeating prefabricated scenarios. Pew-pew-pew with no possibility for grand works gets old fast, and though there are marginally stronger consequences for player actions than in WoW-clones, it's still a far cry from a true persistent world.

Despite its MMO aspirations, Firefall plays like an arcade shooter.

I won't be a third party to this

A long time ago, in an internet far, far away, Penny Arcade actually used to be funny!
But that's neither here nor there, I suppose. What is undeniably "here" is the entrenchment of that attitude within the computer game industry. Whatever their difficulties, game designers have also long been an incredibly spoiled lot and when viewed objectively or comparatively, their incompetence, lack of standards and outright hucksterism would make a snake-oil salesman blush.

I mean, at least he's selling you a bottle of dirty water. Valve, on the other hand, now makes 10% commissions on imaginary items sold for real money between players in TF2, DotA2 and other online games. Mafia dons collecting protection money can only wish they'd gotten in on this racket. WoW and WoW-clones like LotRO, as I complained months ago, now want you to pay them to avoid playing the product you're buying from them.

But let's say that's just the fleecing associated with a product. What about the product itself? Obviously, if we put up with this bullshit, we gamers must be getting some primo material at least. Painstakingly detailed, artistically original... not quite. Can we actually use the programs we pay for without being treated like criminals? Oops, wrong again. Hey, maybe we at least get prompt, reliable service... yeah, that ain't happenin' either. This isn't just me bitching. We know it. Every once in a while, some utter fiasco like Dark and Light reminds everyone that it's possible to be both incompetent and crooked and still be taken seriously in the game industry. Yet despite all of this, gamers keep fawning over designers like beaten dogs crawling back to lick our master's hand. L. Ron Hubbard said the easiest way to make money was by founding his own religion... but boy howdy, it's so much easier to make believers of fanboys. They will make, advertise, sell and buy the invisible alien detectors for you! Go to any game board and see the boundless reserves of belief that things will get better next patch, the sheer levels of denial about the product's endless flaws, the sheepish desperation for a single word from those handing out electronic endorphin delivery systems. That, is faith!

Fanboys have long been the game industry's greatest asset, and a disposable one at that. How do you establish a new intellectual property? Sell it first to a discerning interested audience, then once they do the work of spreading word-of-mouth, screw them, dumb it down to a barely-recognizable caricature of itself to glitz the brainless masses in. But geeks are more than just disposable advertising platforms. They're an endless source of free labor. Games used to have manuals. Now they have Wikis. Instead of paying someone to put together your game's documentation, you do some random schmoes the honor of allowing them to put a thousand work-hours in for free.

Spoiled. How spoiled? You don't even have to finish your product. In a constant display of pure professionalism, countless games have been released over the decades so malformed and cored through with bugs (even my favorites like VtM:Bloodlines) that only customer-created unofficial patches made them playable. The multiplayer incarnation of this disease is the reliance on add-ons. It stands to reason that all participants should have access to the same tools to control the game. Yet especially in so-called MMOs, developers shrug off the responsibility for developing an interface onto third-party programs which sort your inventory, chug your potions for you, queue up whatever skills are algorithmically determined to be necessary and then kindly inform you whether you've won or lost.

Take for instance Firefall, a game I was unfortunate enough to get suckered into some time ago. It's become a running gag that the game's still officially in "beta" only because it allows the creative team to get away with selling an unfinished product. One way to gain resources in Firefall is by salvaging loot, which takes a few seconds per item, minute after minute of sitting there repeatedly scrolling through the same list and clicking the same confirmation window for item after item. A third-party add-on called Salvager can automatically salvage all the items you queue up while you go AFK. If you don't know about it, the game will eat up much more of your time pointlessly. Players will quickly tell you that you need Salvager, and they're right... but it is the responsibility of the designers to include that functionality in their product. If a game is crap without a slew of interface add-ons, then the game is crap.

I play TSW once in a blue moon, so I occasionally forget where such or another NPC service might be found. I once asked someone where I can buy extra gear load-out slots for my character's inventory. He replied: "oh, I dunno, I just use a UI add-on that gives me infinite slots."

I shouldn't have to be the one to call this inexcusable. Getting a helping hand from a third party is, in any game, cheating. It is in fact the most basic definition of cheating, obvious even to eight-year-olds on the playground. If you're seeking and you get a friend to tell you where all the hiders are, you are cheating. No gray areas. No relativism. If some functionality is necessary, then it is necessary for all players, not only those who download the add-on.

We have to stop glorifying cheating and start holding game designers accountable for making their products playable in themselves. In what other industry is such behavior tolerated, much less advertised and applauded?
Can you imagine a plumber coming to your house and saying "eh, I hammered at that pipe for a while, it's still leaking, but you can probably find some kid with a wrench to finish fixing it; I still get paid full price, right?"
Or maybe you'd like a movie editing team saying: "Oh, the scenes are out of order and there's five minutes of blank screen in the middle of it? What do we care, we're still getting paid. Get some editing software and finish it yourselves, see ya!"