Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Red 5 Studios’ jetpack-based free-to-play shooter Firefall is making me sing with excitement – and look at this previous coverage for judgement, not this trailer – and no less after watching this new PvP trailer. While I am most interested in the scale of the world and co-op play vs monsters, this player combat (although entirely staged) looks like it might have some Tribes-like value to it. Also: class-based. Hmm! Go take a look.
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Earlier this week I had a chance to talk to Matt DeWald, community manager at Red 5 Studios, the company making Firefall. It’s a shooter that promises to do new and unusual things to the free-to-play space. The game was the big surprise at the most recent PAX event in Seattle, with its blend of cartoon good looks, Tribes-like shooter action, and a persistent world. Perhaps most intriguingly, Red 5 is the company that Mark Kern and William Petras went on to form when they left Blizzard. It seems to have both the vision, and the design pedigree to be a really big deal. I asked DeWald to go into some of the details.
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Ooh, I just noticed GameTrailers grabbed a developer walkthrough for MMO-shooter hybrid Firefall, which I’ve posted below. It shows a bunch of the weapons and abilities in action, explains how the missions and freeform stuff works, and goes into some detail on the game’s hub areas. The footage explains how those provide you with new weapons and equipment, and shows how battles take place around them. It’s worth noting that it’s going to be a cash-item driven free-to-play game, but developers Red 5 have said that the cash items won’t produce unfair benefits for individuals. It’ll be interesting to see how that pans out, and we’ll be talking Red 5 soon, so we can get some more detail on that and the rest of the game.

But going back to what I was saying about the quality of free online games appearing on PC now, well, when you see stuff like this, it’s beginning to feel like a big deal. If Blizzard really are making a shooter for their next MMO, as was rumoured last year, then they must be looking at games like this with great interest.
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It’s late at night, and it seems the logical time for news of a free to play Tribes-alike shooter to appear in our inbox. It’s Firefall. It’s being shown at PAX. It’s got a beta sign up over on the official site. It’s being designed by veterans of Tribes and World Of Warcraft. It’s looking pretty good. There’s ten minutes of game footage embedded below. More on this soon, I am certain.

Oh, and watch the whole video. This one escalates.
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