Red 5 Studios noticed a pretty major issue while beta testing its shooter MMO Firefall. Previously, Red 5 had a traditional MMO leveling curve, with initially fast leveling that gradually slowed down. As it turns out, toward the higher levels, it slowed down far too much.
“What that did, is it really disincentivized people from playing the game,” said lead designer Scott Youngblood, “because the rewards were so far out that they just gave up. So one of the things I was looking at doing was increasing the rate of reward, giving players more tangible goals to achieve in-between levels. But then it dawned on me, well if we did that, what’s the point of having levels at all?”
So Red 5 redesigned the system without levels, trading a typical approach to MMO design for a tier system for all the game’s Battleframes. Battleframes are superpowered suits of armor in Firefall that alter your ability set, functioning essentially like classes. You’re not limited to one, so it’s possible to power up a variety of different Battleframes and then switch between them at specific in-game locations.
When you first begin playing Firefall, you select a frame, which starts at tier 1 with very limited capabilities. You go out into the world and kill stuff, blasting insects and other hostile computer-controlled creatures, accumulate experience, and then spend it in your frame’s branching certification tree. Each certification in the tree represents an ability or some kind of bonus, and you’ll be able to unlock the first few very soon after starting out.
Each branch of the tree represents a different specialization. One might be more about dealing damage, one about movement, and one a blend of the two. Movement is especially important to a game like Firefall, because in addition to running and jumping it’s possible to take advantage of jetpacks, meaning like Tribes, there’s a lot more to consider in terms of positioning when heading into a fight, particularly in PvP.
Picking one path of the tree doesn’t lock out the others, so it’s possible to earn enough experience to purchase every single commendation. Or instead, you could focus on unlocking commendations along a single branch from beginning to end in order to unlock the next Battleframe tier. “This is an important distinction than previously,” said Youngblood, “where if you created an Assault, you played that Assault all the way up to level fifteen.” In this new system, the higher tier of Battleframe is an entirely different thing from the previous tier. “All experience that you earned in the first tier isn’t applicable to the second tier. It’s kind of analogous to a car racing game, where you buy that first car, you soup it all up, you win, you get access to another race, and then you get a new car that you drive in another race.”
The path you follow through each Battleframe’s commendation tree also affects the type of Battleframe unlocked at the next tier. If you unlock all the damage-focused commendations, for instance, the next Battleframe tier you unlock will be better at dealing damage. If you’d picked up movement-enhancing commendations instead, you would have unlocked at a different frame. “That provides a lot of customization options for players to really tune the Battleframes for the ways they want to play.”
The current plan is to include five total Battleframe tiers, where each higher tier isn’t only more powerful, but also allows access to unique mechanics. “You go from tier one, which has no crafting options right now, and tech up your frame to tier two, you immediately start being able to craft options for your gear. Tier three offers a different type of way to upgrade your characters called passive bonuses. Those are really cheap but scattered all around the tech tree. Even if you log on and only play for two or three matches, or one match, you could probably afford to buy one of those passives. But you want to get them all because they stack up to a pretty decent bonus. Each additional tier that we go up has more horizontal progression options as well as more mechanics that feed into this system.”
This tiered system is another way Red 5 gets around balance issues with its PvP matchmaking system for arena battles. “When you go to matchmake for PvP it’s going to look at the frame you’re currently wearing and match you for that tier. That creates some interesting scenarios. Let’s say I have a tier two BioTech, but I have a tier five Assault. When I queue for that tier two BioTech and I get into a match, my tier five Assault will no longer be accessible to switch to during combat. So that’s the way we keep the power consistent.”
Eventually you’ll unlock a large number of combat options to equip on your frame, from different ammunition types to movement boosters, but not all can be active at a time. Everything you equip consumes resource points, so you need to make decisions about which powerful items you want equipped at any one time to stay under the resource point cap.
This ties into Red 5’s recent changes to the crafting system, which according to Youngblood was modeled on what he liked about crafting in Star Wars Galaxies. By visiting crafting terminals you’re able to match up blueprints and materials you’ve collected to construct useable items. To build better weapons, you need to use rarer materials than what the weapons were originally built with, and you additionally need to pay close attention to the statistics the materials are influencing. If you want to boost a sniper rifle’s damage output for instance, not just any resource will do. Even a super rare resource type might not be the most effective way to boost damage, so there’s a lot of room to explore, collect and experiment with putting together the best components and arrive at the desired results.
In addition to adjusting the progression and crafting mechanics, Red 5 has made sweeping changes to the actual function of the classes. The Medic, which used to be a dedicated healing class, was completely scrapped and replaced with the BioTech. The BioTech has a number of new abilities and its healing is more skill-based, letting healers take a more active role in a fight. The Engineer frame, which can deploy turrets, can also now stick turrets to walls and ceilings, allowing those using the frame to set up more varied defensive perimeters.
Firefall has been in closed beta testing for some time now, and Red 5 would ideally like to officially launch the game soon. “We’re getting close,” said Youngblood. “For the previous milestones, we were focused on the character progression and the leveling, and we feel like we’ve gotten that going mostly in the right direction. We’ve still got a lot of balance work to do there. I feel a hell of a lot better about this system than I did our previous leveling system. The other thing is that we’ve really been focusing on is increasing the skill ceiling in the game. We want this to be a viable esports product. But in order for it to be an esports product, we need it to have that high skill tier.”
If you’re interested in trying out Firefall while it’s still in testing, you can sign up over on the official site. Otherwise, it doesn’t sound like it’ll be an especially long wait until Red 5’s promising free-to-play game is opened up to everyone.
Source : ign[dot]com
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