Red 5 Studios unveils Firefall f2p shooter MMO - Page 6

On January 04 2012 23:27 YunhOLee wrote:
any news? i want to play this beta so bad

Hi, I'm Mark Kern, the CEO of Red 5 Studios, makers of Firefall.

We do have a seperate marketing budget. Rather than buy banner ads that don't really work anyways, we decided to use our Marketing budget to do cool things that have more impact. Firefall cosplay is only one small part of that, and Typhon and Mourningstar are going to be appearing in that armor at 6-10 events this year. The events are really what we built them for.

The high quality of the video and production is because we've realized that all game marketing right now is shifting to video. Screenshots and text blogs don't really cut it anymore. We invested in creating a little digital film dept inside of Red 5 called the "Chop Shop" which will produce all our gameplay videos, behinds the scenes, dev diaries and yes, even little documentaries like this one.

It does cost money, but we feel its surprisingly affordable compared to other avenues of marketing such as incredibly expensive ads. Ads cost $15,000 - $30,000 per month on a *single* site, and we shoot video for far less, especially since we have invested in our own staff and equipment so we can do lots of these. It used to cost us $70,000 to produce a gameplay trailer out of house, and now we can do them far cheaper, at higher quality, and soon, more frequently.

Thanks for all the interest in Red 5 and Firefall!

Planetside was one of my favorite games. I'm looking forward to PS2.

That said, Firefall offers a very different experence. We have huge open world PvE co-op play, fighitng off Chosen invasions, locating and refining Crystite resources into tech modules to upgrade your battleframes, and a story campaign.

There is room for both games. And Firefall will also feature open world PvP in the future.

Well, I came from Blizzard, so "it's done when it's done" runs deeply in my veins.

But really...what we are working on now is the Open World. It takes a lot longer to do that than the PvP aspect. We don't have a release date, but bring the game up in phases of features and content. Each phase is accompanied by more testers. At some point, the store will be brought online, but the game will still be in beta but with even more users. At some point, we drop the beta tag altogether and let users invite whoever they want.

On January 10 2012 04:46 FireWaterFX wrote:



Hey all,

My name is FireWater, and I'm a very active member in the FireFall Community. I am also a member of the beta, and was invited to the Red 5 Studios community day as seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuZSIqG-RIg

So obviously I'm a huge firefall fan, and was so a soon as the PAX Trailer was released in 2010. I believe that this game can be a competitive shooter, because the developers are taking into consideration eSports, but also doing a huge reach into the casual community by offering open world PvE. Their CEO, Mark Kern, was the team lead on World of Warcraft, and also worked on Diablo I and II. Their lead designer is Scott Youngblood, who was the lead designer of Starsiege Tribes.

I can't comment on anything beta related, but what I am pretty sure of (and this is speculation) is that they are looking to expand the beta soon. Every beta member so far got 2 invites in each wave (I think there was 3 so far), and that is looking to expand, until invites just get kind of irrelevant.

I have to say, that when I went to the studio, I was extremely impressed. I met with their eSports Liason, Rhoulette from the Frag Dolls, and we had some pretty good conversation about eSports. While I don't have specifics, Red 5 studios is DEFINITELY interested in supporting the scene.

So now what I will pledge to do, is to give away a key (and see if I can secure more from my army Digital Syndicate) to the team liquid forums, as I feel that this community has given me a wealth of knowledge already. I would give both keys but I owe one to Mango, as he has been very helpful and is an old teammate of mine.

I will also post here any firefall forum contests for beta key givaways, if that is allowed.

Any other questions that aren't NDA related, please feel free to ask!

Dsyn-FireWater

On January 11 2012 07:34 FireWaterFX wrote:
I have a few thoughts, either doing a random drawing (if allowed) or maybe a first come first serve, where I post an opportunity for a key, and the first responder gets it.