Nov 15 2012 DevChat

QuestionAnswer
when will you guys add more PVE content, and what are your plans in regards to PVP esports?
We are actually about to release a new patch, next week, which will introduce several new dynamic and on demand world encounters
are you guys planning to keep the current patching schedule (i.e. only do big patches) for the time being?
Our patching schedule is completely dependent on what we are trying to do. For a while, we did patches every week, but found that it put way too much stress on the team and really only gave us 2-3 days of real work while the rest was spent prepping. We try to patch as often as we can and are hoping for a 2 week schedule.
is the game still in beta ?
Yeah, we are very much still in beta and plan to stay in beta for a little while; we are very focused on collecting feedback from our community as we go
What role do you guys see for community sites when you start you $1mil eSports season next year
I came from a fansite background. It’s important for Fansites to find their own niche and provide something that they think they can provide. If you wait for the dev team to tell you what you can do, you’re going to be behind. Just start making cool stuff and we’ll support it.
Will Watchtowers events be more exciting?
Watchtower events are the start of a bigger system for the Chosen Warfront. We do have plans to make watchtowers more interesting, like defense systems and making more AI types / improvements.
Right now, it feels that there’s only one important resource – XP. I find that I’ll thump just to grind XP and unlock options so I can have a choice in my loadout, when I’d rather be thumping for minerals to craft awesome equipment. Are you happy with the importance of XP in the current system? Are there any plans to change it significantly?
We have big plans for resources in the coming months. We have just scratched the surface on some of the things we want to do with manufacturing/crafting and have yet to roll out our army system
Will you be adding a premade 5v5 queueing option for teams to get more practice in?
Right now teams can use /challenge to match up against each other. We do want to add easier ways to do that, including a queue, but it probably won’t be until next year. We’ve seen great use of the /challenge system in fan-run tournaments like the Brontodon Brawl and Limelight Esports tourney
should we be expecting significant improvements in hit registration anytime in the near future?
We’re looking into the hit reg issues. It’s something we’re very concerned about.
Also, not really a question, but I wanted to let you know I love the founder’s beanie, keeps me warm! The lady at the postal office gave me a funny look when the package was addressed to ‘commander’ :D
Damn straight. Chicks dig beanies.
Will the Server system stay like that or will you make changes? Will there probably be WoW-Style servers?
We have intentionally not forced you to lock to a specific server so you have the flexibility to join different friends. However, we have been chatting recently about possibly giving you some way to soft-lock to your instance. This becomes more and more important as we build upon our plans for the Chosen War.
Is there any possbility to bind hotkeys to different abilities, for example have a hotkey for scan hammer/sonic boom mining thingy etc, also what are the teams opinion about tacos?
We’re looking into hotkeys and hotkey solutions. That would help gameplay quite a bit.
do you plan to make tournaments ?
Yes, we do have tournament plans and want to make it easy to get involved with.
what kind of game will this be
Firefall is an MMO Shooter. We have a massive open world where players cooperate in dynamic missions and collect resources to expand their technology as well as competitive PvP mode where teams go head to head in some hot shooter action. All skill-based gameplay. No tab targeting or macro’d keysets.
Can you give us a date for EU servers?
Very, very soon(tm) we currently have EU servers running but are needing to finalize a copule things to allow you to join friends in different regions, etc. Soon! :)
any plans to make the heavy machine gun more challenging?
Expect HMG changes next patch!
Are you planning on increasing the performance (FPS) of the game?
We are always working on better performance. If you have specific complaints, be sure to contact support so they can gather info on your setup so that we can repro the issue.
do you have plans on releasing a documentation for the firefall lua api and if u do what’s the ETA on them?
We’d love to support more LUA customization and have proper add-on support. It’s something that is definitely on the backburner though. Core features and gameplay come first.
On the topic of only having the basics for minerals and crafting, do you ever plan to change the rate that the CY of thumpable minerals changes and or having multiple CY’s avilable at one time. Because some don’t change for sevral weeks and remain low or high for a while.
The specific types and rarities of resources are controlled globally. The goal is to generate days or weeks where a certain resource becomes important to race for. WE control the availability by a global amount harvested and/or time in the world. We still need to tune how long these stick around.
witch one of the current battleframes in the game the hardest to Design In both looks and in play style? And do you play to put any more uniqe battle frames in the game
I would say Recon and Dread. Snipers in a game with fast movement and aerial combat means it’s a delicate balance to keep people wanting to go in the air without being shot too easily, and snipers generally keep them pinned down. Dreads move slower, and in a game about moving and shooting quick, it’s one we’ll be tweaking a lot.
When will the next patch be due and what will it primary change? Also love the game so far!
Next patch will have some new PvE content and improvements on existing content / systems. For Chosen Warfront, we’ll have AI improvements (performance, navigation, combat) and some world building changes around towers to help with player and AI navigation.
Do you want to make it game popular via ‘beta for everyone’ like DotA 2? DotA 2 is pretty popular (140k+ players in beta) and I think you’re trying to make same thing in Firefall. Am I right?
We first need the game to be at a point where new users can hop in and feel like there’s enough to do and enough polish to not push people away when they think it’s a final product. More users will be added over time and we are currently doing beta weekends where we invite hundreds of thousands of players just for the weekend to help stress the servers and give feedback.
Is there any ETA on T3?
Not yet. We are really focused on T1/T2 and making adjustments to these tiers before adding more variables to balance.
Do you feel that the Dreads turret mode is working in the game or can we expect some changes to that? IDK maybe replace it with a dif skill.
Not really. We recently had a playtest with a different implementation of the turret mode and even with some big improvements, we still questioned whether this ability makes sense.
With reguards to item weights. Do you intend to look at the and perhaps tone down the whole carrying sevral tons or even change any at all? As an assault it feels kind of change my secondry AR weighing twice as much as my primary Cannon.
Absolutely. The crafting system needs another pass and there are plenty of people here that want to see some pretty big changes. Please consider all the constraints to be placeholder numbers.
Will there be any chance to the range on the sniper riffle reach real world counter parts 1000m+ range?
That depends a lot on our capability to render enemy targets at a far range. Hopefully we can push that out as much as possible.
Are there any plans to change the tier system? ADvancing to a new tier currently feels like you have to start over, which can kill motivation a little.
We’ll be making improvements on the tier system so it feels better going from tier to tier.
Doesn’t giving Founders a permanent XP bonus conflict with your stated goal of avoiding pay-2-win?
We don’t see XP bonuses and boosts that save you time as buying power or paying to win. The big thing that is off our list for monetization is selling “I Win” buttons or more powerful weapons.
What design change or feature is currently the most fiercely debated internally by the development team?
Probably how to address PvE and PvP balance and frames. Do we split them up? Do we keep them together? These questions have big impacts on the game and something that’s a hot topic.
Have you guys thought about maybe adding more skillslots later down the road or will we be “stuck” with only 3 skills? And if the later is true why did you dudes and dudettes decide to grant players all 3 slots in such a fast manner rather then delaying them a bit to make it feel a bit cooler when you finally get acess to all slots.
Yes, we have plans for additional ability slots. The Tier 2 Engi can actually unlock the 4th slot. We decided to give out more at the beginning based on making sure as a new player you could experience more of the role abilities play in combat.
Do you plan to improve soundtrack of the game?
I rather like the music we have in the game. :-(
do you guys plan on making this game in shockwave so i’ll play it
hah No plans currently
In the game i feel there are too many similarities between the first 2 tiers (for example engiframe turrets and the weapons mounted on the arm), will there be ways to make weapons more different by manufacturing or to make it more visually appealing and feeling a difference in strength level?
Good question. I believe quite a few of us internally would like to see some differences in the first couple tiers of frames so long as the gameplay progression makes sense and feels intuitive when going to the next tier.
Are you planning to make thumbing near meld more challenging and rewarding?
This is a very interesting discussion, one that we are going to address tomorrow on Firefall Live on Twitch. There are people that think it is too difficult right now and people that think it’s too easy. Tough to find a balance
Are there plans for more PvP maps, perhaps for more then 5v5 DM or do you plan to keep the player numbers unique to each game type?
Yup! definitely plans for more maps, gametypes (competitive and less so), and varying player counts. We’ll likely stay 5v5 for esports gametypes though.
This kind of might be asked already, but my Korean Fiance is absolutely terrible at gaming and so she will not be able to play PvP. Are you guys planning on there being enough PvE content to keep people interested and not bailing on the game because it’s meant for PvE & PvP.
Absolutely. We’re also excited to get going on our army system which we hope will offer a lot of really cool things for PvEers and PvPers to enjoy.
Will your game have something like jumping puzzles, could be fun to have little jump challenges and give little xp as bonus from completing one :].
It’s something we’ll likely want to design into the worldspace in the future. I know for PvP maps, it’s good to have some of that for the riskier but rewarding power-ups.
will it be possible to search for PvP matches on specific player has played, eg search the players name to see the games he/she has played
We would very much like to have this feature. I think watching some really experience players play is an awesome way to learn and improve on your skills. We’re still talking through how we’d like to implement this but you can expect to see this someday.
Hello! As a person who hasn’t been able to try Firefall due to not meeting system requirements, I have to ask: Is Firefall still going to be optimized in terms of lower system requirements, or has that been set in stone by now?
There’s optimization and there’s making the game run on hardware it was not designed for. Depending on where you are at, it’s unlikely any amount of optimization will make it playable if it’s unplyable at the moment.
On which platforms will the game be released?
PC/Windows only at the moment
Any plans for organized instanced PvE Content to challenge groups of players?
It’s something we definitely will be looking into, but having a cool open world comes first.
are there any plans to expand on how SIN affects the game? It doesn’t seem to be of much use outside of marking people in PvP.
Yeah, we have a lot of plans for SIN; just need to build them out.
Becauso of what Microsoft is doing in Windows 8, it looks a lot like Gaming is going more into the Linux direction (Valve boss programming Linux support for Steam and Games personally, Blizzard agreeing, etc.). Are you planning to make Firefall support Linux?
Firefall is written using DirectX right now. It would be a major port to support Linux. Windows comes first for this small team.
Army Warfare How will that Work? will they duke it out in the open world for controll over watch towers and recourses? or will it manly be in the pvp maps?
Open world PvP is on our radar, and this is where the good AvA can happen. Plans are still a bit TBD, but expect competition of resources, buildings, etc and not just queueing for PvP for armies.
The Dreadframe skill Turret Mode does not fit the “at the moment” gameplay revolving most of the enemy types having AoE effects that instantly counters it in PvE. ( geyser,toxic,explosive,sieger ) Will you be changing this to make it more appealing to use without suiciding?
We had a playtest, this week, with a big change to turret mode that doesn’t lock you in place… it’s still not where we would like it though, so we will continue working on it.
will we ever seen Thrasher in a Cheerleader outfit, since he is the company’s cheerleader as he said himself ;)
Who says we haven’t?
Will there be possibility of temporary/permanent player buildings?
Yes. How that will happen is TBD, but expect it down the road.
When will you release information about the upcoming factions? I heard there will be 3 in total, is that right? Can we also expect something entirely new?
Not until we’re done building what we’re trying to get out right now. Factions are far-future. We have a timeline up on the website (http://www.firefallthegame.com/game) that will give you details of what we have planned
Is thumper customization something you’re planning for the near term, or that be later on the timeline (ie, after armies)
I’m hoping we can get to this by next spring. We have loads of ideas on how we’d like this to work but would like to wait until we build out more of our professions/crafting system.
Is there still plans to eventually add a competition tier for battleframes, with everything unlocked and balanced specifically for PvP?
This is something we’re definitely looking in to for competitive integrity for e-sports and arena PvP in general. The how’s are still being planned out.
I’ve registered for BETA, how often do you select new beta-testers and how many are you selecting overall?
As often as we can. Right now we’re doing larger scaled weekend-only tests rather than permanent testers, but we add permanent testers fairly often.
Are there any plans or even whispers about potentially implementing non-full team rated matchmaking ala League of Legends, for people who want some more serious pub play?
Absolutely. That’s a big requirement for PvP to have meaning.
Did you really say ‘professions’? O_o Like ‘crafting professions’?
ooops, did I say that? ;)
are any new battleframes currently in development
Always. Though mostly just ideas. We are focused on making the ones we have fun and balanced first.
As you have demonstrated with the halloween items, can we expect more limited run items coming, like new years fireworks/christmas themed items.decals?
Yep. We have some Thanksgiving and Christmas items coming up soon
Can engineers please get a longer ranged signature weapon, so we can take advantage of using a short ranged secondary weapon
We’re upping the range on tesla and will continue to monitor weapon selection on frames so you have reasonable combat options.
will we be able to customize our frames looks by adding for example some spikes or different style of a weapon skin?
We are continuing to offer more customization options. In our next patch we will be introducing patterns (think cammo) thatyou can put on your battelframes
At what point would the game not be considered in beta?
When we and the community are happy with how it plays and feel the beta tag is ready to come off.
Is there going to be wipe after beta?
Nope. No more wipes
do you need translaters to translate the game to French or smth ? 8)
We will probably be posting some new Localization positions in January. Please, please check our job postings and apply if you’re interested.
Is there a possibility of the bolt action sniper rifle making a return in T3?
It’s a possibility. Having different gun options is a good thing for gameplay.
If you can answer this, when open world PvP is introduced how will we choose to participate or not? currently servers seem assigned at random, will it be something we can change on the fly, or will characters be restricted to a specific type of world? (pve/openpvp)
We don’t have plans for PvP vs non-PvP servers. It will most likely be a form of zone that you enter into after logging in. Think of New Eden as “home base”. But it’s all just ideas at the moment.
It seems like gear progression is too large in tier 2 pvp. Is there a plan for addressing this in the near future?
Yes, we’re not completely happy with the power curve in Tier 2 and will be addressing this in the coming couple of months.
Are there going to be Chosen vehicles ingame, like tanks
Sounds great to me. :)
Are you guys super excited to see what the community is getting you for Christmas this year?
awww yea!
Hopefully I’m not asking too many questions but are you guys looking into the way tiers transition and how crafting affects the overall power of the frame? For example making the default t2 frame at least as good as a fully upgraded t1 and then making printed scale a bit less and not make them several times better then the non printed items. I’m esp looking @ the chest plate and the ammo
This has been an ongoing major topic of discussion internally.
Is it possible we will see a resource wipe?
It would more likely be a resource tweak than a wipe. We currently don’t have any plans for a resource wipe.
Do you have plans for leagues/ladders in PvP? If so, what do you expect it will look like?
Yes we do. Any meaningful PvP needs to have some sort of ladder. What it will be like is still a TBD, but we’ll be wanting to get that nailed down sooner rather than later.
Somehow the game doesnt appear to enjoy alt-tabbing. Have you guys considered this?
Weird. We’ve fixed tons of issues related to alt-tabbing. If you are still having problems, be sure to report them to support so that we can track it.
will you guys be supporting community events such as rewarding players to become more involved outside of just the hardcore fans of the game?
We try to support as many community activities as we can. If you are expecting something specific, let me know
are you planning on doing anything to increase the significance of the human settlements in the game world, so that players are more likely to gather there? like specific towns being used for specific things, so trans hub for travel, sunken harbour for all PVP and another town for trading>?
Going forward we definitely want to do this. The Chosen Warfront requires POIs, towns, hubs, etc to have a significance in the world.
Will we be able to use multiple decals on our battleframe in the future? Also, will there be real world (i.e. pepsi/m&m’s etc) decals available that e-sports teams can get sponsorship from and promote in game? (Think Nascar jumpsuits).
Yes, we plan on giving you way more support for decals. Our current implementation is just our first step. We are also going to offer certain logos for partners to be used as decals (and likely down the road army logos).
Has there been talk of reductions to healing, moving away from burst healing, or having a burst/HoT hybrid?
We’ve been looking at not just healing bursts, but DPS bursts as well. We don’t want either to happen in game breaking ways. We’re dialing back healing returned on heal ball and want to keep healing in check (but not remove it).
are there any plans on making different parts of armours having an effect on the visual appearance of the battleframe (omnidyne making jets different colour, servos being different, ect)
We’d like to push on this. We have imnplemented the ability for your abilities to add geometry to your battleframe which is our first step. TO see this, check out your Assault with and without afterburner or crater.
Another question: Are you happy about the balancing atm? If no, what classes do you think are too strong / too weak?
Balance isn’t where we want it to be yet. We’re getting there but we still have work to do. Not just on frames, but maps too. Our maps are not balanced at the moment.
What about giving armies the opinion to customize a personal paint for its members which members can put on and off as they wish?
Definitely something we want to do once we roll out armies.
why were the gaming pc’s for firefall fest AMD based and not Intel, because of partnership? And is the game going to be more optimized for AMD based gpu than Nvidia. (saw an add for Firefall on a AMD/ATI based driver installation)
We have a partnership deal with AMD, but we are not focusing on any specific brand for optimization. We are working with both nVidia and AMD for driver support
Good to know. Any info on if/when Dragonfly Biotechs will be better viable for PvE/not team jockeys in PvP? Utility, or offensive things?
We’ll be taking a look at the viability of the support frames in PvE pretty carefully. Recon and Biotech both can be rough in PvE and we’re making an effort to balance that out and give them more options.
There has been feedback on the forums regarding the layout of unlocks within the tiers and how they relate to posts from developers. Is feedback such as that still be looking at? Or is Unlock layout pretty much set in stone?
the layout is not set in stone. We expect to make some updates to the tech tree UI at some point.
Will sustained areal combat (Such as “infinate gliders” or dogfights with deployable aircrafts) be introduced eventually?
Not sure on this one… but I will say… infinite glider aerial fights are a lot of fun. :)
Is there a plan to bring back the HMG with the spin up alt-fire?
It’s a possibility. Having weapon variety is great as long as it feels good and plays well.
are you gonna make a video to show us the upcomming content?
We haven’t created a video but we are planning on getting you the new content on Monday. :P
Have you guys looked at redesigning PvP maps to be less open for recons/allow flying not to be a death sentence?
Yup, definitely had talks about it. How we’ll change them will be discussed later. Expect future maps to not just be a bowl-shaped and to have better sightlines.
Do you know whether the Monday patch will fix eyefinity again?
Hmm… sorry, I’ll check into that with the team today
some people seems displeased with the secondary fire on the HMG. will there be a way to tweak the HMG’s shield to become larger but with drawbacks?
Shield changes coming next patch. We definitely don’t like 100% uptime on shield, constantly mitigating damage.
do you see the possibility of having in game advertisements for example a billboard or poster to promote tournaments or events? Kind of like what you guys have now for the Founders Pack.
we like the idea of billboards for in-game stuff. If you head to SUnken Harbor you’ll see a concept we have of showing off some of the top players and teams.
As the future battleframe tiers come out, will new primary weapons with completely new combat archetypes be released, or will you be sticking with the “same combat, harder to use, greater reward” upgrade style.
YOu can expect new combat styles, weapons and abilities
Are you planing to place more updrafts for gliding around the world or are you happy with the current amount?
The current updrafts are there for the mission. There has been discussion about adding more.
Are you focused on the anticheat part? f2p fps games are usually those games with alot of hackers, and they just keep creating new accounts.
Absolutely! THis is a major, major thing for us. We have had a team of 3 engineers working on this for the last year+
Lots of talk about the HMG…why don’t you guys relay what happens in these discussions to the community more rapidly?
We do testing internally on things first and when we’re happy with where it’s going, we’ll get the community involved to keep ourselves in check. Sorry if we appear to be hiding that news, it’s not our intention.
Why did you decide to have glider platforms instead the ability to spread wings with a simple action like you had in one of the earlier videos? Even if it would still consume a glider pad thingy it would still feel like a lot cooler/more fun way to have them implemented imo. Have there been any talk about this around the tiki bar?
Once upon a time, the Engineer had gliders all the time and it was pretty freakin’ sweet… however, we saw in testing that it make it really difficult for squads to stay together. We might find a way to give on-demand gliding down the road but haven’t talked to omuch about this recently.
are you going to make good deals for the founders, more or less like warpaint on Firefallfest, eg. RedBeans discounts?
We are extremely appreciative of our early adopters and founders and want to make sure we show our thanks as we move forward.
Are you guys planning on incorporating the PvP aspect more into the story of the game? As it stands now (and in most MMOs), the PvE game is story, the PvP game is a weird sidenote, aside from open world PvP
This is where open world PvP shines and we’ll try to play to the strength of the PvP type. Arena PvP is harder to sell the story, but if the gametype is designed with Firefall mechanics and story in mind, we can definitely do some story telling with that.
Have you thought about making the bike better to maneuver? its very hard with the way the map is created
Better roads are definitely a way to improve that.
Category:Patch Notes