What Went Wrong? - Firefall
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 พ.ค. 2022
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This is what went wrong with Firefall, an MMO that had a lot of promise but suffered behind the scenes with an a toxic work culture, identity crisis and a CEO with questionable marketing ideas. Firefall fell due to the failure to both keep an audience but due to funding issues later down the line. Firefall was a great MMO for a short time and it'll be missed by many who had the chance to play it.
Red 5 Studios was the company behind this game. But unfortunately Red 5 Studios was shut down shortly before Firefall was. All in all it's a shame. - ตลก
Oh yeah, they also mentioned a mobile version of this game but of course nothing came of that. Real sad to see this game die the way it did. RIP Firefall
Yeah, RIP. This seemed so promising.
damn
You should cover robocraft next
Rip
Can you cover Medieval Engineers at some point? I know it may not be as disappointing as some of the others but as for it's unused potential it's up there.
It's funny hearing out how awfully employees were treated by the CEO and upper management considering how they were seemingly mostly ex-Blizzard talent. Must be something in the water there
> I implicitly trust governmental action, because government is never wrong. especially if it about muh whammins that of course never lie
glad the back-rationalization is working for you
where there’s smoke there’s fire
@@fazejev6094 ideologically motivated managerial anarcho-tyranny making a claim isn't "smoke"
@@HarryPearce7
What the actual F you ranting about?
Forgot your meds or something? 😏
@@HarryPearce7 who tf talking abbt the gov. and what the fuck is a whammin?
The fact he had a safe word leads me to believe he was aware he couldn't control his emotions fully.... Which is kinda sad honestly.
I say the opposite. Just by talking back you got fired. So anyone stupid enough to email him to shut up was most likely sent a reply saying I don't have to shut up cause you don't have a job to listen to me.
source: trust me bro
@@HarryPearce7 calm down, its a comment section not a lecture.
@@Giliver I missed the part where that gives you diplomatic immunity to say dumb shit
@@HarryPearce7 Just running around salty all over the comments, huh, little one?
11:02 trust me, that is NOT a dumb analogy. I work at Starbucks. That exact scenario you described happens multiple times a day. unfortunately some people really just do expect anyone doing tasks for them to read their mind and magically know what they want 😭
Ignore it and if you can´t, move on. Your boss is a narcissist, it will never get better and if you have to stay, your only hope is he will find another victim.
Sounds like my fiancé. I guess working at starbucks won't be that bad 🙃
right as someone who works at dutch the analogy was too relatable 😭
@@Morpheus-pt3wq totally correct! the comment was more to be taken literally: about customers who genuinely expect you to have put sugar in their coffee for them even though they didn’t ask for it, but one of the managers does the same thing metaphorically too lol!!! thankfully there’s multiple store managers and it’s just the one guy that is awful, but you predicted that situation exactly tbh
10:56momenyt
"Not even Josh Strife Hayes"
*shows a picture of Henry Cavill* 🤣🤣
As someone who was a founder pack owner of highest level, getting that unique bike, i must admit, the game was great, but it just... stalled, like really hard, i miss it, it had potential.
I feel that. Every other patch was a complete progression overhaul and I feel they wasted so much time/money there.
Such fun game play with the jet packs and classes. The world was the best mmorpg world ever too!!
@@sorbet-fox1334 literally. I cant count how many times id load into cobana, and there would be a new system to level up my character class.
@@ChaoticMartian either that or gear or modding/crafting
@@sorbet-fox1334 or thumping being reworked for the 99th time
In all honesty I think the Firefall Bus could have been used for something really cool, like imagine if they travelled around the world and started mini E-Sports events with it, or public demos at major in person events. Such a lost opportunity.
No joke the US Military did something similar at my highschool. I'm not exactly sure how to explain it, but it was a somewhat similar concept. The fact that the US military has an e-sports team is just fucking ridiculous, but the guys who came were pretty nice and we got to play DBFZ during school. Plus I got a water bottle, so that was cool
@@no64256 it's propaganda to get people to join the military, they even stream
@@soulreaver6546 I mean I get that, but it's still kinda ridiculous
@@soulreaver6546 I mean, nearly everybody knows that. Doesn't mean you can't appreciate the ridiculousness of the event.
Would have been cool, Firefall Bus could barely drive though.
The whole point of it was to have it as a mobile demo hot-spot at public events, but it was so costly to maintain and move. It had to be taken to every event on an even larger truck. It was simply unsustainable.
You missed another one of Kerns' disasters.
FireFest...
Game was in Closed Beta and Kerns' went out and hired Nathan Fillion and couple others plus several twitch streamers
to showcase the game.
It happened way too early in the game's development cycle and it didn't draw in the people Kerns wanted.
Another huge waste of money.
I remember this, it's how I learned about firefall in the first place
Yeah, it was a fantastic example of just how out of touch and scatterbrained the guy is.
And no surprise, his current project is running a lot of the same way. Kind of a cross between this and ahm... Starforge. Very quiet, with fits of laggy communication, lots of spending on art from professional artists... but nothing to show for all the money people have thrown at it.
If I had a nickel for every time an event called firefest backfired on the organizers, I'd have two nickels, which isn't alot but it's weird it happened twice
My mind went straight to fyrefestival lol
@@steelfox1448 That would have been so appropriate, the sh!tshow that firefall became being part of the cluster**** that was fyre festival.
Firefall is something I still play in my dreams. Nothing else has come close. The ability to almost fly and use every ounce of tricks to get from one moutaintop or something to another was just fun. The resources thumping was the best drop in co-op I've ever played.
Likewise, man. I've had some wild fever dreams from this game lol
Try Warframe. I played Firefall too. I quit when they deleted my Arsenal ;_;
Than I found Warframe and my love for that game still goes.
Look up em-8er
@@player0additem0noif Warframe can't full fill my wish of playing Firefall anyway, even I have a lot more play time on it than Firefall.
The closest game to Firefall with many active player I think it is Destiny 2, but I hate their bloodbath price DLCs.
Warframe isn't a bad game to play if you didn't play it 150 hrs/week like me.
@@hdlpghgtvytpvpxdmcfna992 that game wont even be close to playable for another 5 years at least
"Being told that you're doing everything wrong, while not receiving any real guidance and being forced to work overtime to re-do work it wasn't what the CEO envisioned, is enough to kill your drive and enthusiasm for the thing you're working on"
Yup. Totally. And from experience too. And it sucks.
How many times did you paused to write all that lol
@@elnormanoski8587 a few 😂😂
@@coastermad13 hahaha epic
working for walmart in a nut shell. Get hired and watch these CBL's or short videos on what you do but realistically they're all shit and you have to learn how to actually do things from your co workers cause the company doesn't tell you on how to do shit. Then you'll get pulled into the office one day for "productivity" cause you're too slow but you've never been taught on how to do anything. Oh and don't forget a multi billion dollar company doesn't want to spend money providing its employees the tools to do their jobs and also cut away quarterly bonuses for hourly associates but we got W+ for free now! yay....not..imagine working 20 years for walmart and a new hire makes almost as much as you do. Imagine having to quit and get rehired to make more money cause they won't give a raise for your tenure with the company. Last winter they announced they'd give everyone that's been with the company for 30 years a whopping 300 dollar bonus in january for their dedication. Yeah no fuck walmart. One of the worst companies to ever work for. They literally care only about profits for their shareholders and their employees are replaceable wage slaves.
This sounds like an actual nightmare. I would just quit, devote my time and skills somewhere else to a CEO that doesn’t act like he’s suddenly the Egyptian Pheroah.
I remember when Thumping was one of the main attractions in game, and you could call in a Thumper almost anywhere and summon the hordes. There was a tiny beach site just to the southeast of Copacabana with umbrellas, and you could call the Thumper down on top of one of the umbrellas. You'd get nothing but dirt in your Thumper, but it was hilarious to watch the critters try and get to you. That, and everyone would always grab engineers and go down to the beach to to the spot occupied by the shadowy dudes, and hide up inside one of the buildings with a second floor that you had to jump to, and set up a million turrets, and just turn the game into a building defense against the zombie hordes. Good times.
So much this, and every other comment on here reminiscing about when we could just do so much on a whim. That's when the game was really fun, when the community could just throw together random fun and pile on the random events.
@@steelfire9597 God yeah, being able to log in get in 20 mins of fun flying and shooting and intense battle protecting a thumper get some progress done and be able to log off was such a nice thing coming from an MMOish game. Some bugfixing and more areas and the initial launch of the game would have been great, but instead it got redesigned 3-5 times and the company bled money and finally crashed.
i remember those times. fun was to be had.
i also remember having the game playing on my pc almost all of the time in tower defense mode or just going around, take a single shot at a mob in a thumper defense and get some resources from it for the help (usually sand but hey...).
being able to cheese the game to a point made it kinda fun, broken, but fun.
and they didnt really even needed to fix it...(well...mining an umbrella was kinda silly...) in fact i would've incentivised it...tower defense game against bugs inside an Open World RPG/FPS?! sign me in...all you were getting was sand anyway... that would give you little money and there was always the risk of being attacked in your favorite spot by those increadibly accurate plasma launcher enemies...
The TRUE profit was still in walking around and search for the 300+ lvl purple resources :P
i still remember, previous to the update were they removed those ridiculous resources (and everyone was running around trying to make OP weapons before they were fased out), i sold all my top tier stuff and got so much money i never needed more while the servers lasted (or at least until they introduced those coin thingies that made all that money worthless).
This comment gave me flashbacks
I remember when they first released that 'raid' boss for 4 player groups and the most efficient way to do it was to hide in a tree near the back of the room until the devs caught on and nerfed the tree lol
Being fired for failing to read the CEO's mind is something I can relate to.
Anyone remember the "Chosen Invasion" events? Firefall was always a very co-operative game, but a horde of 30+ players storming Chosen drop sites from one end of the overworld to the other was something else entirely.
totally bro. Like the Amazon events? fukin madness. loved Firefall.
reminds me of a different game i played for a while, "defiance".
that game had these "arkfall" events, where random players would come together to fight monsters that popped out of a piece of a wrecked spaceship, "the ark", that crashed to earth.
@@ericb3157 Totally get what you are saying as I played both of those, but Defiance was garbage compared to Firefall (before it went to hell). Defiance killed me when they introduced swords, but literally the entire game was definitely not designed for any sort of melee combat and it felt like "Hey, you finding guns too easy? Here, nerf yourself by 1000% and use a sword just for the "fun" of it!"
The only issue I had with Arkfall events was that it was designed for maybe 5 players, but 40 would show up. 😆
remember when you'd get a REALLY big group running a level 3 thumper near the melding wall?
nonstop, frantic brawl,
then huge dance parties afterwards....
god i missed that kinda, "passive" feeling of community/teamwork-
met a buncha folks ive known for years just organicly pulling thumper groups together...
I remember enjoying early Firefall, I still have the Hat from the founders edition. But as the game kept getting patches, it kept changing its means of progression. From being able to Solo events, to be hard required for groups. From a simple leveling system, to requiring a bunch of materials that made no sense, breaking progression and only half working....And all of it completely changed the next patch cycle.
I remember by the end they were stripping out entire systems and not replacing them with anything. Each patch leaving the game lesser than it had been. It was so much better in the early days. The jetpacks felt so good everything felt so open. That glitched bug spawn that kept spawning endless tides of bugs and how fun it was to join the choatic mass of players killing them. Then they had to missmanage it into oblivion.
@@Jerickjv It's a shame they didn't just make that a feature. It would have been great to have a sort of defense mode or the like where there's just hordes and hordes of bugs to tear through until you eventually die outright.
@@Jerickjv One day after not playing Firefall for a while i hopped back online to play. Everything had changed, the gear system was completely different, so all my top tier stuff was jsut gone. Had to grind for new jumpjets, weapons, armour etc. all over again for multiple frames/classes. And the new gear sucked so hard! The new jumpjets was soooo bad compared to the older ones, as you mentioned too. Man i still had an addiction for that game, just going around exploring and finding events, but after they changed stuff, it wasn't the same anymore and i lost interest.
It's like your role-playing as one of the employees.
It's really crazy how ahead of its time this game was. Even just from a visual and fun factor sense. It's really a shame it had to die off so early in its life, it had so much potential to be incredible.
It had such a unique and creative world, fun gameplay a bit like tf2/overwatch, it just needed more progression, a complete world map, and sustainable player economy
@@citizenerased7214 I agree! I played this game during the time of it being alive, it was so fun and I wanted to bring my friends into it. But I was young, the moment I saw the game died, I felt sad a few years later.
The Game was something I would love to somehow make a Private server and even make the game bigger to what was missing in it.
Sadly, I don't got the funds, or the good leadership to make a good group dedicated in reviving good games that missed so much potential and lend to players for free.
Would also take too much long effort into also fixing the bugs I remembered experiencing and adding a ton of new stuff that never made the light and even new unique stuff.
Same thing that happened to Wildstar, these fires burned so bright but didn't last.
Never played it but it did look fun and interesting In this video. Seems like it could have been a huge sucess honestly.
Fun fact.
When Red5 was sold to The9, a lot of the early devs jumped ship. Many of them got deals to work at Blizzard, but some actually went off and joined Epic Games to work on their at the time unreleased project, Fortnite.
Some fun parallels to be had there to how Fortnite's plot changed, how the melding worked compared to Fortnite's own storm effect and big purple/blue wall of death.
Shit, man. Regardless of anything that happens afterwards, those actors at PAX looked absolutely great and I know I would have had stars in my eyes too after a show like that. It looked like they were the actual in-game face models too which is incredible.
it was legit fun to play that's why they thought it was going to be the next WoW but mismanagement made it so there was no real end game and you'd just farm the same events for their version of gold
@@Aaron-zu3xn Yeah I had the feeling we'd push back the fog and unlock more zones and more difficult to explore. Instead we got instances for end game content, while open world was the main drive behind the game.
They also made unlocking advanced frames easy as shit and without any progression. Before you had to unlock them by progressing through your basic frame, after which you could unlock the two advanced frames for said basic frame. They could have made dozen's of more frames going from basic to advanced to let's say master to legendary frames. It could have given players hundreds of hours of fun to unlock every frame. Instead they removed the "skill tree" and made it so frames could be bought with either tokens or actual money.
They also made thumpers so easy that it wasn't fun to do anymore. I think they removed "elite thumpers" and made them S1 to S3 thumpers "squad 3 thumpers". They could have gone up to S10 (or any number) with increasing difficulty rather easily and without much-needed development. Yet they didn't and left us with thumpers too easy to be fun.
as indie game developer, what i learned after watching your videos is:
1.never ever declared your game until it's ready, or you can make a devlog if you want to show people.
2. don't set high expectations for players, you'll eventually fucked up if you do that
3. don't ask for to fund your game.
outside investment is the worst
@@sonfable8809 no
"The employees are not fired for messing up, but for offending the CEO"
Wow, all you have to do to keep your job is act fake and friendly with the CEO.
That’s what I like to call (A)nger (M)anagement (U)nder (P)ower
Wow, thats kind of lame.
More common than not, really.
Yeah that's most office jobs.
Literally why I got fired from my last job. The boss made some completely idiotic decisions, I called them out, and I got the boot.
Hardly surprising that bus was unsafe to drive. West Coast Customs aren't known for their attention to safety (or mechanical) standards. But the do make cool looking stuff....
I just found your channel dude, looks like it's blowing up! Congrats!
Keep up the great work! 👍
This was one of my favorite games. I met people who would become my roommates on this game. Mark is working on a new project now that’s the “spiritual successor” to firefall but development on it is almost non existent and they are just collecting checks from monthly subscribers that are promised skins for their money, in a game, that most likely will never release
Yep. Em-8er is just another Star Citizen scam, unfortunately.
We've kicked up enough dust to force a roadmap the other day. The current problem is hiring a few additional developers:
2 Hard Surface Modelers
1 Animator
1 Technical Animator/Unreal Developer
they literally asked almost 1-3 k for some herald system that says your name when you log in or whatever bahaha
As a Brazilian, I cannot stop myself from noticing that Brazil was indeed mentioned in this piece of content.
Thank you from cooperating with our mastermind plan of spreading the world, and turn the whole Earth into Brazil 2.
Oh, and also, awesome video bro, your channel definitely is one of the bests I've found recently
Greetings from itaquera
you won't succeed Brazilian, Atrocitus will see to that.....we'll set fire to your rainforests and then where will you be?
LMAO, JK man JK lol
@@darthXreven make better jokes
@@lonearachnid6591 I'm the supervillain here, you will laugh and like it or there will be consequences....now we wouldn;t like that now would we no.....no, so do laugh and have a good time, have a punch or two....lol
what never tried a Hawaiian Punch?? man so uncultured....
@@darthXreven???
@@lonearachnid6591 I can't help it if you don't get the comedy, I'm equal parts evil nemesis with a love for fire and failed comic....eh
wait....
Honestly, I am loving the content - “What went wrong?” So many games I've loved only to disrespectfully spit in my face over the years. Just finished binging some of your videos, I would love to see a video on the disaster that was The Stomping Lands. The Kickstarter killer (IMO). I think it was the first game I really saw explode, only for the dev to run with the money. Making future Kickstarter projects very questionable to support for many people. But I have “great” news, return to the stomping land steam forums. For there you will find that the dev has returned. I repeat, after not paying artists, running with the money and going silent for about 8 years, he returns and 'updated' the game. As far as I have seen, he is silencing any questions about the disappearance and past scam that had occurred. I have seen very little talk about this except directly on the steam forums now renamed “Stomping Land”. All tho, I'm not sure if this has the amount of content required for a video of yours. I at the very least would like to spread awareness that someone who damaged the Indie Developer scene's reputation and trust has returned with no answers to his actions on his community and the indie community as a whole. This coupled with the fact that there seems to already be a small community following praising him as if he's some Messiah, for returning to finish a product he was already paid to develop. It all just puts a bad taste in my mouth. With the lack of transparency on the past, I fear that this will become “The Stomping Lands” 2.0 growing in size like the last only to run with everyone's money. Anyhow, this rambling has gone on quite enough. I bid thee farewell WickedWiz, til the next video. Cheers
@Tsuru Tsuru Hades isnt really indie though, i know a ton of people who play it.
@@Chris-ks4sw Indie doesn't mean no one plays it, it means it was created by independent (indie) developers instead of a big company.
@@maximsavage Hades didn't ask for people to fund it though. When I think of an Indie I think of a small company that requires crowdfunding to make a game with a few amount of people working on it. If we're just basing Indie to mean it's not made by massive studios than the number of "Indie" games massively dwarfs the amount of ones made by the studios. At that point they would be the vast majority of games.
@@Chris-ks4sw That viewpoint is sensible, but it doesn't relate to how many people play the game, which is what your original reply used as a metric, hence my rebuttal. A crowdfunded game could become a huge success and gain many players, but it would still be an indie game.
@@Chris-ks4sw the number of indie games does trump the number made by big studios though...
The memory of this game has been an itch in the back of my mind for years.
Suddenly remembered it's name and wanted to find out what happened to it.
The development being such an abusive mess is awful, shocking, but ultimately unsurprising. I hope everyone who worked on it is having a much better time now, whatever they are doing.
I wish companies had to open source as part of bankruptcy. I'd love to be able to play this with my lady.
@@patrickryan7829 Id want the PRE china intervention version you know the PLAYABLE one.
I remember playing this game myself actually, it was very fun! Unfortunately after returning to the game after a long break i noticed the game changed a bit. The very first quest was broken and didn't work, they changed the way getting new classes works even though the NPC you were now supposed to talk to to actually get your new classes wasn't in the game thus preventing you from doing that, and of course quest progression was reset so the only thing you could actually do was the randomly spawning pve stuff and some pvp. Then shortly after that it shut down for good.
I remember playing this in beta and having a blast. There were a lot more than 30k player peak due to it having its own launcher yet it was only fun for a few months in the beta
@Tsuru Tsuru Sounds like about right time. Ever met Taynin, Nannou, Holi or ShihoinYoruichi (spelling might be a bit off)?
Craziest thing, I wanted to beta test this, signed up or whatever I think. The crazy part is that my coworker was the sister of a dev for the game.
I also hated the job
That do be crazy
Expect this guy's twitter sycophants to raid this vid any day now.
loving your what went wrong series, showed up on my recommended and binged them all!!! great work :)
The decision that Mark made to agree to investors having the majority share of Red5 wasn’t very smart, but this deal also somewhat played a part in getting him voted out of the company. A bit ironic to say the least.
This was a great video by the way! Keep up the good work with this type of content ❤
Which is why he isn't letting that happen with his new game, Em-8er
And now the dude is mainly just a douchebag on Twitter
To be fair, it seems this time said investor didn't jump the gun, but only pulled the vote as a last attempt to save the project.
Nobody wants to lose 18,5 million initial investment and 22 million late buy-in investment to a guy's ego.
@@MuteMyst also probably why the game isn't releasing anytime in the next 5 years.
@@ChonkySodaCat I'd rather it take time than have another the 9 try and take it over.
I was in the forums from day one as well as in the closed alphas where they secretly invited people to play.
Here is the thing, we told them in several posts for years all the design issues, which parts of the gameplay they should focus on, which changes were good and bad. They didn't listen to anything in the tester's forum. Instead they tried to push the game into esports and failed to realize people couldn't even get a pvp match going because almost nobody that played the game wanted to pvp. When they finally revamped the frames, they did all the shit we told them not to do instead of the things people wanted.
It is failure by design. Massive lack of community awareness. Completely ignoring the playerbase. At least we have community of Firefall refugees trying to make the game we actually wanted. Either that or it will be vaporware.
Shit. Let us know when the fan made is up
@@clumsybanana6524 One is called Em-8er and the other is Project A abyssall
@@soulwynd thanx man
I was one of the testers like you, writing up big critiques of the near constant changes on the forums. They never seemed to listen.
@@soulwynd Haven't seen a damn actual thing out of EM-8er in terms of gameplay. Just skins and character models.
and now Mark Kern is saying shit about starfield start screen, lmao
I specifically remember the game design changing from a more horizontal progression where you could craft guns that gave up reload for fire rate etc... to a basic vertical leveling so they could sell all the micro transaction nonsense with the release update. It completely changed the game from open world exploration to level grind. why explore and search for thumping locations when you could play WOW or any other of a dozen vertical leveling games that were more polished with bigger player bases. They made a last min shift to be more like that bigger mainstream games at the time and as a result just blending into the background so new players never thought to play the game and old players left due to the changes. The game died due to spineless cooperate tinkering. RIP firefall
The investors thought they could buy up majority shares and the vanilla WoW lead and pivot the game into "WoW with guns".
It was incredibly stupid and just made it sacrifice it's uniqueness to compete with every other MMO.
"THIS time, if we make lesser-WoW, we will make billions!!!"
Really enjoying this series. Especially appreciate that you have a unique style in the way you approach these topics when compared with Death of a Game and Wha Happun. All these series have in common that they are very informative and entertaining at the same time and I hope you will continue seeing success covering these missmanaged projects.
Wha Happun seems to have changed their name, at least in the thumbnails... but this channel really has exactly what I always wished for: Wha Happun without Matt McMuscles. I'm sorry to his fans, but in my opinion that guy is just insufferable. Anyway thanks Wiz and keep up the amazing work!
@@t0xcn253 Personally, I enjoy Matts content and persona, plus being a former game tester, he can often provide some unique perspectives on developemnt issues. Can understand though that his style isn't for everyone.
@@exp2745 I will agree with you about his qualifications, and for the most part I find his choice of subjects outstanding (hence my continuing to watch) but something about the presentation just consistently grates on my nerves, no accounting for taste I suppose.
@@exp2745 Honestly I don't stand him but I'm biased because of the whole SBF drama (also hate his wife for trying to stir up drama between them on Twitter; she's a disgusting person overall, and can't believe Matt settled with her).
His videos are useful whenever I want to know what happened to something without having to do the work myself though.
I was unsure I should cite Wa Happun, because I never know who really came first, on those kind of concepts of show.
In the end, you're right : it's nice to see several one existing, and there's plenty of game history to dig into anyway xD
I have the beanie and poster, and I had the special bike. Mark was in fact incredibly defensive and he, like Chris, envisioned Red 5 as a content engineering team or platform, not first and foremost a games studio (the game was, to him, just an ad for the studio). That's why the youtube channel was so nuts and had so little to do with the game -- some of the leadership were trying to sell a different product, one that had only a tangential relationship to the game.
Also check out EM8ER. Don't give it money though.
What's an Em8er
@@user-bm8xo3mw1k Some shitty game with two opposing factions and something about fires? I think? Looks popular with streamers for whatever reason, but uh.... also looks like a shit show
@@chrismanuel9768 Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down? But thanks for the info anyways
Man em8er is a joke haha
At this point Im pretty sure em8er will never be finished. As long as I was following it, mark was just posting lewd artwork
Seeing your channel
It’s so cool you found this format that fits you because of your ability to narrate
Nice seeing that it also gives you more views as you deserve
Used to play this game every day after school. Miss everything about it, still makes me sad to think about. Everything within that world, completely gone.
There's a reverse engineering project but it can't do more than look at assets.
I got in this game near the tail end of the closed beta. My friends and I played the hell out of it throughout the open beta. Even through the loss of the PvP and crafting (and by extension, the thumping), I still kept with it. The rug-pull of the level-gated sections implemented right at launch sucked, but I STILL loved it. In the end, I was still sporadically playing it right up until the server shutdown.
I'll always miss this game, and I will never change my icon (Tigerclaw ftw!)
Are you, me? Because this describes my experience so well, right down to the time when I got into it and sometimes coming back to play even during that last death spiral.
God, I remember doin' PVP duels with the tigerclaw. There wasn't really anything quite as rewarding as landing those big blasts of "get rekt lmao" mid air.
I used a dragonfly with super powerful life steal to get a bunch of people the "I am hendrix lake" achievment. Amusingly, it's my rarest one on steam, and I actively made it less rare by helping folks grind it out. Could solo the boss real easy, it just... took forever. Man, those are memories. Now I'm sad again. aaaa
If you haven't covered it already in this series, "The Mandate" would be a great candidate for it. I believe the company that was behind it was 'Perihelion Interactive' and there was a big kickstarter for it. I remember Angry Joe making a big video on it, hyping it up. I even backed it because it looked very cool, but guess what? Never came out! Complete vaporware.
Firefall is to this date my fourth most played game on Steam. Other games are very slowly pushing it down the list.
There are two spiritual successors to this game -- Respark, and Em-8er -- one of them is founded by Mark Kern.
One of the best game ever!. I played it since day 1, when was in alpha test. Everytime me and friends talk about it, tears comes out. Was a great game where you meet many, many players and have the opportunity to have a lot friends.
Firefall was my very first MMO experience, and one of my very first PC games. I remember spending hours retaking lost territory, exploring the map trying reach the highest peaks and doing other world events with dozens of other players. I'll never forget the "tower of power" we created with a pile up of 30 people standing on top of each other. I played every day and loved what the game was, what it could have been. Really a shame how it ended up.
Holy shit, I think I might have been involved with that "tower of power." Something like it, at least. Small world.
the tiki tower!
I just binge watched your entire "What Went Wrong?" series and then subscribed. Can't wait to see more failed games, especially those I played myself.
you subscribed AFTER?!?!?!? FOR SHAME!!! you must now dance naked in the street while also shitting all over the road (take colace).
One of my favorite MMOs. I was sad to see it go, and even sadder to not receive a successor.
But did it have a nice main menu?
💀
No ! 😀
i managed to get 30 hours in this game before it shut down, god it was so fun and they just kept making the game a bit better and better with the different crafting mechanics.
until craft was removed
@@revodrol6136 that's exactly it, I loved the game, came back like 3 months later, and crafting was gone.
Back when I played the game was just a fun sandbox. Run around doing random missions that pop up on the map while protecting territory from AI invasions. It was a blast to login and notice half the map was taken and then group up with other players to reconquer it or defend a major city against a massive siege.
When Mark was still around there were some weird things going on with a focus on PvP, I believe there was a forum post made by a dev saying something along the lines of "PvP is the focus, the open world sandbox is just a distraction while you wait in queue".
When Mark left some players were optimistic they would drop the focus on PvP and work with the game strengths. PvP was closed, some areas were added with new objectives but were extremely buggy, missions got reworked and got even glitchier, crafting was being reworked and was disabled, it was clear the game was changing direction. This was when I stopped playing due to school.
When I came back after their official launch the game was completely different with a lot more rpg mechanics with zone levels and a main questline and dear lord the game was so buggy and crusty. At some point they added a new upgrade system that was very "mobile-esque", supposedly to appease some chinese investor or players and that was when the game got dropped by even their most loyal fans.
The Firefall I loved died before the official servers closed down.
There was talk about how they'd hired a real-world economist to design how their resource and crafting systems should function. Crafted gear had a range that stats could roll in, and the absolute best stat rolls were coveted. But gear had a limited durability, and no repair mechanic. The idea was that everybody should have to constantly farm the thumpers while in shit quality burner gear to fund your good set for higher pve content. But the thumpers required 4-6 people above the small low yield one, and your crafted gear broke often well before you could afford to replace it.
I was actually excited that Firefall got a campaign and coherent plot, and did enjoy those missions (and the various quests at each town/outpost), but I wish all that hadn’t come with mismanagement and generic MMO mechanics.
I’d say the final nail in the coffin for me was the removal of Amazon Warzone for update 1.6, and I slowly stopped playing. One of my prominent regrets in life is that I didn’t keep up with the game long enough to be notified about the shutdown. I wish I could’ve joined the server on the last day and had fun one more time.
@@asdfgibberishjkl They ripped the crafting system out by the roots and replaced it at least 5 separate times over the game's lifespan. Some of the changes they made were good. Most of them were bad. Half of them didn't bear the faintest resemblance to any of the older systems. Iirc there was only one version that had the limited durability, no repair issue, somewhere in the middle. The one after it, I think they just made repairs cheap and easy at any spawn area and gear breakage nonpermanent, and then after that they went back to removing durability mechanics entirely.
I remember playing this game. I had fun with it despite my first PC not being able to handle running it that well. I think I remember noticing it's downfall when there was suddenly a lack of voice acting or that the original voice actor for your operator(?) was replaced. It was sad to watch it's death in real time because it was genuinely a promising game.
ill say,
that as someone who was in the CBT,
the repeated progression wipes/complete reworks of progression/crafting did, repeatedly kill my enthusiasm for the game-
i ducked out for months to a year or more each time all my work/grinding was reset back to nearly stage one >.>
its the sort of thing you understand/expect in an alpha or early test, but when the game's been playable for the public for years, its...
not a great feeling *sighs*
so much wasted potential.
still sad nobody was able to leak the server code...
I still got the poster rolled up somewhere, the beanie gathering dust in a drawer. I loved playing this game but my pc was a struggling mess. By the time I had a proper computer the game was dead and buried. I was never able to experience the game fully even after backing it with a lotta money. I miss everything about this game, the good and the bad.
Ur a clown for backing this mess in the first place
leys not forget the amazing Firefall Halloween special they had the Legandary Mega64 team host. that stream was amazing and will go down in history as the most chaotic experience iv experienced
the only cool thing about Firefall is that it used the Offset engine made by Offset Software which was later bought by Intel when they almost released a GPU back in 2010. At that time it was a very good tech, that could rival Crytek’s Cryengine (at that time UE4 was nowhere to be seen). Few insiders say, that the engine was heavily modified by Red 5 and had some outstanding features. It simulated the solar system, with different loading zones that tiled all around the Earth’s globe. It had a very powerful day/night system, which carefully calculated the sunlight duration, depending on the global movements in the Solar system. It also had a very interesting AI component, which allowed to run hundreds of AI within a loading area. It was capable of running thousands pos attackers at a time. And remember this was all happening back in 2010-2013. Years before we’ve seen similar things in modern games.
I was playing this game in two milestones periods: at open beta and after crafting/frame unlocking redesign. And honestly both times it was a blast. But there was not enough interesting to do to hold me for more than 3-4 months. Mechanics and game feel was actually the main reason to continue to play and wait to expansion of the game. But they did anything else but that.
And then one time I remembered this game and went to my steam library to download it again... and it was just closed.
I put this game next to Defiance and Wildstar as fun but dead MMORPG. Now this is just sad. Damn.
definitelly did not know about the stuff Mark did, but I did hear how The9 was forcing changes onto the game, making it more cookie cutter like. I wonder if that had to do with his sporatic changes.
Another thing to mention is he is working on a new game with several of the same devs called Em8er which is a spiritual successor to Firefall and strongly community driven
Last time I heard of Em8er it was years in without gameplay. Did something come out?
@@MultiJade It's had gameplay for a while, with various test builds having been made available to backers over the years.
Yeah they're basically working on it part time until they're certain they've got something to dive into fully.
@@MultiJade at this point its a multiplayer demo, you got a gun and swarm rockets, the gameplay is calling down a mecha thumper equivalent and shooting some baddies. progress is slow but they talk with the community a lot.
Never trust Mark to deliver on anything. He is 100% responsible for the failure of firefall and not because of the investors.
15:42 it’s usually related to how the servers are run. Blockland, a game so old it still asks if you’re using dial-up internet and so dead less than 10 people play online at peak hours, still has its servers up because almost everything is run by other players.
It has everything to do with who is running the game. Firefall had owners who didn't care, by developers who didn't care because they had asshole bosses and couldn't even get paid ontime.
CONGRATS ON 100K!!
Recently found out about your channel. I watched everything so far and I really like the "what went wrong?" series. Love the content!
Maybe you should do CardLife next. A phew big TH-camrs made videos playing it as it was supposed to be a really big game with lots of features but hasn't been updated in 3 years and pretty much died out.
I remember having so much fun in this game. Those huge events and watching players coming from all directions to help out was just awesome.
I was much younger and running around and just doing random stuff was great.
I used to play this thinking it was Starcraft MMO. I used to play the class that kind of like Ghost and went around the map using Dropship.
I really miss this game.
I was there for the semi-private beta.
Despite content being limited to unlocking the different classes and thumping for materials, the game was SO fun, and the community worked together when parts of the map opened up that had rare minerals.
Red5 screwed up when they quit listening to the players. They introduced a ridiculous durability system that would inevitability make all your hard-crafted equipment useless. After durability and durability "pool" reached zero.. that was it. Gear was broken.
We tried to talk them in to allowing it to be repaired with currency + rare minerals, but they were too concerned that it was going to negatively impact the economy with the upcoming auction house update.
It was shortly after this that myself and many others left, and shortly after that we heard about the failed dungeon system. Then.. it was gone.
I really miss just chilling at the Cabana with everyone while we waited for the miasma to clear.
Good times.. shame Red5 were too stubborn to listen to good feedback.
It also doesn't surprise me management turned out the way it did. I remember hearing rumblings about devs not being treated well at all.. guess it was all true.
I loved Firefall, put quite some time into it when i was a teenager. Thank you for covering this game.
I loved the Engineer-like frame with its automatic/shielding turrets and healing stations. I was the support of a duo at the time, and we enjoyed doing thumpers and events with massive monster spawns! What killed our motivation was that after an update, the different frames weren't available anymore unless you paid real money for them. I worked so hard to unlock the three assault ones and the turret mods that, as soon as I logged in, it killed my desire to play the game any longer.
hell ya bro. Electron was a super fun Frame. but Mammoth was my favorite. Firefall classes (Frames) were so well designed. miss this damn game
@@hawkmoon7930 I was a Firecat main, some of the most pure fun I've had in games in a long while.
@@hawkmoon7930 Mammoth was my main too and was ridiculously good and satisfying to shield and get close to enemies, then fill them full of holes from 5 feet away.
I played that one until the Arsenal came out and then I find that one to be a better middle ground for me. But I remember soloing a lot of content that wasn't possible for other classes as the Mammoth.
Was it the same "official release" patch that removed 90% of the game's unique features? Like the class swap, no-leveling-needed progression, no lvl-locked zones, etc
Really wish we could get a multiplayer or MMO third person shooter that sticks. Firefall, Anthem, Outriders, all had promise and all fell short.
There is Warframe
@@samon53 Warframe is good but it feels very loose and floaty not enough weight on the characters, and the upgrade systems are arcane and confusing.
@@Toastybees yeeeah..that is a pretty huge problem with Warframe..so much to do, and very little explanation...not to mention the boatload of mechanics they created, then seemingly abandoned over the years. At its core, it's a solid game, it's just not very newbie friendly
Global Agenda was pretty good for the time it existed, and kinda had firefall vibes and wonky advertising with a bizarre focus on emphasizing that there weren't any elves in the game. iirc it was published by Nexeon though, which played a pretty big hand in its demise
Warframe has serious balancing issues. You're rarely in that golden zone of not too difficult and not too hard
Your videos are so good. Keep uploading as much as you can albeit tiring I know. But you can make a fast career out of this with your style brother. Good luck! 🍀
Mark Fern? you mean the guy who criticized Starfield for it's main menu design? oh well, no wonder his game died
I'm from Hong kong and new to this channel, after watching all your what went wrong video I absolutely loved it. Keep it going!
Played firefall for a month and is sad to heard about its dead, tbh the idea of a gun oriented mmo sounded so great
If you're looking for an FPS based MMO, planetside might be a good pick, though it's only PvP, making it more akin to Battlefield than World of Warcraft.
@@Lewd-Tenant_Isan too bad Planetside 2 is aggressively p2w..but that's nothing new, considering who runs it..
@@kazumablackwing4270 What about Defiance? Oh, nevermind, it's dead, along with 2050, welp.
@@Temmoie yeeah...that was disappointing when I found out it was shuttered..I wasn't overly attached to the game, and was none too thrilled with Trion's predatory practices, but it was a good casual time-waster while it lasted
Love your "What Went Wrong" series, lad! Keep them coming ;o)
Just recently discovered your channel, and I've really been enjoying the content. Subbed and looking forward to future content. Keep up the great work!
that game was so good, so many memories being a medic class that can branch out to a poison and debuff specialist or continue improving being a healer. And sniper rifles were so fun to use... RIP firefall.
thats one game i wish was still alive. With events allowing players to fight devs playing the role of open world bosses, the thumpers... there was some definite love in here.
Fondest memory was Thumping for resources as an Engineer. Placed my turrets, found the perfect spot for the Thumper and hit Deploy... And then was marked by a Chosen Death Squad. The Executioner of the squad however made the poor decision to stand and start shooting at me directly in the center of the Thumper's landing spot. Splat.
engineer here; I loved that stuff too.
Keep making these videos please. I enjoy hearing the background of these once giants.
Me and a couple friends were "founders" in that game, back in that time where every game had a founder pack.
I can tell you exactly why it fell apart from first hand experience.
it was still in beta, and they jammed in a real cash shop with loot boxes, there was almost nothing to do in the game, you ran around the map and you either do a thumper or you find a outpost tower, which were these 3 floor towers that the evil human enemies would attack or be defending.
there was so much empty space, and nothing to do. I remember the biggest thing people would do was just spam thumper missions and do the party Tiki dance thing.
It was all ambition with out any meat to the game, and once there was some story missions to do it was broken and dull, mostly being more and more attack waves with no NPCs to be seen or talked to, just audio log BS.
it just didn't have anything there. and I will be honest, the game was pretty ugly. everything was like chunky and plain.
Believe it or not, there are people praising the "endless horde" as an interesting choice, as if it doesn't render all combat meaningless slugfests.
There are games where that can work (L4D2 for example) but it does not work in an MMO.
This brought back a lot of the game memories to me. But I personally never thought the game was ugly. I thought it was beautiful. I would sit in awe on the coast line admiring the water and the rocks. I still kinda love the aesthetic but it does look dated and blocky in 2022.
I just remember hating the crafting system rewards. Crafting things worse than dropped items you found while grinding out the mats in the first place.
@@mike0rr Yeah aesthetically this game was great for its time.
I would repeatedly use jump pads to get to the highest points in the world and just glide around admiring the views.
What i hated to the core was the enemy minigunner shooting me from great distance like he has a damned sniper rifle
One way to get essentially endless materials and money was to do "races" on the minibikes. You basically drove from one city to another as fast as possible against AI opponents. It was trivially easy to do. Do that 10-12 times and you got enough stuff to build exotic gear.
i found this channel on a complete whim but man am i glad for it, this kind of video essay content u make has got me hooked man, really love watching this stuff!
If you want more of this type of content
"Death of a game"
And "what happun?" Are also similar series
@@dafire9634 thank'a yooouuuu
Great vids, I'd love to see what happened with Evolve (Stage 2) next if possible.
Just discovered your channel! Keep up the great videos, I can’t wait for more
And here I thought I was the only one who even recalled this poor game's existence.
Thanks for the fresh insights on what the hell happened with this one, 'cause I was never able to get a clear picture of why and how this game drove straight into a wall.
Firefall and free realms was peak existence :( miss them sm
Yeah lots of us miss Firefall, especially beta.
It's just too bad there is still misinformation as with what's in this video..
Dude, every time I hear the main theme song for that game I get hit with a huge wave of nostalgia and regret.
That game was nice, and it could have been GREAT.... but here we are today asking "what went wrong?"
I remember playing Firefall back in the day. I don't remember specifics, but I did play a lot of the class with the jetpack and the AoE gun. There was one sort of challenge that came up in the PVE events a lot where you go into some sort of collapsing dimensional rift to get resources, fighting off loads of baddies and have to jump out of it through something up high to avoid death.
Glad to see you getting the growth you deserve recently! Found you a little while back and found it criminal that you weren't larger for the amount of effort put into each video.
I found your channel today and i already love your what went wrong videos
sames its fun content
This game was pretty darn fun. Melding tornados were hella cool, and I figured out how to bug them pretty quickly by platforming random debris to get above the kill zone. There wasn't much point to it, but it was cool to be where you weren't supposed to.
Once you could kill the tornado and enter the... whatever that place was... you could get a ton of exotics.
@@kevinmccarthy2793 oh I loved those
As soon as you said 'Blizzard' everything made a lot more sense.
I was hyped for this game and jumped into the open beta, playing up through when they did the big overhaul of the resource system. Power-grinded for credits and materials, bought a neat in-game motorcycle, then played sporadically because the overhaul simplified the crafting and resources too much for my liking. Came back a year later when some friends wanted to try it out, and we drove around in the 4-man jeep that was apparently added to my character at some point. But, I'd already done all the content, and my friends didn't want to push through the grind, so we all left.
It was sad to find out that the game shut down for good. Good memories of thumping, very vertical exploration, fighting off big invasions that would demolish a town (temporarily) if not dealt with, and having so much control over each stat in your loadout.
I desperately loved this game. Never been so active in a game's community, and I probably never will again. Firefall was something so unique, and I remember everything in this video as it happened. I was even a community mentor for a while, and participated in a few raid world firsts too.
One thing that wasn't mentioned here was Firefall Fest, which was a particularly fun part of everything for us players. We chased around some celebs they brought in on the live servers and had some fun in PvP playing against them too. I remember Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day, and some other online personalities were brought in to play the game and be on stream. It was pretty strange in hindsight, but you just don't get anything that felt both as jank and close to home as that did, while also having so much money invested into it.
It all was just so unique. The crazy events and stuff they did were huge wastes of money, but I still enjoyed it all the same. I really miss the community of the game, AFKing and chatting with people because we'd all run out of content to do, maybe going in for a round of the big team battle PvP they had for a while, trying out Jetball and being annoyed that playing anything but Assault felt too slow, riding end to end of Copa on a LGV just to enjoy the vehicle mechanics.. Even just taking this ball I could deploy as a mentor and making up games to play on our own by bouncing it off walls and making a sort of volleyball thing. I even was part of hosting a little mini racing tournament one time, going through the Transit Hub underground tunnels.
I doubt there'll ever be a game just like it again, and I really do miss it. So many games just don't have the same.. Messing around factor that it did. And when that messing around has vehicles, jetpacks, fun toy consumables and all of that good social stuff, it's really hard to beat.
I remember Nathan Fillian and Felicia Day from the Firefall Fest. I was in game w/o knowing what was actually going on, and just saw a huge horde of people mobbing around, so I joined them. I remember realizing it was related to FFF so I turned my laptop on and put FFF on while playing. I remember Nathan was particularly funny, he got real into character for, Dirk Mcbadass I think was the character? Something funny like that.
I was just talking about how much I missed this game yesterday… RIP firefall I love and miss you every day and it’s been over 6 years…
fingers crossed for the remake
Just wont to say well done on growing so fast keep up the good work👍
Remember playing this a good while ago and having a blast, unfortunately with a lot of games like this though, it got lost in the sea of way too many
I don't remember when, but I played it for a whole summer and dumped like maybe 600 hours into it. I had an absolute blast because this was during the beta where there were tons of players online. I never felt the controversy of the terrible workspace or company because I was just a kid enjoying the game.
Started watching you yesterday, with hello neighbor, watched the others and I must say I rly like ur videos of what went wrong.
I loved this game, played it during the beta, remember good times in collecting minerals to upgrade my frame and get better gear, trying to get the top quality minerals on respawn. It was awesome! Then things got changed to a general leveling system and more of the story was put in, I could live with that, news zones opened up things seemed to be looking up. Blasting across the Chosen's fortresses with an Army as we retake land is still a highlight of my Firefall memory. Then came the final area, the max level area with loads of dynamic events and 3 bases under heavy attack. The area was amazing! You could go in and there was always something to do. From pushing back the chosen wall to holding a base, to capturing a outpost by yourself. Damn it was fun!
But that was it.... nothing came after. we stopped getting updates, bugs started to stay in game, microtransactions and loot boxes came in. Rumors of The9 just taking a bunch of money from Red5 spread, layoffs and nothing being done with the game. you could see it dying. The Max level zone was taken OUT of the game so they could fix it, whatever that meant and never came back. Things kinda chugged along on life support. Players could tell long before the game died that it was dead. Hell there was a exploit where just standing in a certain spawn zone would give you exp from a dynamic event, it never got fixed. Most games fix that pretty fast I think that Red5 just didnt have the staff to do it by then. That was 1 game bug. Let along an entire game.
Watching Firefall die was like watching a friend on life support. Eventually, you get up and have to pull the plug. Good-bye Firefall thanks for the memories.
Congrats on 100k
I remember having a great time during the beta but had to stop after a certain point in the main storyline because my toaster PC nearly choked to death trying to render the huge city area. The motorcycle was also totally useless because moving faster meant my computer had to render things faster to keep up. It's a shame that the whole game went to hell and died by the time I could play it properly.
same
yea, same. My 1GB 9500GT suffered a lot.
Your hello neighbour video got me dying with the jokes 😂😂
Congrats for hitting 100k subs, wiz!
I think the main issue with most MMOs that look promising but get canned shortly after launch is commitment. MMO's tend to be way more expensive to develop than other genres, and they rely on a lower monthly subscription fee than a higher initial pricetag. This means that a brand new MMO may be in the red, that is costing more money than they made back, for at least a year or two. Not to mention, unlike almost every other genre, you can't just dump the game out onto the market and forget about it. Something like Elden Ring, or Pokemon can be released and only receive minor patches to fix bugs, and nobody would question it. An MMO, however, requires constant maintenance and updates. FF14, WoW, GW2, all receive constant updates on a regular cycle. If an MMO goes a year without any major content updates, or at least a promise that a huge expansion is on the horizon, people are going to lose interest very quickly.
In short, MMOs cost more money, require constant updates, and get their money trickle-fed through monthly subscriptions, which makes it an unsustainable model for any company that isn't prepared. Most of the failed MMOs are by companies who expect fast returns, which the genre naturally doesn't do.
Just recently found your channel and you for sure deserve more subs! Keep up the great work Mr. Wiz!
Your channel is literally exploding, congrats on the growth.
Lol I had no idea what this was until I saw that ridiculous bus and it all came back to me. I was at the Anime Expo that year.
TLDR Red5 fk'd up
Faded Pez maintained the game as a GM that went on until the game was shut down, he held a weekly event. Where he would invite people that whispered him, teleport them to the event and made sure they got drops. This went on for awhile little while. then the game servers just suddenly went offline but not before he thanked everyone for playing. Then there was no more.