In the realm of geeky, one of the things I am doing that I have not talked about here is .. playing the closed beta of Firefall.
Last night my wife gave me permission to upgrade to “Commander” level in my investment – which gives me a lot of in-game currency to buy the “pay-for” builds, and a Motorcycle to get around the map faster with. (they call them LGV’s) On a $/hr enjoyed ratio, I’ve already enjoyed this game enough to justify that investment.
Last night, after the purchase, I started to get serious. I’m building a spreadsheet of what kinds of resources I need to keep my eye out for, in order to build the “better” gear.
My goal: to have decent Tier-II gear so I can solo a Light Personal Thumper.
A quick crash course to frame this goal better:
There are 5 major resources, with 3 sub-species each. (See Xls Screenshot above)
- When you mine them, they come in different qualities.
- When you build components, the quality of the material you put in affects the stats of the item you build. So if I want more damage from my Heavy Turret II, I need to use a better quality Conductive Metal.
- If I’m short on Conductive Metals, I could use another metal. However, a high quality Computational Metal used instead of a Conductive Metal would yield a lower quality.
- To get resources, mostly you “mine” them using a “Thumper”
- You run around the map, scanning the ground with something called a “Scan Hammer”. It tells you what the concentrations of stuff are at the spot you’re standing. Concentrations shift over time.
- Pick a spot, and call down a specific size of thumper.
- The thumpers supposedly annoy the surrounding fauna and they come attack the thumper. Your job is to defend the thumper so it doesn’t get down to integrity=0 and blow up.
- The resources mined are shared amongst the people who helped defend it in some manner.
- The smallest thumper (Stock Personal) is easy to solo. I can send it back at Integrity = 80% or so.
- The next size up is the Light Personal Thumper, and I cannot solo that. I can’t kill them fast enough.
There’s other stuff to do around the game as well:
There’s an overall story line of an alien invasion (“Chosen”) with a different atmosphere (“Melding?”) with zombies (“Tortured Souls”) and they occasionally try to take over human territory (“Drop Ships, Incursions”) which makes it quite annoying to try to mine an area. If they take over an area for too long, they convert the atmosphere there and its effectively “lost”. (I don’t know if it can ever be taken back – probably not yet, but maybe in the future)
- You can fly around the map using a glider. Gliders do exactly that: let you glide from a high elevation to a lower elevation – the higher off you start, the longer you can glide. There are achievements to unlock here (distances, sight seeing, death from above, etc)
- There are roads that can be used to ride your motorcycle (“Light Ground Vehicle”) between places at high speed (which is quite fun).
- There is PVP that can be queued for (not my cup of tea)
- There’s something called a “Melding Tornado” which involves some dimensional shifting monster spawing blah blah dropping resource blah blah stuff.
A lot of the stuff (Chosen, Tornado) is pretty difficult to solo, however, the population is pretty quick to respond if you ask.. once you get two or three people working on it, most of the tasks are doable.
Things I like about this game:
- I like that the difference between a newbie (stock armor, no enhancements) and a veteran (T2 armor and above) is in the same order of magnitude – unlike most other games. The monsters are the same for both – the veterans can handle more of them at a time.
- Amazing sound. Explode a grenade and listen to the echo from the walls.
- Good Graphics
- FPS Shoot’em’up adrenaline
- Jumpjets are fun
- Good people playing the game. That will change when it goes public, but right now its awesome.
- The battleframes are different enough in styles of play – each one has its own fun.
Okay, so done. This is what I’ve been playing for the last month or so … it replaced “European Truck Driving Simulator” as my go-to game. I hope I’ll be playing it for at least another month or two.
Almost all the images in this post are borrowed from other resources, which I have linked them to. This last one is me using GiantManiac’s thumper as a photo shoot.
