Red 5's David Williams reveals the next stage of open beta.

“See this grin on my face? I love talking about this game!”

After spending an hour talking to David Williams about FireFall, it’s easy to see why. As one of the lead designers at Red 5 Studios, Williams spends much of his time adding to a post-apocalyptic vision of Earth. But his passion for the game runs deep, sprawling into eSports and beyond.

After I’d caught up with everything the team is planning for Stage 2 of open beta (and there’s a lot of it), he tells me about a recent Jetball final. Following on from all the work the team had poured in over the past year, with an impressive spectator mode, new game types and new PvP gear, I’d asked how the competitive scene was going.

 “The European team – Epsilon – they’re probably the top FireFall team right now. And they were up against a team that’s been surprising everyone recently. It went to the third round of the third match, and it was 3-0 to Epsilon. The other team, they were pushing and pushing, Epsilon was bunkered in and it was a done deal.”

“The other team did this crazy push with about 30 seconds to play, got in and dunked the ball for three, and tied it up. Everyone in the chat room is going berserk. ‘Oh my god, we’re going to extra time.’”

“Wait a second. Ball just respawned. Epsilon’s going for it.”

“Five. Four. Three. Two. He’s taking the shot.”

“One. Bank shot. Ball goes in. One second to play, Epsilon wins by a point. It was nuts. So yeah, to answer your question, it’s going pretty well.”

End of Stage One

In the year since I’d last met Williams, much had changed. Last time, we were talking about class changes and PvP systems. This year it’s all about pushing that story forward, filling out features and putting meat onto the bones.

Williams describes the recent work as Stage One of beta. FireFall is almost unique in being housed almost completely on a cloud-based platform. Open beta acts as a shakedown for almost every online game, but the surge of players hit Red 5’s infrastructure particularly hard. “We knew it was going to happen and, as much as we planned for it – we’ve got really smart people who are doing that planning – as always and with everyone else, we ran into stuff we didn’t expect.”

“A lot of scaling issues for us were involved with the items database. We’re doing something which we’re pretty sure has never been done before, which is basically that you have one global account, and you can log in on any server in the world at any time and use that character. It was creating some really major stresses on the servers that were transferring data back and forth. It is believed, by our engineers, that we’ve found several flaws, at the server level in the MySQL and Amazon Cloud databases, which have never been found before.”

As a result, the studio turned around and rewrote most of the code responsible for backend database management in order to make the game feel more responsive to players.

“It’s been one of our biggest issues, both in terms of player login issues, as well as once in game, being able to open your inventory, being able to see stuff in the marketplace. Anything that accessed your character’s inventory was taking forever. So this new patch that went out makes it incredibly snappy.”

With those stability problems, Red 5 stopped trying to attract new players to FireFall. Instead, the studio’s focus was on keeping existing gamers as happy as possible while resolving the issues. “Hopefully we’re at the point in the next couple of weeks where the gloves come off and we can add people as we want to add them. Let the game do that scaling that we’ve always wanted to do.”

FireFall has seen substantial changes, tweaks and updates since the start of Closed Beta almost two years ago. More recently, development has started to switch gears from systems updates to content creation. “We think we’ve really dialled in what FireFall is. These tools that we’ve built over seven years, now we really get to turn them on and let them loose. All these new developers that we’ve been hiring for the past six months or so, we can just let them loose to make great content.

Ready Stage Two

Since the early days of FireFall, the small settlement of New Eden has been surrounded by the Melding – a hazardous cloud that shrouds much of the remaining Earth. In Stage Two that changes, with players able to push the melding back – permanently.

“Since we’ve ever talked to anyone outside the company about FireFall, one of the things we’ve said is coming – and it finally is coming – is for the players to unlock the game world itself. For the players to choose what they’re going to get access to. To fight against the Chosen, push back the Melding, and start to reclaim the earth chunk by chunk.”

That reclamation will happen in stages, with players contributing time, resources and manufactured parts to each project. And, since FireFall exists on a global scale, players from all around the world will be choosing which areas to unlock.

The process starts with The Accord, a militia formed from the surviving fragments of Humanity, placing the foundation for a massive Melding Repulsor at two or three different locations. “A lot of pieces and parts to build these things, and the players are going to be the ones to do that work.”

“Once it gets built and the players push back the Melding, the Chosen are there waiting. There’s going to be a Chosen fortress of some kind, and players are going to have to fight them to clean out that area and take it. So the same way the Chosen have been coming to New Eden and taken the Player towns and areas, the Players are going to be taking that fight back to the Chosen.”

That Chosen fortress then becomes a player city, complete with new missions, rewards and open-world content. Each area will also include a unique 5-player co-op mission, continuing the story that surrounds each area.

But that’s not all. As each player contributes resources toward that Repulsor, the game tracks a leader board of the largest supporters. Once the city is built, a statue will appear to whoever holds the number one spot on that table. Clicking on the statue will pull up a list of everyone else who chipped in to the project.

According to Williams, the choices about which areas to unlock will start out fairly simple. The studio will prepare content for each location, then leave it up to the players to decide which one to tackle first. That might be for aesthetic reasons, or it could be to open up valuable resources – hand in hand with the content updates are even more crafting options.

“It’s all about special components that you can add into any recipe, and completely change the end result. There’s a special gland that you can get off the Fiery Aranha that, when you put this into the recipe, makes flaming bullets. That’s the level of craziness that this new system is going to be built with.”

Hard choices might also influence the decision. “Down the road there might be a true A or B option where, if players choose A they lose B. Probably not permanently – we spent a lot of time building that stuff – but maybe that version of B is gone forever. Maybe B is gone and comes back as Twisted B. What if Sargasso Sea gets covered by the Melding for nine months and comes back as an even crazier jungle, where the plants start attacking you? Who knows?”

The story of pushing back the melding and retaking earth is deliberately intended to be player-driven, according to Williams. “This is going to be a multi-year, story based campaign to unlock the world.” He later adds that, as a result, “The player that comes in two years from now is going to be playing in a very different FireFall from the one you and I started in.”

A Rolling Beta

With stage two expected to start in the next three to four months, Red 5 has also been putting the finishing touches on a number of other parts to FireFall. The first is a new VIP program that works like a subscription, but without the auto-renewal, granting a boost to Crystitie earnings, more manufacturing and marketplace slots and access to all PvP battleframes.

Bought using Red Beans (FireFall’s item shop currency), players will soon be able to pick up anything from a single day’s boost for that intense crafting or PvP session, up to a year-long bonus for the incredibly committed.

Red Bean Vending Machines are slightly different take, offering players a chance to get their hands on a new rare or epic item, as well as a whole bunch of consumables and crafting gear. Those rare and epic items could be something completely new – only 40% of listed items have been seen by players before. These include new decals and logos, vehicles and other fun gadgets and toys. Williams mentioned a new hoverpad that you can use to hang in the air without a jetpack, allowing you to shoot your enemies from above.

Both of these are just the start, as Red 5 steps up to producing a regular feed of new content. As if he’s been itching to get to this moment, Williams describes how long Red 5 has been working on this.

“When I started working on this game, we had ideas and no way to implement them. We spent probably four or five years just building systems and backend tools. We had enough of a game to say what we’re building will be fun eventually, but there wasn’t a lot of game there.

“Since then we’ve added a lot of meat to the bones, but now that we’re getting to the end of Stage 1, we’ve proven, at least in our minds, what FireFall is. We know that it’s fun, we’re really good at keeping players having fun - we’ve figured that part out.

“We’re at that point now where we can actually make enough content to, hopefully, build out these new areas in which players will be engaged. And then we’re on that continuous rolling release of new content.”

Part of that rolling release is the new Arsenal battleframe, a heavy-duty suit for those who appreciate bringing every toy to a firefight. Unlike other free-to-play games, Williams doesn’t see the need to release a new one every month. Instead, with the depth their current progression system has, Red 5’s attention will be on other parts of the game, such as new areas to unlock and explore.

Before we finished, I reminded Williams about something he told me last year where, one day, they’ll take the Beta label off and throw a party. Was Red 5 any closer to that celebratory day? A little.

“What does beta really mean? For us, it mostly means big chunks of gameplay features that we think the game isn’t complete without. Opening up the world is, for us, a big feature that the game isn’t complete without. Armies, army bases, open world PvP – those are some of the big categories that still remain to fill the definition of FireFall. Without those features in the game, FireFall’s still a fun game, but it’s not the one we envision. Without those features we won’t leave beta.

“We stopped doing character wipes 6 to 8 months ago. People are spending things like Red Beans, and we’re not going to wipe out those investments of time or money from players. This is a fully supported game, whether it’s called beta or it’s not. We call it beta because it doesn’t have all the features that we envision FireFall having.”

Here’s hoping that the stage of beta involving beer, cake and champagne arrives quickly. Until then, there’s a world that needs retaking.

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor

Follow me on Twitter @Gazimoff