Firefall Seeing Big Changes, Completely Drops Leveling

Red 5 Studios has come out to announce (in video form) that their game Firefall, a F2P team-based action MMO, will be seeing some drastic design changes – the most striking of which is the removal of the leveling system altogether.

“In the way we did our progression model, it took a long time to go from level to level, and what that meant was, your rewards were going down – and it created a space in time where players felt like they couldn’t progress their character, they didn’t know exactly what to do or what the path was.

So getting rid of levels is awesome. It gives us the opportunity to give you the choice over how you want to progress your individual battle frames based on your play style.”

As scary a change as that might sound at first, the team actually offers up some interesting (and most importantly convincing) reasons why removing the leveling aspect was a smart idea. Firstly, they want to make sure the game stays focused on skill-based action, where higher-level players don’t simply dominate over newcomers because they’ve logged more time online.

This philosophy of “leveling the playing field” has been in place since they first announced the game a few years ago, and since they’ve seen higher-level players skewing towards having a tangible advantage, they’ve decided to take the game along a slightly different path.

This is not to say some Johnny young blood could come in and wipe the floor with hardcore players, but if he’s more skilled at the game than they are, it’s certainly possible.

So, where will all your earned experience (XP) go, you might ask? Well, you’ll still receive it the way you always have, but now it’ll be used as in-game currency of sorts, allowing you to purchase the items you want for your character.

The catch? You’ll have to find the supplies to make it yourself.

All in all, the team at Red 5 is implying that player progression is still extremely important, but through customization of your character, not simply grinding your way to a digit next to your name.

The studio has been very consistent with their in-progress updates on the game thus far, and their slowly adding more and more players to the beta while making improvements and changes.

Let’s see where they take it from here. For more on Firefall, check out our written and video previews of the game, as well as the official Firefall site.