1 Jul, 2011
It’s 200 years in the future, and humanity is in danger of being wiped out. Crystite, a newly discovered energy source, has been founded on Earth and is currently being used to power just about anything and everything. Following a distentegrating storm called the Melding, even more problems come along in the form of humanoid-aliens called The Chosen.
Before we start to stroke our chins and judge the story, let’s take a step back.
This is the premise for upcoming free-to-play PC title Firefall. First revealed to the world at last year’s PAX Prime convention in Seattle, Washington, the little studio called Red 5 Studios has been hard at work to bring this game into fruition. First founded in 2005 by former Blizzard employees Mark Kern, William Petras, and Taewon Yun (they’re all from World of Warcraft‘s dev team, if you really must know), Red 5 now have the services of SciFi writing powerhouse Orson Scott Card. Yeah, it’s the same guy who did Ender’s Game, or the series known as Ender’s Quartet.
“I got involved with the game Firefall because the guys from Red 5 invited me to,” said Card in a developer diary entry. “Since I think the game is a great one, the story that they’re developing is exciting, I was delighted to be a part of it.”
Story will be playing a key role in Firefall and Red 5 wants to let us know that they’re aiming for us to really care about the characters and the fate of humans. Due to Card’s character-centric writing style, Red 5 Studios figured it was a match made in post-apocalyptic and alien carnage heaven.
“Story is really important in Firefall,” said Mark Kern, CEO of Red 5 Studios. “We want to experiment with really having you care about the story. And a lot of that really derives from caring about the characters in the story.
“Orson is a character driven story guy. I mean, his stories are about SciFi, but they’re more than that. They’re about the humanity behind them, they’re about people’s problems and how they’re resolved. And we feel that that really draws you along in stories. And we believe in the same way that we want you to be drawn along in Firefall‘s stories.”
If you think this will be another Fallout-meets-Halo story of humankind struggling amongst rubble to survive, Card was quick to say that no, it’s a little different this time.
“What I found when they started talking to me about the storyline of Firefall and the material that they already developed, is that it’s really fascinating to be dealing essentially a post-apocalyptic, in fact post double-apocalyptic world, in which it’s not a bunch of people running around obsessing over water or gasoline or whatever,” said Card. “It’s not Mad Max, it’s not the world ending. Well, the world did end, but we’re maintaining our high technology, we’re moving forward with it, we’re still civilized to a means. We just happen to have a whole bunch of extremely dangerous monsters coming at us that keep shooting.”
Want to see the game in action? Check out the official trailer:
Firefall will be landing towards the end of 2011 for PC.
Watch the full diary entry with Mark Kern and Orson Scott Card.
For more information on the game, visit the official Firefall website.
Via Gamasutra.
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