Firefall launching in December

@Tyrang

To be fair, generally Open Beta for a F2P game IS its launch, since that's when they open up the Cash Shop to people to buy from, and once you start accepting money like that, you aren't testing anything. Its a "soft launch".

@DevilSei Yep.

It's all about opening your development to the market.

These mammoth titans from overleveraged AAA titans are a poor return on investment for gamers. I think that we have grown to understand that quality development cannot happen as a trade secret or as a top-down business model.

Minecraft, Torchlight, LoL... these guys are being paid for their betas by people who want to invest in the development of a better genre. Outside of the bubble that's where the flowing, working capital dollars are.

At 15 euro a pop, Mojang must turn more profit with less overhead than Bioware can selling three million copies at markup on their cheesy MMME (Massively Multiplayer Mass Effect).

I'm willing to pay for genius without a hope of AAA polish, rather than invest in the next big same old thing from a studio sponsored by big money. If the studios can't be open because they're in it for the money, the gamers who love this genre more than money will put things right.

@Tyrang
I'm left wondering this too.

Firefall has been on my casually watching radar for probably a good year or more. (actually I think since Massively had the article saying they opened up beta sign up)

@Tyrang
They haven't announced a date for launch... just a month time frame. I'd assume that sometime over the next month or so we'll get both dates for a more-or-less open beta and probably a launch date announced. My guess would be the announcement of a launch date would come sometime during the open beta (unless they pull a Cryptic and announce an extremely short and unstatisfying beta).

@(Unverified)
its been in dev since 2005, quit hatin behind the screen of unverified.

@Skyydragonn

To be fair the game looks really polish. It is one of the games I have been looking forwarding to.

@Graill440
That brings about an interesting point, did/should/could we consider MUD's etc from the 80's/early 90's MMO's?

They were definately the precursors to today's modern MMO's, essentially games like Everquest were just DikuMUD with a bolted on 3D graphics engine.

Yet most MUD's only had 50~150 players playing at once.

@Graill440

Its as much an MMO as APB.

And why are you talking about subs in a f2p game? Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

@mmogaddict Actually, I would call them MUDs - Multi-User-Dungeon(s).

MMO(RPG) - Massively Multiplayer Online (Role Playing Game).

The term was coined when we moved from a hundred players max or so to thousands. It is also implied that we are talking about some persistence to the world. I wouldn't call Bad Company 2 an MMO just because of the persistence, but it does contain the other main elements of an MMO (class advancement, many people on a map/zone, etc..)

@Graill440. You cant blame the game for Massively covering it. If you knew anything about the game you would know that Red5 themselves have said "this isn't a MMO" but I'm sure they're not complaining that a Joystiq website is covering its release (but that wont stop fools from complaining)

@Graill440 actually it isn't the company that is labeling this an MMO. It is the player base. They list hundreds of players per map - the devs had constantly said on the forums that this is first and foremost a shooter which borrows mechanics from other game genres. Can't blame them for others blindly labeling a game they don't know. :)