Firefall Devs Open Up About Game's Challenges

There's a lengthy interview up on PCGamesN with Firefall's lead designer, Scott Youngblood, and design director, Scott Rudi, that goes over several of the game's issues during its challenging (to put it mildly) development time and early launch period. The game officially launched in July, after being in open or closed beta for years.

It turns out they originally wanted to make a Tribes MMO, but decided not to after the rather wise acknowledgement that people would have compared it to the original series of games and never been fully satisfied. Looking at the issues people have with The Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and, well, Hi-Rez Studios' Tribes: Ascend, it seems like it wasn't a bad idea.

The Scotts admit to making some mistakes along the way and that the new player experience needs work -- something I can attest to personally -- and how not being free-to-play from the start, which meant that they "didn’t integrate our systems with the least intrusion to the player experience as possible, which created for a much more difficult situation later." They don't, however, bring up the bus or this... thing.

Anyway, it's a good and pretty honest read, if you're interested in such things. If you're still playing Firefall, how have they improved since launch and what more needs to be done?