MMO Anomaly: Behind the scenes with the world builders of Firefall

"If you play the game right now, you get an idea of ... 'This is kind of what the world's like. There are some bad guys called the Chosen, but who are they really? What are their motives? What are they doing here?' What we haven't done yet is convey that."

A lot of that challenge is on Pearsey's shoulders. After meeting with Red 5 founder and Firefall creator Mark Kern and lead designer Scott Youngblood to get the high-level details of what makes Firefall Firefall, Pearsey dug in to the wealth of backstory that had been created for the game, trying to learn what it was all about and how he could translate what had been written into an experience suitable for the game they wanted to create.

"There's this very intricate backstory that's built up," Pearsey says. "That's actually a real challenge: how to communicate this very complex, very interesting, very well-thought-out backstory to players in an experiential manner.

"What we have, in a lot of ways, is very suitable for a very large novel. Of course, games and novels, the intricacies are very different. How do we craft a shooter campaign out of it, one that's not a shooter campaign because it's an MMO? ... You cannot necessarily have the day-to-day stuff be linear. And so how do we tell a non-linear linear story?"

This is Pearsey's first stab at broadening the scope of Firefall's narrative and a first for the game in many senses. The first mission to take players outside of New Eden. The first to include a shooter-style mission structure. The first appearance of Firefall's "Big Bad." And the first Firefall mission created entirely from scratch by industry veterans Demarcus Holbrook and Clancy Powell.

Pearsey, you may have heard of. He did, after all, write the story for one of last year's most arresting shooters. Holbrook and Powell, though, get less press. They are part of a small, hand-picked team inside of Red 5 experimenting with new ways of generating Firefall content. And if they pull it off, they could change the way this game (and potentially all games) are created.

Their level, Blackwater Anomaly, will be a self-contained mini-mission that players could potentially experience at any point in their time with Firefall. The plan is for it to reveal just enough of the overall story for it to make sense, but not so much that if it's played out of order, it could mess anything up.

"What we're doing, this group five-man instance that we're trying to release for open beta, it's been done internally, when the game was ... Basically it was like Firefall [version] one, and [now] we're like Firefall [version] some huge number," says Powell. "Because we've gone through so many different iterations. We changed how we do our tech and stuff like that. This experience has never been introduced to the public. It's the first time."

The idea is that in Firefall, players will eventually have the option to experience whatever type of game content they want, whenever they want. Blackwater Anomaly is a shooter-style mission with a straight-up objective and a mostly linear progression. But there will be other kinds of levels, and all of them will combine (somehow) into a variegated whole that will (hopefully) provide players of this yet-to-be-released game enough variety and excitement that they may never need or want to play another game.

Yet as grand as this all sounds, it starts small and simple, with Powell, Pearsey and Holbrook and the evolving game development techniques they've been polishing for decades. Or, in Holbrook's words: "Design, narrative and art."

"There's a lot of surveying that goes on beyond just forums," Pearsey says. "So there's a lot of give-and-take, on a massive scale and on a smaller scale, with the community. ... It's very much a community-inclusive development. [We] really do want that feedback. [We] really do want to know what's working. [We] don't want to just say, 'This is our product and you will use it as we intend.'

"[But] I think you have to be careful. Because it's a business. I like money. I don't want to sell out, but I want to eat. ... You can have your cake and eat it too in this industry. You just have to plan carefully. All problems are engineering problems. You can, I think, be creatively true to what you want, and at the same time present something to the public that is popular and makes money. There's no reason you can't do both.

"Now, as to what's going to make money and be popular ... you don't know sometimes."

When it came to helping Red 5 build Firefall, Holbrook leaned on his wealth of experience and all but uprooted the way the game was being made.

"There was a milestone where we had to come up with 35 new [rooms] in one month. Everybody was terrified," Holbrook says. "And so I took that opportunity to take more of those rooms from people. ... Basically, I introduced the three-ring layout, where ... you start with a circle shape and ... repeat that three times over, and each time you have a different room. When I made my first one, a lot of the guys were like, 'Huh, that's pretty simple. There's gotta be more to it than that.' ... Before you know it, we had more than 100 rooms within two weeks. I have to admit, I was actually surprised myself. People caught on so fast."

When it came time to design Blackwater Anomaly, Holbrook took it back to basics, called everyone into a room and started from scratch.

"One of the things that I tell the artists," he says, "[is] first of all we think about it on paper. What is the space? Where are we? What's the climate? What's it like geologically? What is the space? So then we start hashing out ideas. Everybody. You don't have to be an artist to just brainstorm."

Holbrook likes to gather people together for brainstorming sessions (he calls them "free your mind sessions"). Then he takes the ideas everyone has freed from their minds, works with a team of artists to create mood paintings, then shows the result to the game's art director. Some work, some don't, and the best ones are what will get made into levels.

That's how Blackwater Anomaly started out, just a mood painting drawn from a brainstorming session. Then Powell, working from Holbrook's mood painting, created a giant playspace, called a white box, containing basic shapes of what the final level will look like. That whitespace was playtested while Holbrook and his team slowly added art and textures to the blank, white geometry. Eventually it became what you'd recognize as a game.

"What I'm hoping is, the cues and the compositions that I've set up in the levels ring true to players," Holbrook says. "People can go in there and they can be taken out of reality and feel like they're in a real space ... they can get a sense of direction just from the visuals. And to be able to tell a story through the visuals ... That's one of the biggest things that I try to accomplish in any game that I work on.

"That's why working with design and narrative is so important for me. I look at myself as a hybrid, an artist and a designer. Somewhere in between. I'm kind of that guy who speaks between the two disciplines, or three. Design, narrative and art."

Powell, Pearsey and Holbrook hope to prove that their design is the new way forward for Firefall, and, potentially, MMOs in general.

"It's not a traditional MMORPG," says Pearsey. "It's a strange hybrid. ... Because this is skill-based, whereas a lot of MMOs are almost mathematical exercises. It's a whole different type of gameplay."

"It's a 40 to 60 minute experience that feels nice and meaty," says Powell. "It feels like a shooter game. If you were playing through, the enemies shoot back, for example. Whereas in the open world we have a lot of melee-type enemies. I wanted to cherry-pick the shooter elements, what I feel makes it a compelling shooter game, and build gameplay around that specific thing."

Aside from the innovations in world building, the shooter-as-MMO conceits and the narrative-driven story elements, perhaps the most ambitious and potentially world-changing idea this team is bringing to bear on game development is the idea that failure actually is an option. In an industry where hundreds of millions of dollars and years of people's time are spent attempting to achieve perfection, and entire teams can be shifted from one end of the world to another and release dates pushed back years at a time simply to avoid releasing a flawed product, the idea of releasing something experimental — and then changing it — is shockingly new. And it could just be what the game industry needs to keep it fresh and, more importantly, survivable.

"There's no reason to fret over a mistake when you learn from that mistake and you improve," says Powell. "You do it better the next time, or you do something that you know is going to be more successful the next time."

For Holbrook, the experience of releasing Blackwater Anomaly will be just another part of his journey through this industry, and through life. It may work, or it may not, and he'll try to learn from the experience either way.

"I try my best to listen and stay humble," Holbrook says, "because I only learn when I hear from other people. A lot of times, if you're constantly talking, you miss stuff. It's worked for me. If nobody wants to hear what I have to say, I'll just do it myself in my own personal work. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't."

And if it does work, Red 5 will be able to keep at it. That's the best case. And that, ironically, will mean Pearsey might not see his home again anytime soon.

"Splitting the family up is ... not good for us," he says. "But if I was going to move, it was going to be entirely for a project that was right, for a company that was right.

"[Firefall is] unique, which is what attracted me. It's a complete high-wire act, which is what really attracts me. I'm not interested in doing really rote stuff. I don't mind ending up where I can pay bills. Sure, I'll do a great job. But I'd rather do something that's kind of out there, on the edge, doing something interesting.