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Firefall's Dreadnaught gets a serious beta tune-up
Red 5 Studios Designer Justin Hanson is hard at work on making Firefall's combat the best it can be, and he's openly discussing the changes that the team's been making to the Dreadnaught battleframe (read: class). The Dreadnaught is a close-range fighter with impeccable durability, giving him the survival edge in any given battle. The team recognized that players were stacking accuracy modules to make him a good ranged fighter, so the devs tweaked the machine gun to make it semi-inaccurate at all ranges. The class now requires skill and planning to get within range, whereupon it can start mopping the floor with the competition. Dreadnaughts now have an option to replace their machine guns with thermal machine guns. These offer more accuracy at range the hotter they get, but its rate of fire is slower and it can overheat and shut down. Hanson goes on to relay some of the other weapon and skill changes that are meant to tighten the Dreadnaught's focus and make it an interesting class for talented players.
Firefall ramps up for its summer milestone
The upcoming milestone update to Firefall is a big one that revamps several core areas of the game based on player feedback. That includes multiple frames seeing a large-scale revisions. Designers Justin Hanson and John Deshazer elaborate upon some of the changes wrought upon the Engineer in the newest video, explaining that the class had some serious problems before -- it wasn't mobile and generally wasn't considered desirable within group composition because of its limited utility. Meeting the new and more functional Engineer will turn that impression around. Engineers have gotten a new weapon that ramps up in damage as it scores repeated hits on a single target. They've also been granted a number of better build items, such as mini-turrets that can be tossed in odd locations and instant-build forcefields. And that's just a sample of what the milestone is improving in the game, something detailed in two recent development blogs outlining the philosophy behind the changes and what players can expect after the dust clears.
