Unique among 2011 MMOGs is Faxion, an free-to-play, supernatural-themed MMOG whose humorous take on religion and the afterlife contends for attention with its fresh new take on PvP, territory control, multiclassing, gameplay, and a beautifully straightforward microtransaction model.
Ten Ton Hammer recently abandoned all hope and entered the gates of UTV True Games in Austin for a personal tour of the hereafter in Faxion, and somehow lived to offer you a pre-alpha preview of a game that’s sure to cause a stir next year. Joining us on the journey were Creative Director Mike Madden and Community Manager Keith Duncan.
“Congratulations – You Have Died”
Community Manager Keith Duncan played the role of my personal Virgil: “It’s a Dante kind of thing – everyone wants to get out of Limbo. Your ticket as a player is to side with Heaven or Hell, because in the game Heaven and Hell are constantly vying for territory points represented by the seven deadly sins. When one side gains control over all seven of those sins, they’re actually influencing one of an infinite number of mortal worlds.”
Though Faxion offers plenty of quests and PvE content, the core of the game is a PvP battle over control points, i.e. deadly sins. If heaven wins all seven sins this time around, a world becomes virtuous, and those control points reset. The experience also changes you. Keith continues: “As you help heaven or hell gain control, you’re becoming more angelic or demonic, and you start to sprout horns or sprout wings. You’re still mortal, but the fun bait-and-switch of the story is that as you become more heavenly, you know of heaven, and you can visit heaven, but heaven sends you back down to Limbo, because there’s a fight raging down there and they need you.”
The Seven Deadly Sins – Yours to Own
I saw a handful of these Sins, and the Fields of Hunger, for example, featured idyllic farmland tended by starving hands in the thrall of three-story tall abomination-esque creatures. These animate creatures were situated in a structure that puts me in mind of a Viking feast hall, and the faction that controls the flow of food to these creatures controls the massive control point for the zone, and the waste these creatures expel forms the second half of the zone, a massive toxic dump.
It's not all (or even mostly) grey and gloom. Faxion's environment team regularly finds ways to break the visual tension.
I also saw a bit of the Garden of Ardor, which represents the deadly sin of lust. How to represent lust without retailers and etailers declaring your product anathema? Simple: don’t complete the image. Statuary dots a maze of thorny red and white flowers (the maze suggests the dizzying power of the sin in question, as well as providing plenty of surprise PvP opportunities), and Mike explains that players can fill in these statues to create risqué imagery. It’s a cautiously off-color take on the photo-op cutouts you might see around kid-friendly tourist destinations.
But if you fear appreciably large but vacuous zones where combat is raging over a single point, note that there will be plenty of opportunity to spread out on offense and defense. “We’ve got a great territorial control system where we can have multiple game types running at the same time.” Mike Madden continues. “So there can be a capture the flag, a domination, and a king of the hill, each with different point infusions that go to a central point pool,” Mike Madden explains. That pool determines who’s in control of the zone, so factions have multiple points to attack and defend in order to attain or maintain control of a Sin.
Classes and Gameplay
A number of Faxion developers - Mike Madden and Associate System Designer Brian Lucas for two – also had a hand in Shadowbane, so it’s no wonder that Faxion is deeply vested in class builds and well-balanced PvP. While Faxion three classes – soldier, mage, and healer – don’t sound particularly innovative at face value, it’s how these classes play that sets them apart.
Healers, for example, drop area-of-effect totems to heal, then dive into the damage-dealing action along with everyone else. Soldiers have a defensive ability that essentially turns on collision, allowing tactics like fencing in vulnerable casters. Not to be left out, mages employ an innovative charge-up mechanic for some of their damage-dealing spells.
Keith was careful to explain that there are no roots or stuns (“They’re just not fun if you’re on the receiving end,” Mike interjects), but some abilities become more powerful if you stand still to cast. Keith explains: “You can pop it and do a decent amount of damage, or you can hold it and actually have a UI indication that the spell is charging – level 1, level 2, and if you wait for level 3 to hit, you can murder a single target. The trick is, you had to stand still for a few seconds in an open PvP game and make yourself an easy target.”
Those aren’t the only tricks up players’ sleeves in Faxion. Blind, for example, dims your opponent’s display temporarily. Combining Blind with Blink allows position-based players to quickly flank their enemies. “Confused” flips your opponents’ screen and changes the keyboard for a very short period of time (the keyboard changes the same way each time, so it is possible to adapt to confused relatively quickly). Mike explains that these effects are meant to last long enough to throw players off their game without becoming frustrating – somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 seconds.
Even the environment gets in on the spellcasting action. “You don’t have to cast invisibility. Just stand in a thick brushy area and the game will cast invisibility on you.” Mike explained, noting that the game world is rife with places to get the jump on your opponents.
The three archetypes – Soldier, Healer, and Mage - each create a distinct silhouette for the player – useful for picking out specific enemy types on a busy battlefield. But if you think you could surprise your opponent by taking advantage of multi-class to create a stealth soldier in mage’s robes… well, it’s possible. But a fourth track, martial, governs the sort of equipment a player can carry, and options are limited by your initial choice. Mages, for example, can never wear the toughest type of armor, but could spend a few extra points to wear a mid-grade option like leather.
Classes in Faxion are distinguished by faction as well as archetype.
Classes are further broken down to provide some faction color: Mage can be Occultist or Diviner. Multi-classing is encouraged – at level cap players could max out one ability tree and make headway into another- but second tree abilities cost twice as much (third three abilities cost three times as much). Keith summed it up by quoting the Faxion website FAQ: “The more you’re a swiss army knife, the less you’re a machete.”
Faxion offers the most reasonable re-spec scheme I’ve encountered in a free-to-play MMO. Two options are available: take a small hit to your total offline ranks and endure a significant timer to respec for free, or get a full respec in return for RMT chump change. Pricing on this (and the rest of Faxion’s microtransactible wares) is yet to be announced.
While levels grant points to unlock abilities and spells, it’ll take time (real life time) to grow these abilities into their most powerful forms. Each of the myriad abilities for each class has 10 ranks, and each rank requires 10 hours of offline time to achieve. Initially, players will able to queue 2 ranks (20 hours), but with RMT purchases, players can unlock additional queue slots to potentially queue close to a week’s worth of offline training. You can also purchase tokens to reduce rank leveling time by increments of one hour.
With the combination of multiclassing, respecing, and the offline advancement system, Faxion asks the question that many smart F2P games ask: do you want to spend time or pay money to progress meaningfully through the game? Paid-for progression is leavened by the game’s level-based approach – you still have to level to unlock abilities, whether you’re a rank-reaching Rockefeller or not.
Persistence and PvP
I mentioned instancing, and happily put Mike on his soapbox for a moment. “There’s always a fight. In a lot of these other games, you either have to go and sit in the lobby waiting for an instance, you wait for a group, and then you launch that experience. To me, that’s not an MMO – those are multiplayer games, I play those on GameSpy. That’s fine, but please for the love of God don’t call it an MMO. I’m getting really sick and tired of everybody tacking on MMO because it’s the new hot trend. MMOs are persistent worlds – they’re places players go to live out their experiences in a setting that developers provide for them. In Faxion, there’s always going to be a zone that’s up for contention 24 hours a day.”
away from it once in a while. Your game can’t be player dependent.”
So no battlegrounds, scenarios, etc. at launch, but Mike did leave open the possibility of guild vs. guild challenges in the future. “Instead of a duel being one on one, I’d like to build a guild arena or even best-of-the-best tournaments, where you find the best build types across all of the servers and run tournaments on a special tournament server. Those are all things that we want to take advantage of going forward.”
The Faxion team will be highlighting PvP achievements from fairly early on. How? “Mostly by paying attention.” Mike went on to explain that eaderboards will be in place to track a large variety of stats, but the Faxion team hopes to find ways of highlight elite players in elite guilds doing elite things.
What’s the difference between this and other games that have had similar pie-in-the-sky ideas on how to immortalize player achievements? Keith mused, “The difference is that Mike’s team is ready to build them a statue.” Mike took the ball: “I want to know who the very first character that logged into alpha was – I’m actively looking for that player to say thank you for showing up. It is all about the players – we’re players, everyone here is a player first. We’re just lucky enough to also have jobs as developers.”
What about the players that don’t exactly play by the rules, or at least the conventions (i.e. griefers)? Mike isn’t scared: “They’re content makers. If a griefer shows up at a quest camp and he’s harassing some players, they put the call out to their guildies, and it’s almost a dynamic quest.” The lesson here is this: in Faxion or in any PvP game, there’s strength (and standing) in numbers.
So what about PvE?
We’ve seen a few MMOGs launch recently that were PvP to the core at launch, yet have had to step back and create content around the coop PvE side of the game (Global Agenda and CrimeCraft are two examples). I asked the Faxion team if this seeming shift in player interests concerned them. “We’ll have PvE,” Mike explained. “Players can progress entirely through the level progression entirely through PvE. You cannot rely on your game being PvP only. My experience in Shadowbane really showed me a lot about that. Even the most hardcore person needs to get
Mike described the sort of competitive raids a la Aion that could be on the horizon. And while the Faxion team isn’t opposed to more PvE content, their launch interests tend toward richly repeatable. “We’re believers in systematic content. PvP and territory control systems are a good way to launch Faxion because they’re systematic, they regenerate – the rules never change. After you play a match, you want a rematch. It’s the actions of the players that dictate the outcomes. Whereas if you play a PvE dungeon twelve times, it’s pretty much going to be the same experience twelve times.”
Hellraisers Meet PetRaisers
Shifting gears, Facebook integration is nothing new for MMORPGs, but the UTV True Games team is proposing a level of cooperation between Facebook gamers and MMO gamers that we haven’t ever seen before. “We recognize that there are couples that play these games, and maybe they don’t always like to play a PvP game together, but they still should be able to game together. My wife has no interest in Faxion, it’s not her cup of tea, but she’ll play a Tamagotchi pet-raising Facebook game all day long.”
“So we’ve got an idea that we’re calling PetRaiser – you’re basically raising a small imp or cherub from an egg all the way up. You feed them different things, they go on their own adventures, and it’s a standalone Facebook app. However, if she ties her account to mine, I can then summon her pet in Faxion. It grants me benefits – initially we’re talking about passive buffs, but ultimately we want that to become a full-fledged combat pet system. At the same time, different things I loot in Faxion might help her raise the pet – different foods offer her different abilities – demon steaks for firebreathing abilities, for example.”
So, according to Mike, maybe Facebook and MMO gamers can learn to get along after all. “It creates this cyclical game experience without either of us having to compromise on the type of game we enjoy, and that’s something we’re hoping to do with all of our social platform integration. It’s part of the core design, not just an afterthought.”
Dance with the Devil – Religion and Humor in Faxion
Humor is a cornerstone of the Faxion experience, and the UTV True Games team promises to take on the previously taboo topic of religion unlike any game before. “It is a world of religious humor, it very much explores the fallibility of humans and all of the ridiculous stuff that any group does against the group they think is their enemy. We’re staying away from good and evil – that is a fight, but it has nothing to do with the sides. Everything gets messed up in Limbo, because Limbo is full of mortals that didn’t do better or worse things in life.”
“With that, there is just about every religion represented somewhere. We’ve got really obscure stuff about religious sects and groups no one’s ever heard of, along with lots of mainstream stuff… We don’t care if you know it, we’re not going to teach or advance any belief system over another and we’re not taking a stance, but you’ll probably get a chuckle out of it. Or be offended by it- we’re ok with that too,” Duncan laughs. At print, however, God and the devil are never shown in Faxion. “I probably wouldn’t put them in the game until I can implement something to show them in their various representations and forms,” Mike explained.
The Gates of Hell - the lights are on, but nobody's home... yet.
As much as UTV True Games didn’t want to admit it, they do draw the line somewhere. Picturing Mohammed still seems to be a prickly issue – Mike noted that it would be something they’d have to talk over not only with everyone at the company but also with the developers’ families if this is something they want to pursue. “I thought South Park did it well with the bear suit,” Mike laughs, “but it’s still up for debate.”
Other religions are entirely fair game. Scientology, for example, is represented by a crashed spaceship with Elrond as a nearby questgiver. “We might take some heavy shots at Buddhists,” Keith joked, “but they don’t retaliate, so it’s all good.”
Hopes and Fears
I’ve said next to nothing about Faxion’s graphics and art direction. In short, Faxion delivers the experience visually. The environments are appropriately dark and gritty punctuated by occasional breaths of fresh air in the Fields of Hunger and Heaven, and Purgatory City is a nice mix of Classical, Byzantine, Medieval, and more modern architecture, lending the well-trafficked central hub a feeling of timelessness. The character models are slightly caricatured in a way that reminds me of Chronicles of Spellborn in all the right ways.
Faxion represents progress in a way totally separate than anything I’ve mentioned thus far. If all goes as planned, HeroEngine will have its first launched product with Faxion, an important step for the promising middleware solution (HeroEngine is also being used in Star Wars: The Old Republic). But any step for versatile middleware is a big step for the industry simply because it tends to lower the pricetag on innovation. Nowadays, with MMORPG development typically expressed in hundreds of millions of dollars and prison terms, any moneysaver / eliminator of rote work is a welcome thing.
Faxion has a solid idea of the scope of their project and doesn’t appear to be trying to do too much with too little. Ideas like PvP reporting and contested raids are on the board, but UTV True Games’ pursuit of these ideas will be governed by factors like player interest and developer availability.
I’m not even that worried about Faxion’s somewhat twisted sense of humor. Being on the religiously observant side, I was surprised that I wasn’t more offended with Faxion’s shots at religion, at least the ones I saw. Freely invoking the Family Guy approach of spreading the humor evenly and with a thick brush, in other words offending equally, the True Games team seems more interested in pointing out absurdities than picking on anyone’s creed in particular, and if you can’t handle that, there’s plenty of other games out there to play.
Given their Shadowbane pedigree, I trust the UTV True Games team to create a self-balancing PvP experience. I’m less sure that the community will balance itself. A game that takes shot at religion is probably more likely to attract hellions than heavenly helpers, and I’m concerned that (much like other games with a light vs. dark motif) Heaven might run short on recruits. That’s an eventuality that could be a game breaker.
All that said, if you liked Shadowbane, love PvP, enjoy your humor slightly abrasive, and have a natural disdain for subscriptions, Faxion is a game that should definitely be on your radar. Look for it in 2011, and thanks to the folks at UTV True Games for an extended tour of the hereafter according to Faxion.
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Faxion Online Game Page.
