Buzz Burbank said:
I agree, first person shooters are a fast paced, intense experience and completely different from the turn based genres. I personally am glad there is a FPS coming out on facebook, there are PLENTY of coffeebreak titles already, its staggering. Facebook needs a game that i can actually PLAY, instead of manage which makes it feel like chores instead of fun.
True any FPS will not be as work friendly beacuase it actually involves your full attention but again there are PLENTY of games that dont. Believe it or not there are people like me who dont social network while working and use facebook at home so this is not an issue.
I dont think Brave Arms will change gaming or be as big of a success as farmville or many similar titles but i DO think it will be a fun free shooter that i can't wait to try.
I see where you're coming from, but I just don't see it being compatible with the whole facebook "thing". FB is, at heart, just a big ol' messageboard. Like a 4chan where no-one's anonymous and you pre-approve people who can talk to you (or at least, the friends-of-friends through whom they can do so). It doesn't "need" a game of any sort tacked onto it. The little flash based coffeebreak games are little more than hangers on that take advantage of the general-purpose "application" thing and happen to be of the right type to work well with that, the FB "feel", and the data in/out routes that are available to them. Basically they make messageboard posts that can be clicked through to grant extra bonuses (or publicise help requests) to your friends.
Turn based games do that well; Farmville and Battle Stations already have non-simultaneous co-op modes, e.g. ganging together to kick hell out of a boss (over 3 days). First-person shooters require everyone to be on at the same time, and just looking at my chat list or "friends online" readout, there'd generally be barely enough folks all together at the same time to make a fairly simple capture-the-flag work, let alone a general deathmatch. Besides, as previously noted, almost anything can run the existing game-ettes, if not necessarily at a great speed, and you can check on progress via notifications even with your barely-smart phone. Systems that occasionally stutter with farmville are going to die with a shooter, and that knocks even more potential opponents off your simultaneously-online list even if your system is good.
The closest I've seen of this so far is Battle Stations' "clan war" mode, and though that IS a simultaneous action thing, it still covers quite a long time period for its single round of actions, is still a leap in- and out- at leisure paradigm (your participation basically limited by your "action points" and health), has near-automated notifications sent out to all clan members for once- or twice-a-week fights at fairly fixed, standardised times... which they manage to get a few tens of players out of generally 100+ clan membership, looking at the names probably those who would otherwise play Starcraft
. The "game" part of it, despite being ostensibly graphical, could be easily displayed on a 40x8 character LCD display. Push button to choose attack. See how that attack has affected the other clan's fort and the health of your own fort and ship. It's still turn based, not even as interactive or twitch-response as command & conquer!
There are plenty of this kind of game that are released as completely separate applications, natively coded for their target platforms, and they do well (WoW, CoD, TF, etc etc etc etc) - and it's just as complicated to organise getting everyone online to play one of those as it is to get them together for a facebook one. Hell, you can use FB to do it, and not all your opponents need to be on that - just one of many - social network to play.
Therefore there has to be a reason that they're making and publicising it this way. I suspect a rather lacklustre shooter that's partnering with facebook to a/ get players that it otherwise would never see, b/ drag people onto that soc net when their friends say "hey, wanna play?" and they find that they can't do without joining. Everybody wins ... well no. The game makers and facebook win, the players end up signed onto a data-harvesting network that they otherwise wouldn't have touched and end up playing a comparitively poor game. Otherwise why not just release it normally and let it stand on its own merits?
That said, I'm still going to have a look now it's out. It may defy expectations. It may only need as much processing power as Half Life 1, which is about what my Intel 915 graphics system can support. But only because I'm already on FB, and I've seen the link put here. There's plenty of things just like this that I already ignore on facebook's own advert feed. There's only enough space in the day for one and a bit of these games unless you're a serious gamehead who does little else.
And for the record, I access it *briefly* at work (there are short windows where it's unblocked for staff access across the network, _literally_ making it a coffee/lunchbreak occupation), and more seriously at home. So it's not like it's only during those breaks that I facebook. But it's still not like I'm on it all goddamn evening, like one might with a "proper" instant messenger, or IRC.
