GRTV: Mark Kern shows off Firefall

We sat down with Red 5 Studios' founder Mark Kern at PAX East to get a look at Firefall and talk about the prospects of the free-to-play MMO shooter.

On making a PvE MMO shooter:

"You had Tabula Rasa. You had Hellgate: London. This is the holy grail, something that's maybe a quest for Red 5 - we're drawn to it lile moths to a flame. It's like it must be possible to do this, right? So that's why we decided to found the whole company to try to do impossible things. We wanted to help change the genres in gaming. You know, I came from a background where I was team lead for World of Warcraft and I left Blizzard to found Red 5 and I said I don't want to do that game anymore. I want to make a new type of game that's never been done before, I want to figure out how to make this shooter MMO actually work, and I think we've finally discovered a way to make it work..."

On opening the game up to players at an early stage:

"We've kind of reach this point in game development where betas are really short - it's like the last month or sometimes it's only three days before the game releases. And we said how could you do that? How could you risk $50 million or sometimes $200 million on doing something hoping that it will work without letting people even try it? What we did is, most MMOs are 3-5 years in development, we're in year three of our development. After the first year we let people start playing the game. Because we were trying new ideas and we wanted to make sure that they worked before we finished them. So we even share them in a pretty raw state."