Sorry if it's just me being thick but I thought the original concept of the 'omniframe' was that our one frame was fully customisable into whatever role we wanted for it.
Now I see we have 3 variants, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of calling it the omniframe??? Light is pretty much recon and engi/biotech, Standard is like the assault and Heavy pretty much equals dread. I know the game is the spiritual successor to FF but is the current desgin not drifting a bit too close?
I can offer a bit of clarification on this. The
original indiegogo campaign for the website had two statements about the Omniframe.
- Build and customize your own "omniframe" suit and weapons system. Customize them to your unique needs and the role you want to fulfill.
- Omniframe: To keep initial costs down, we will use one frame that can be advanced into several class variants. We still have classes, this is just to save on art resources in the first few milestones.
As you can see, the only reason for having just one frame body-type was to keep initial costs down, the only change here is that we went ahead and made some basic art assets for the other frame body-types sooner rather than later. Which, I am happy to say, was only possible because this amazing community has exceeded our funding goals at every turn. The earliest prototypes versions of Em-8er will still only have one body-type to play with, but the plan is to eventually have the three.
I understand that the word "Omni" in Omniframe suggests multi-use and/or multi-purpose at the very least. There is still quite a bit of variety of build within each frame-type, and the frames will be quite effective in many types of combat and traversal situations, but we never meant to imply that there would only ever be one frame that can do all things.
To the question of does this bring Em-8er closer to firefall's class breakdown, and more importantly, whether or not that would be a good thing? Well I would say that is a matter of perspective. Different people would want to see different parts of firefall reborn in Em-8er. Also, different games have broken classes down in different ways, some even with a light, medium and heavy set up. Either way, I hope you stick with us to see how the options for the Omniframe take shape. There are some rather cool ideas being considered behind the scenes. With your continued support, we hope we can keep on exceeding the goals we set out in front of us.