Its no secret that Firefall has been a rather mismanaged project, constantly going through complete reworks and spending a lot of money on absolutely insane marketing stunts such as the by now infamous Firefall Bus which couldn't even drive.
There is a glimmer of hope for Firefall however as patch 1.6 which is arriving this January 20th brings with it massive updates to almost every area of the game, from questing to PvP and class skills. Here's a brief overview of the main features:
Update 1.6 will bring with it the first arena PvP mode titled Jetball. Information on it is a bit scarce but its set to be the first of many such modes that will arrive over the coming months as Arena PvP returns to Firefall.
On the PvE side of things there are two new operations you can undertake as well as a new raid and an infinite horde mode that allows you to fight ever harder waves of Chosen with proportionally increasing rewards, just make sure you cash in before you die and squander all of it away.
Instances are also being changed so each one now has three difficulty modes: Normal, Challenge and Hardcore which will ensure that every player has plenty of instances available to them both while leveling and when at max level.
The rather unfocused PvE questing experience is being updated to contain a much more focused story, more lore and a bunch of new story-focused instances. To me this is the most important part of the update because the completely generic MMO questing just drove me away from Firefall before I came anywhere near the max level.
To further help new players out there will be a bounty system that will direct them to points of interest and have them do generally fun stuff like shooting at things, jet-packing around and so forth. The bounties will be divided in to daily and weekly ones with the weekly bounties having the chance to give out some rather nifty rewards.
Things may change in Firefall but the front-liner Assault class (far right) still doesn't wear pants
Every single battleframe (read class) will receive a significant rework both in terms of when abilities are acquired and in terms of overall power. The idea is to make sure that you always have something interesting to look forward to and that when you finally do get a new ability it doesn't end up being worthless. A much needed change if you ask me because the last time I played my Assault it barely had an ability worth using.
Experience beyond max level is now getting a new-found purpose in Elite ranks which will allow you to increase your power, gain certain abilities from other classes and even just unlock new classes. The whole power gain part of it sounds a bit fishy to me but as long as these stat boosts don't work in the PvP arena I don't see an issue with it.
Finally, the itemization is also getting a heavy rework in the form of many new equipment slots and, you guessed it, equipment that goes in to them. On a similar note modules will no longer have level requirements and will affect both weapons and abilities so you won't feel forced having to lug around a dozen of them to adapt for different scenarios not to mention how much more fun it'll be to level when you aren't constantly gated from cool modules.
And there you have it, all of the biggest changes coming in 1.6. If you're interested in more details I'd suggest you head over to the Firefall Website and go through the patch features there, I skipped out on a lot of minor details you might find interesting.
The patch will be arriving on January 20th but the servers will actually go down on January 19th in order to ensure the patch launches smoothly so make sure you plan around that.