GamersFirst Announces Free-To-Play FPS MKZ

No, it's not a typo. GamersFirst is doing itself no favors with this utterly forgettable title for a game trying to break into the crowded free-to-play market when it launches next year. Are MKZ's advanced social features enough to overcome this handicap?

From what I've seen on the E3 show floor, the answer is a resounding "maybe." MKZ hits all of the bullet points gamers expect out of a competitive first-person shooter. It has over a dozen driveable land and air vehicles, 23 maps, four classes, and the fast-paced action to use it all. GamersFirst hopes that its focus on social features turns this me-too near-future FPS into an exceptional product.

MKZ hangs its hat on two off-the-battlefield pieces of tech. The first is its clans, which it terms "corporations" in order to fit with its near-future privately funded corporate warfare theme.  These social constructs provide another path of advancement through the extensive persistent progression. Corporations level up and gain access to new gear and cosmetic accessories parallel to players' personal progression, and GamersFirst promises more details on that and more functional gameplay based around corporations as the game nears launch.

MKZ's second distinguishing element is something the publisher is calling affinity. You have an affinity score with everyone you encounter in-game, both positive and negative. If someone camps you and racks up a killstreak taking you down, you'll get an explicit incentive to exact revenge in the form of increased rewards when you turn the tables and drop them. That's negative affinity. Possitive affinity comes in the form of bonus gameplay modifiers when you hang around with other players and support each other. Both types are persistent, following you from match to match and tying into the matchmaking system as it tries to build and continue rivalries between individual players and corporations.

As a free-to-play game, microtransactions are a part of MKZ for better or for worse. GamersFirst declined to go into specifics on the game's economy, but the company did state its intention to tie the real money transactions more into corporations and the affinity system rather than the traditional new guns and cosmetic pieces -- though those will be available as well.

MKZ has a solid enough foundation to build on, with an experienced team building action in a genre we're all familiar with, but the games' true measure will be whether its social mechanics succeed in investing players into their characters and communities. Unfortunately, there's no way to make any judgments on that in an environment like E3.

MKZ doesn't yet have a release date, but the publisher hopes to get the beta running this year in preparation for a spring 2011 launch.