Mark Kern's Firefall Successor Ember Seems Questionable At Best

You all Mark Kern, right? The team lead on vanilla Firefall bus? The CEO that was removed from his own company following some questionable decisions? Yeah, that guy. He's back with a new project called Ember. But before we get to Ember, let's go through a history of what Kern has been up to since he was pushed out of Red 5.

In September 2014, Kern's new company MEK Entertainment announced that it raised $1 million from investors to create a VR MMO with 16-bit graphics and an in-game, player-driven economy powered by "Voxelnauts, and Kern had "departed the company to pursue his own agenda."

Fast forward a full year to this past May 6th. Kern announces Crixa, a "space opera, tabletop, roleplaying game" ion project of his. Crixa is said to have history as a 3rd party title Kern was working on for Blizzard before they hired him on.

After another period of less than two weeks, for some inexplicable reason, Mark Kern decides he's going to speak out about Firefall. He goes on a long-winded rant about how the title was intended to be an alternate reality WWII MMO at first, but that he realized that wouldn't work and it went sci-fi. He discusses how it was going to be a full-PvP, combined arms title that sounds like something not unlike Planetside. Later, things changed and it was meant to be "Minecraft with war." After the many changes the game underwent, the "original vision" unclear after all of this, he sums it up as "what shipped with Firefall was a complete redo of my original game." He later updates the post to state that he would buy back the Firefall IP if the game went under and posts a now-deleted explanation of what buying back the Firefall IP mean if were to do so.

An alleged former employee responded to the post with a bold statement: "Mark, as someone who worked FOR YOU, at Red5, on Firefall: You're full of shit." He goes on to explain that there was no "executive team" of any kind at Red 5. Kern made all of the decisions and thus most of the blame lays at Kern's feet. Perhaps the most damning of the accusations are as follows.

There was no "Executive Team" making actual decisions. Nobody except Mark could make real decisions. Mark rarely showed up to work though, so lots of decisions were made in absentia, and many were countermanded when he decided to show up. The state of Firefall is the result.

The eSports focus? Mark. Founders Packs? Mark. Higher-tier frames? Mark. (He wanted to sell a new one monthly, so he could be like League.) Real-money, per-use paint jobs? Mark. Vehicles, Pets, and dozens of other random features that were irrelevant to the core gameplay? Mark. The completely fucked up UI? Mark. He thinks he's a UI genius, and put himself directly in charge. Stage 5 and the clusterfuck that was the bus? All Mark. Cutting PvP? Mark again (and he told the forums before the devs).

The vaunted "story"? All bullshit. Was in constant flux. Major rewrites to whatever feature was the flavor of the month.

He then goes on to state the following.

As an aside, even if Mark managed to buy all the code and IP, there's no way on earth he would ever get that game running again. With the team they have left, I doubt that Red5/The9 could get that game running again from scratch either, and there's no way that any of the key devs would ever work for Kern again.

Fast forward another month and it all makes sense. Kern announces that he wants to make a game called Ember, which is set in the Crixa universe. The title is meant to be a "spiritual successor to Firefall, as originally intended by its creator." Oh, but there's a catch: "it won't get made unless there is sufficient demand from the community." To gauge demand, Kern started a Change.org petition that those who want to "see the original vision of Firefall" could sign for a better chance at it. He later updates the Change.org petition to state: "I'm not asking for to make a game. I'm asking people to convince me there is a market left to make it."

In order to get the forums, website, and art together, Kern launches an IndieGoGo campaign asking for a mere $500. None of these funds will go towards the game itself. The "first milestone" won't be launched unless the Change.org petition reaches 8000 signatures. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, the IndieGoGo campaign is sitting at $2,497 with 2 days left.

Should Kern get the signatures he needs and, as one would assume from the fact that he crowdfunded the game's website, the funds he needs from another crowdfunding campaign, I have almost no faith that Kern will actually make the game. If he's as ionate about the original vision of Firefall as he seems to be and he believes in the concept enough to want to make a new title based on it, why would he need us to convince him there's a market for it?

Moreover, why should we trust him after all of the accusations that have come from Red 5 following his dismissal? Why should we trust that he has the attention span to see the project through after he left Mek Entertainment mere months after getting the funding he needed? Should I even mention the fact that he had barely announced his tabletop game, let alone released it, before announcing a Firefall successor that would be set in the tabletop game's universe? The damning Reddit post about the development of Firefall claims that, when times got tough, "Mark had seemingly gotten bored of Firefall, or perhaps disillusioned by it." It seems that there's always something else Mark Kern wants to be working on. The best thing we can do this time is refuse to be swept up in words that we think will never be fulfilled and save our money and our signatures for a project that seems like it might actually be completed.