FireFall

Firefall was an open-world MMO shooter for PC from Red 5 Studios, the studio Mark Kern put together after his years at Blizzard. It went free on July 29, 2014, following almost three years in beta. Its central idea was the battleframe: a swappable exosuit with a jetpack and glider wings that set your class, weapons and abilities. Switching roles meant switching suits, not rolling a new character.

All of it took place in New Eden, a seamless map overrun by the Melding and its Chosen. The loop that belonged to Firefall alone was dropping a thumper to mine resources, then holding off the waves the noise pulled in, with public events and missions spawning on their own while you flew between them.

Straight free-to-play: a free client plus a shop selling cosmetics and progression boosters, on top of the founder packs Red 5 sold during beta. The shutdown notice promised to make those founders whole inside a mobile version of Firefall that never got a date or a follow-up announcement. There is nothing left to buy today.

The servers went dark on July 7, 2017, two days after the announcement. The warning signs ran back years: Red 5 missed payroll on December 25, 2015, laid off nearly the entire team in July 2016, and the game averaged under 40 concurrent players on Steam across its final three months. The Steam page came down as well.

The only thing still moving is community preservation. The PIN project, by themeldingwars, lets you spin up a local server where the world is explorable, battleframes can be swapped, and the jetpack and glider work. There is no combat, no enemies, no PvP and no multiplayer: it's a museum you can walk through, not the game.

Nobody who wants to play it, because no official way to do that exists. As a case study it still holds up: reception was lukewarm at 60/100 on Metacritic, with reviewers calling out repetitive content and a thin endgame, and Red 5 rebuilt whole systems more than once, most recently with the 1.6 update in 2016, without winning players back. Anyone who wants to look at it has the PIN project. Anyone who wants to play it has nothing.