F4 (company)

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F4
legal form Société Anonyme
founding 2002
Seat Paris , France
Branch software
Website www.f4-group.com

F4 is a French company that designs and develops massive multiplayer online games . It was founded in 2002.

The development work is taking place in Paris, near the Avenue des Champs-Élysées . It is also represented in Asia, with offices in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. These are aimed at the distribution of video games for the Asian market. F4 is part of a group of companies that come from the software development industry and academia.

Products

  • Empire of Sports (release date not yet known), first sports MMORPG. There is a prologue version.
  • Exalight Reloaded (2009), massive multiplayer online game with futuristic courses and vehicles
  • Lafuma Unlimit 2 (2007)
  • Eco - Battle with Detritus (2006)
  • Lafuma Unlimit (2005)
  • Stardust Academy (prototype) (2005)
  • Castle! Castle! (Prototype) (2004)
  • Trium Planeta (prototype) (2003)
  • Pocket Castle (prototype) (2002)

positioning

Centered on topics rarely addressed by traditional persistent worlds, such as sports and auto racing, F4's games are aimed at families and the general public. They combine:

  • conventional classic game elements of MMOGs, such as developing characters' skills through in-game activities (tennis and soccer games, skiing, car racing, etc.)
  • Game areas that can be understood by a large number of people because they are based on familiar worlds, have quick-to-learn gameplay, and incorporate concepts of skill games
  • Concepts of social networks for communication, which allow to build relationships between players and to pursue common interests,
  • a virtual economy, mainly inspired by Asian games, based on the sale of items using micro transactions

Characteristics

Originating from a merger of the worlds of the engineer and the creative, F4 basically unites different cultures

  • The management, made up of persons from the Cabinet of Ministers and large French industrial groups, promotes production methods and manages innovative projects in the video game industry.
  • The high-level development department, made up of people who come from well-known IT and high-tech companies and who have designed all the technology used by the MMOGs developed by F4 (including network platform, web technologies, 3D -Engines and physics engines ...)
  • Multicultural creative departments (game design, graphic design) that are united by their passion for games.

Empire of Sports

A merger of F4 and the Swiss sports rights agency Infront Sports & Media (number 2 in sports marketing worldwide) creates the first multi-sport universe on the PC.

The game is currently in a prologue version.

The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) allows you to interact with your virtual identity ( your avatar ) and to progress in the community by practicing different sports (soccer, tennis, basketball, skiing, bobsleigh, athletics ... )

With the avatar you slip into the role of a unique athlete who makes progress and gradually shows a great development. He can play in different areas:

  • in the city,
  • in the overall ranking,
  • in individual disciplines
  • on soccer fields and tennis courts.

The game brings as many players together behind their computer as there are people on the field.

The sports are self-contained games over which a meta-level has been created that has an RPG-like character. The developers have created their own game mechanics, different animations and an individual surface for each sport. However, care was taken to ensure that the games can be combined into a whole, especially in the area of ​​game control.

The mix between role play and action brings a whole series of challenges: For every sport, the entirety of the actions must be managed by a large amount of data (especially in team sports). This has to take into account the conditions of the network infrastructure (due to which each client sees the scene a little differently than the competitors - caused by network effects such as lag ) and the restrictions of the players with regard to the gameplay (determined by the skill of the player and the abilities of his Avatars).

Web links