MMO Weekly: The Rise Of Fallen Earth page 2

29 Sep 2009 at 09:42:15 by Jeff Hollis

Fallen Earth has the best tutorial I've ever experienced in an MMO. The story immediately grabs your interest. You find out, quite quickly, that you're a clone. There's no time to dwell on what that means, though. You need to fight your way out of Hoover Dam, and this drives the rest of the events. You learn to use doors, computers, how to fight, how to reload your weapons, how to interact with NPCs, you name it. The ambience of the whole tutorial is awesome; the sound effects, voices, and everything are truly immersive.

After the tutorial, the game basically throws you out into the world. You have no idea what to do. It's a little confusing.

Come to think of it, why is every single post-apocalyptic future - including Fallen Earth - chock full of punk rockers? Is there something about punkers I don't know? Maybe they're like roaches, and they're the only things that can survive the nukes.

One of the basic problems with MMOFPS games is the control system. Most of the MMOFPSs I've played have gone with some sort of hybrid system, which is part of the standard MMO interface, but with some FPS stuff glued on top. You know, an MMO with an aiming reticule. Fallen Earth took an entirely different approach to this. Instead of a hybrid system, they simply have two systems. There's "MMO mode", during which you open doors and activate computers and craft all manner of junk. When it's time to fight, you go into "FPS mode," and the targeting reticule appears.

The weird part is that the movement keys do entirely different things in both modes. In one mode, the A and D keys make your character turn. In another mode, they make your character strafe. The switching back and forth isn't hard (at least not on the surface), but it practically fried the contents of my cranium. You're playing an MMO, and then you're playing an FPS, and then you're shooting that NPC by mistake. Oops, forgot to switch to MMO mode! Silly me (I may get used to this over time)!

Melee combat seems pretty rough though. You have to get close, put your reticule on your enemy, and swing your sledge hammer. Since he doesn't want to get hit with that hammer, he generally runs away, puts stuff between you and him, or keeps moving in a frustratingly effective way. From what I've seen so far, unless the melee weapons are super-powerful, the guys with the rifles will have a definite edge. The gunfighters credo - don't bring a sledge hammer to a gunfight - remains in full force in Fallen Earth.

Crafting is huuuuuuuge. I have yet to experiment with this in a substantial way, but here's what I understand so far. In a nutshell, everyone is a crap hound / junk collector / scavenger. You find stuff, you salvage it, and you make it into different stuff.

Allow me to diverge, for a moment. Remember how in Star Wars: Galaxies they had that crazy crafting system? It wasn't bad, it was just far out in left field. I've never seen anything else like it anywhere. You could make some truly unconventional things - like furniture - and there was a system in place to sell it. The weird part is that you could make macros that automated the whole process. If you logged off, the macros continued to run. So you could set yourself up to make 40 chairs, and then go log off. Go shopping IRL (Ed: I presume this is ‘In Real Life'...?), go wash your car, go find your first live girlfriend, whatever. When you came back later on, you'd have 40 complete chairs waiting for you. Weird, right? Well, of all the crafting systems in all the games on the planet, Fallen Earth chose to emulate the wacky one found in SWG.

Still, this is an intriguing design decision. Players can make everything from guns to (presumably) mutations through the "mutagenics" skill. Beyond that, you can basically put your character to work for you even when you're logged off, like a little digital indentured servant. Want to level up your armor crafting skills? No problem. Just gather the raw materials, and put your slave to work while you watch TV. Come back later, and your one man personal crafting factory is waiting to make more stuff.

As always, I'll update you as I become more familiar with Fallen Earth. It's an indy game, and appears quite solid over all. If you're interested in an MMO that's a little different from your standard orcs and elves tripe, then buy it, download it, patch for sixteen hours, and then play it. It's enjoyable, so far. :)

And that is all we have for this week, friends and neighbors. As always, come and visit us over at Wandering Goblin.com, where we not only play a lot of MMOs, we huddle in our basements playing them until we turn all white, shriveled, and pasty. For now, ciao!

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