So I've been playing Fallen Earth lately...
I started playing Fallen Earth about a week ago, right around the end of Champions Online's open beta. I only lasted a few days on CO before becoming fed up with it. I think it was after I decided I'd rather clean the dishwasher than play CO that my wife suggested that I try Fallen Earth. She's actually been suggesting I look at it for years. Hadn't sounded interesting enough to me, mostly because after having seen Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa I was expecting yet another MMO that was nothing more than new paint on the same old stale gameplay. Well, I was wrong.
Fallen Earth is different. It's nonlinear, almost a sandbox MMO, with many ways to advance other than just fighting stuff, set in a gigantic seamless world with more content than I've seen in any other MMO. (City of Heroes probably has more now, but not at the start). I'm very impressed, and have already pre-ordered.
First, the parts I find problematic. Fallen Earth's combat system requires manual aiming, like a first-person shooter. I'm still getting the hang of it, and I'm wary of ever engaging in PVP since I know my reflexes can't match the caffeine-and-sugar fueled 15 year olds who like online FPS PVP games. I decided to focus on non-combat content, which there's a lot of.
At the start of the game you're a normal person, with minimal skills and equipment. You get to do the tutorial at level 40, but are wiped before going into the real game. There aren't classes as such, you need to level up to gain skills and equipment to specialize in a role, so the only things that distinguish starting characters are the cosmetic details you can pick during chargen. They game does give you more freedom than most MMOs in your appearance, although it of course can't come close to CoH. There are about 20 faces to pick from, but somehow they all look pissed off. It also follows the common MMO practice of having your gear and armor determine what visible outfit your character is wearing. There does seem to be a decent number of options for normal civilian clothing, although there don't seem to be any clothing stores so you have to use crafting skills to make them. You can also have your character walk around basically naked if you want, although it's not recommended. Armor is your friend, and the armor in FE isn't of the chainmail bikini type some MMOs have - it's actually sensibly designed clothing.
The interface takes some getting used to. It's not as bad as Anarchy Online, which I ragequit and uninstalled from when I somehow managed to destroy my gun while trying to equip it, but it can be tricky. It took me a while at the start of the tutorial to figure out how to talk to the computer terminal that was trying to give me my first mission. Most of the questions on the New Player chat are “How do I do ...” issues with the interface. Once you get used to it it's not bad, but there's a lot going on that isn't intuitive to most MMO players.
The thing I think most likely to turn off players is that the game is a lot slower-paced than most MMOs these days. Unlike City of Heroes where you can go through Outbreak and reach level 10 in an afternoon, it took me two days of playing to gain a single level after the tutorial. Travel times are huge - it can take hours to walk to another town, although this does get better once you have a horse or vehicle. The simplest recipe I have, Craft Ragged Bandage, takes a minute per bandage, and something like a car can take days to craft. The game does let you do other things while crafting, and you go on crafting while offline, so you can queue up a few hours worth of crafting before you log out for the night, then log in the next day to find it all finished. I don't mind the slower-paced gameplay, but I can see how those used to the immediate gratification and face-paced combat and gameplay of most modern MMOs could get bored.
What do I love about this game? A lot.
First, the game is impressively nonlinear. The tutorial is basically on rails, of course, but once you get out of the tutorial you have a choice of half a dozen cities to start in depending on what you want to specialize in. Once you're in the game it doesn't funnel you along, but lets you wander around and decide what you want to do. There is plenty to do - I've never even come close to running out of quests available - but no giant glowing arrow pointing you at the next mission. This does lead to the occasional newbie complaining “I don't know what to do next!” on global help channels, but people looking for a more self-directed experience will appreciate not being led down a funnel.
The game world is HUGE. Apparently the devs took a chunk on the American midwest and mapped it one-to-one to their game world. You can walk for hours in a straight line without hitting an artificial boundary - none of this space compression you find in LOTRO where you can walk from Bree to Weathertop in ten minutes. It's not totally seamless as you do get periodic 'changing zone' messages as every now and then, but the world itself is graphically continuous from one end to the other. I still remember how disappointed I was with CoH when I discovered the city was broken up into little chunks by huge impassable immersion-shattering force field walls.
Huge, but not empty. There are something like a hundred actual towns, and as I walk from one to another I keep finding little settlements or ruins or scientific outposts with contacts offering yet more missions. I have to restrain my impulse to take every mission offered because even though the game lets you have a few dozen quests open at once it's still easy to fill them all up.
And despite being such a huge and open world, it doesn't feel as lonely as you'd expect. Although you might go a while without seeing another player, the game has a very good chat system. There are regional chats, and several global chat channels, which are world-wide. No worrying about if someone's on the same shard as you - as far as I can tell, there aren't shards at such. The global chat is active, and there's almost always been active GMs on the new player help channel answering questions.
I haven't tried teaming yet, although I know there is a mechanic for doing so. There's also a way to form player clans. The devs say they're working on player and clan housing. Normally I wouldn't care much about this as I tend to solo on MMOs, but somehow I've managed to make friends just during the week I've been on open beta. The community so far has been helpful and more mature than on some other games as well - more like what I'm used to on Virtue.
There's a lot of RP potential here. The world is very immersive - the devs have clearly gone out of their way to make the world well fleshed out. Compared to most MMOs I've been on there are very few times I find game mechanics breaking my immersion. You might think that an immersive post-apocalyptic world would be soul-crushingly depressing, but the missions that I've been on actually are positive enough to make me feel like going on with playing. By contrast the mission text of many Auto Assault quests made it clear that your character, no matter what faction you picked, was a monster making things worse. I don't know about you, but after enough of that I don't want to play the game anymore.
Although no game is going to match City of Heroes in the ability to customize your backstory and appearance, the devs did a decent job with what you can do in this setting. Unfortunately everyone is going to have the same canon backstory (set in the tutorial) although I expect that might get ignored for RP purposes. You do have a fair amount of ability to change what your character looks like. Face type, body size, and skin tone are fixed to what you pick in chargen, but tattoos and piercings can be altered at various shops, and you can change your hair style at any moment you wish. And there are a very good selection of well-animated emotes. My wife is jealous of the dance emotes - there are about twenty to pick from, and they're actual real-world dances rather than the bizarre spastic flailing Champions Online calls a dance. There are plenty of unused buildings and spaces to use for RP as well, some of which have already been picked out by the RP community as meeting places.
And then there's the crafting system. My god, what a crafting system. Unlike most games, the crafting system in Fallen Earth isn't some tacked-on afterthought to provide some additional content for min-maxers. It's an integral part of the game, as important as combat. From what I've seen so far, none of the good equipment in the game drops from kills. Killing animals might give you meat and leather, and killing bandits gives you the contents of their pockets, but if you want that uber machine gun or ceramic plate armor of invincibility you have to craft it. Or you can buy it from another PC who crafted it, and the game does have an action house and player-driven economy for that.
And although the crafting system does make you level up skills through practice, it avoids the “Landfill of Middle-Earth” situation by having nearly everything you make be useful, even at low levels. I picked Support for my initial specialization, and with the Medicine skill set I'm making bandages and antivenom drugs, which come in quite handy when I do need to fight something. I picked up the basic cooking skills (Fallen Earth doesn't make you have to eat, but if you don't eat anything your health and stamina recover much more slowly), and later on the Ballistics skill set so I could make ammunition for my weapons. Yes, ranged weapons in FE do need expendable ammunition, and if you run around shooting at every random snake or rabbit you find you'll rapidly run out of money, as the meager loot you get from them doesn't pay for the bullets or bolts it took to kill them.
There are a lot of recipes. Some come from stores, some are mission rewards, a few are rare drops. Many recipes include the ability to write recipe books, so that you can write them down and give (or sell) them to someone else. Provided you find or craft pen and paper, that is. It's a far cry from bind-on-acquire recipes that only mysteriously vanish from your memory after a single use.
Many of the recipes allow substitution of ingredients. For example, the 'Meat Pies' recipe I received as a reward for finding out what happened to Flaky Pete the piemaker allows any kind of meat to be used. Some recipes require as ingredients goods which are themselves the result of recipes - such as first using low-level recipes to make flour and butter, then another one to make a pie crust, and then a higher-level recipe to make the actual pie. I haven't reached it yet, but I hear the crafting process to make a car is a complex multi-day-long, multi-recipe task of gathering raw materials, refining metal and rubber, building up the frame and engine and tires, and finally ending up with something you can drive. Of course, fuel's not cheap either and also needs to be found or crafted. Finally, if you don't like or don't need a finished good, you can then break it down for raw materials to make something else with. It's the most complex and in-depth crafting system I've ever seen that still manages to be well-integrated with the gameplay.
It's also possible to level purely through crafting. Nearly any skill use - including crafting an object, harvesting a plant, or healing someone's wounds - gives experience. It's not as much as you get from completing missions, but still significant, and if you're making a crafting-heavy character it's not rare to queue up a lot of crafting jobs, log out, and then log in the next day to find you've gained a level while offline from crafting.
Another neat feature is that your choices and actions actually have repercussions for your character. The game has a complex system of faction standing, and doing a mission for one faction will raise your stat with that faction and its allied factions, while lowering your standing with their enemies. Some missions aren't available until your standing with that faction is high enough, but in the process of getting it there you may have pissed off another faction to the point that you can never get missions from them. Even little choices you make on a mission matter. When speaking to a NPC, you often are presented with choices of dialog, and how you choose matters. You don't expect a quest NPC in a MMO to become angry and attack you if you chose to insult him in the dialog tree, but that can happen in FE, and good luck getting any missions from him in the future. Your Charisma stat also comes into play, as well as various social skills available in the skill tree which I haven't had a chance to try yet.
It does unfortunately mean that it is impossible for any one character to experience all of the content in the game. But Fallen Earth seems to have so much content I don't expect that to be a problem.
Anyway, as you can see I'm loving this game. It has depth, immersive world-feel, an amazing crafting system, and a lot of potential for RP. I haven't been hooked in a MMO like this since City of Heroes, and I'll probably be playing it a lot once it opens. It is clearly a niche MMO however, and I do have some concern as to whether there are enough other players out that like this style of gameplay. I have heard that there are a lot of pre-NGE SWG players planning to join it, and I've also heard of favorable comparisons to Asheron's Call. I'm hoping this one makes it.
Fallen Earth is different. It's nonlinear, almost a sandbox MMO, with many ways to advance other than just fighting stuff, set in a gigantic seamless world with more content than I've seen in any other MMO. (City of Heroes probably has more now, but not at the start). I'm very impressed, and have already pre-ordered.
First, the parts I find problematic. Fallen Earth's combat system requires manual aiming, like a first-person shooter. I'm still getting the hang of it, and I'm wary of ever engaging in PVP since I know my reflexes can't match the caffeine-and-sugar fueled 15 year olds who like online FPS PVP games. I decided to focus on non-combat content, which there's a lot of.
At the start of the game you're a normal person, with minimal skills and equipment. You get to do the tutorial at level 40, but are wiped before going into the real game. There aren't classes as such, you need to level up to gain skills and equipment to specialize in a role, so the only things that distinguish starting characters are the cosmetic details you can pick during chargen. They game does give you more freedom than most MMOs in your appearance, although it of course can't come close to CoH. There are about 20 faces to pick from, but somehow they all look pissed off. It also follows the common MMO practice of having your gear and armor determine what visible outfit your character is wearing. There does seem to be a decent number of options for normal civilian clothing, although there don't seem to be any clothing stores so you have to use crafting skills to make them. You can also have your character walk around basically naked if you want, although it's not recommended. Armor is your friend, and the armor in FE isn't of the chainmail bikini type some MMOs have - it's actually sensibly designed clothing.
The interface takes some getting used to. It's not as bad as Anarchy Online, which I ragequit and uninstalled from when I somehow managed to destroy my gun while trying to equip it, but it can be tricky. It took me a while at the start of the tutorial to figure out how to talk to the computer terminal that was trying to give me my first mission. Most of the questions on the New Player chat are “How do I do ...” issues with the interface. Once you get used to it it's not bad, but there's a lot going on that isn't intuitive to most MMO players.
The thing I think most likely to turn off players is that the game is a lot slower-paced than most MMOs these days. Unlike City of Heroes where you can go through Outbreak and reach level 10 in an afternoon, it took me two days of playing to gain a single level after the tutorial. Travel times are huge - it can take hours to walk to another town, although this does get better once you have a horse or vehicle. The simplest recipe I have, Craft Ragged Bandage, takes a minute per bandage, and something like a car can take days to craft. The game does let you do other things while crafting, and you go on crafting while offline, so you can queue up a few hours worth of crafting before you log out for the night, then log in the next day to find it all finished. I don't mind the slower-paced gameplay, but I can see how those used to the immediate gratification and face-paced combat and gameplay of most modern MMOs could get bored.
What do I love about this game? A lot.
First, the game is impressively nonlinear. The tutorial is basically on rails, of course, but once you get out of the tutorial you have a choice of half a dozen cities to start in depending on what you want to specialize in. Once you're in the game it doesn't funnel you along, but lets you wander around and decide what you want to do. There is plenty to do - I've never even come close to running out of quests available - but no giant glowing arrow pointing you at the next mission. This does lead to the occasional newbie complaining “I don't know what to do next!” on global help channels, but people looking for a more self-directed experience will appreciate not being led down a funnel.
The game world is HUGE. Apparently the devs took a chunk on the American midwest and mapped it one-to-one to their game world. You can walk for hours in a straight line without hitting an artificial boundary - none of this space compression you find in LOTRO where you can walk from Bree to Weathertop in ten minutes. It's not totally seamless as you do get periodic 'changing zone' messages as every now and then, but the world itself is graphically continuous from one end to the other. I still remember how disappointed I was with CoH when I discovered the city was broken up into little chunks by huge impassable immersion-shattering force field walls.
Huge, but not empty. There are something like a hundred actual towns, and as I walk from one to another I keep finding little settlements or ruins or scientific outposts with contacts offering yet more missions. I have to restrain my impulse to take every mission offered because even though the game lets you have a few dozen quests open at once it's still easy to fill them all up.
And despite being such a huge and open world, it doesn't feel as lonely as you'd expect. Although you might go a while without seeing another player, the game has a very good chat system. There are regional chats, and several global chat channels, which are world-wide. No worrying about if someone's on the same shard as you - as far as I can tell, there aren't shards at such. The global chat is active, and there's almost always been active GMs on the new player help channel answering questions.
I haven't tried teaming yet, although I know there is a mechanic for doing so. There's also a way to form player clans. The devs say they're working on player and clan housing. Normally I wouldn't care much about this as I tend to solo on MMOs, but somehow I've managed to make friends just during the week I've been on open beta. The community so far has been helpful and more mature than on some other games as well - more like what I'm used to on Virtue.
There's a lot of RP potential here. The world is very immersive - the devs have clearly gone out of their way to make the world well fleshed out. Compared to most MMOs I've been on there are very few times I find game mechanics breaking my immersion. You might think that an immersive post-apocalyptic world would be soul-crushingly depressing, but the missions that I've been on actually are positive enough to make me feel like going on with playing. By contrast the mission text of many Auto Assault quests made it clear that your character, no matter what faction you picked, was a monster making things worse. I don't know about you, but after enough of that I don't want to play the game anymore.
Although no game is going to match City of Heroes in the ability to customize your backstory and appearance, the devs did a decent job with what you can do in this setting. Unfortunately everyone is going to have the same canon backstory (set in the tutorial) although I expect that might get ignored for RP purposes. You do have a fair amount of ability to change what your character looks like. Face type, body size, and skin tone are fixed to what you pick in chargen, but tattoos and piercings can be altered at various shops, and you can change your hair style at any moment you wish. And there are a very good selection of well-animated emotes. My wife is jealous of the dance emotes - there are about twenty to pick from, and they're actual real-world dances rather than the bizarre spastic flailing Champions Online calls a dance. There are plenty of unused buildings and spaces to use for RP as well, some of which have already been picked out by the RP community as meeting places.
And then there's the crafting system. My god, what a crafting system. Unlike most games, the crafting system in Fallen Earth isn't some tacked-on afterthought to provide some additional content for min-maxers. It's an integral part of the game, as important as combat. From what I've seen so far, none of the good equipment in the game drops from kills. Killing animals might give you meat and leather, and killing bandits gives you the contents of their pockets, but if you want that uber machine gun or ceramic plate armor of invincibility you have to craft it. Or you can buy it from another PC who crafted it, and the game does have an action house and player-driven economy for that.
And although the crafting system does make you level up skills through practice, it avoids the “Landfill of Middle-Earth” situation by having nearly everything you make be useful, even at low levels. I picked Support for my initial specialization, and with the Medicine skill set I'm making bandages and antivenom drugs, which come in quite handy when I do need to fight something. I picked up the basic cooking skills (Fallen Earth doesn't make you have to eat, but if you don't eat anything your health and stamina recover much more slowly), and later on the Ballistics skill set so I could make ammunition for my weapons. Yes, ranged weapons in FE do need expendable ammunition, and if you run around shooting at every random snake or rabbit you find you'll rapidly run out of money, as the meager loot you get from them doesn't pay for the bullets or bolts it took to kill them.
There are a lot of recipes. Some come from stores, some are mission rewards, a few are rare drops. Many recipes include the ability to write recipe books, so that you can write them down and give (or sell) them to someone else. Provided you find or craft pen and paper, that is. It's a far cry from bind-on-acquire recipes that only mysteriously vanish from your memory after a single use.
Many of the recipes allow substitution of ingredients. For example, the 'Meat Pies' recipe I received as a reward for finding out what happened to Flaky Pete the piemaker allows any kind of meat to be used. Some recipes require as ingredients goods which are themselves the result of recipes - such as first using low-level recipes to make flour and butter, then another one to make a pie crust, and then a higher-level recipe to make the actual pie. I haven't reached it yet, but I hear the crafting process to make a car is a complex multi-day-long, multi-recipe task of gathering raw materials, refining metal and rubber, building up the frame and engine and tires, and finally ending up with something you can drive. Of course, fuel's not cheap either and also needs to be found or crafted. Finally, if you don't like or don't need a finished good, you can then break it down for raw materials to make something else with. It's the most complex and in-depth crafting system I've ever seen that still manages to be well-integrated with the gameplay.
It's also possible to level purely through crafting. Nearly any skill use - including crafting an object, harvesting a plant, or healing someone's wounds - gives experience. It's not as much as you get from completing missions, but still significant, and if you're making a crafting-heavy character it's not rare to queue up a lot of crafting jobs, log out, and then log in the next day to find you've gained a level while offline from crafting.
Another neat feature is that your choices and actions actually have repercussions for your character. The game has a complex system of faction standing, and doing a mission for one faction will raise your stat with that faction and its allied factions, while lowering your standing with their enemies. Some missions aren't available until your standing with that faction is high enough, but in the process of getting it there you may have pissed off another faction to the point that you can never get missions from them. Even little choices you make on a mission matter. When speaking to a NPC, you often are presented with choices of dialog, and how you choose matters. You don't expect a quest NPC in a MMO to become angry and attack you if you chose to insult him in the dialog tree, but that can happen in FE, and good luck getting any missions from him in the future. Your Charisma stat also comes into play, as well as various social skills available in the skill tree which I haven't had a chance to try yet.
It does unfortunately mean that it is impossible for any one character to experience all of the content in the game. But Fallen Earth seems to have so much content I don't expect that to be a problem.
Anyway, as you can see I'm loving this game. It has depth, immersive world-feel, an amazing crafting system, and a lot of potential for RP. I haven't been hooked in a MMO like this since City of Heroes, and I'll probably be playing it a lot once it opens. It is clearly a niche MMO however, and I do have some concern as to whether there are enough other players out that like this style of gameplay. I have heard that there are a lot of pre-NGE SWG players planning to join it, and I've also heard of favorable comparisons to Asheron's Call. I'm hoping this one makes it.