Fallen Earth Update

I know that only a few people here are still following "Fallen Earth", the MMO project from Icarus Studios, but I thought it would be interesting to post some of the more interesting updates from the last couple weeks. (Credit goes to the Fallen Earth forums and their "Question of the Week" with the developers.):


ON THEIR PROGRESS:

"GDC was again a whirlwind of activity; we did twenty-some-odd interviews, including several audio and video interviews, so hopefully those will be making it online sometime soon. I'm afraid a lot of them won't be that interesting for our long-term fans, since we got a lot of folks who hadn't seen the game before and thus got the “ground up” spiel as opposed to the “what's new” spiel. We did have several folks who also saw us last year at the Austin GDC (MMORPG.com, Ten Ton Hammer, The San Diego Daily Transcript, etc) who should have some of the more interesting, newer bits. Sadly I doubt we'll have the sort of large-scale video that the MOGArmy guys did last year since they seem to be MIA.

I'll leave most of the new bits we introduced at GDC to come out in the interviews so as to not steal their thunder, but the important bit I do want people to see is that we're roughly 70-75% content complete and 50-60% feature complete. We want those to hit 100% before we go to widespread beta, but to give you an idea of our progress, we were around 20% in both this time last year. Complete doesn't mean all polished and nice-like, but it does mean functional.

ON PVP:

Last weeks Question of the Week seems to have stirred up some interest what with the mention of PvP. Not much concerning PvP loot is set in stone yet, including if there will be any, but I can say we won't have looting of primary items like weapons, armor, etc.

There are a number of issues as to why this is the case, and most of them have to do with money as opposed to any perceived favor of PvE or PvP play (because we like both). It comes down to things like, “If someone loses a weapon or some other valuable item in PvP because they had a lag spike, they call customer service. Our customer service costs then go up, and we have to get more money out of the game to pay for it. People generally don't call customer service if they just get killed in PvP.”

Most game designers would love to design a “pure game,” one completely removed from economical constraints, because then they could just concentrate on story, immersion, etc, instead of mass appeal, ease of play, etc. A pure game could have concepts like permadeath or unlimited PvP looting because the designer isn't concerned with player retention, only with creating his ideal world that will cater to some very small slice of the player community. With the world we live in, pure games are not an option, as they really don't make money, so instead we have economical games which are designed to be fun and get enough players to make money.

So we have to make choices. It doesn't have anything to do with catering to one style of play or another, or us thinking some group of players aren't worth listening to; it has to do with us getting enough players to keep the game running and keep our jobs. Now I know some folks will argue, “Well (insert game here) does it this way I like so why can't you?” Well, we're not that game and we have different technical, economic, and social constraints.

On that note, the PvP system discussed last week (being able to loot non-primary items like components, consumables, and ammunition) is still very much an idea as opposed to an implementable concept. We feel it’s a nice middle ground so you get something for PvP, but it won’t turn off a significant amount of players from PvP activities, meaning there will be enough players in the PvP zones to be fun.

ON VEHICLE COMBAT:

This is a big question we're still working on answering. If you can run someone over with a car, it makes investing points in the rifle skill sort of pointless, so we're trying to figure out what role we want vehicles to play in our game. Transportation and storage? Combat? Some combination of both? We don't want Fallen Earth to become a driving game with some personal elements; instead we want it to remain a personal game with some driving elements.

ON WORLD SIZE:

Time to Travel Across (on foot):
The Plateau: 2 hours north to south
Northfields: 1.5 hours east to west
Kaibab Forest: 2 hours north to south
Grainway: 2.5 hours north to south
Siller's Canyon: 2 hours north to south, but that's very deceptive as there are so many canyons and such you can't travel as the crow flies, or even as the drunken crow flies. It'd probably be more like 4 hours.

If you wanted to run from the southern end of the Plateau to the southern end of Siller's Canyon without dying horribly in radiation or plague zones it would take upwards of 13 hours with all the transitional zones and such between sectors.

ON IN GAME FREEDOM:

Q: On a scale from 1 to 10 (World of Warcraft being a 1, EvE Online being an 11), how much of a sandbox will Fallen Earth be?

A: I would say somewhere in the 5-7 range, but that's just a guess. As the game continues this will increase as new options like housing become available.