"Which way to Barter Town please?"
Fallen Earth is a brand new Mmorpg from indy company Fallen Earth, LLC set on Earth in a post-apocalyptic future of the year 2156 AD. If you are familiar with Resident Evil or Mad Max even Fist of the North Star you can imagine the world. Desolate wasteland with small pockets of humanity still managing to hold on against toxic air, lack of resources and warped creatures, roving bands of mutants and more nefarious humans and of course the undead.
Out of the blue in India or Pakistan, we will say Kashmir to be neutral, a bunch of villagers came down with a virus that pretty much wiped out everyone and their goat who came in contact with it. The later stages of the infection caused muscle contractions that made the soon-to-be-dead sick person look like they were dancing. This reminded someone (probably the guy with the goat) of the multi-armed Hindu goddess SHIVA and so the virus got a cool name. I am guessing this turned some people into zombies and other mutated types. THE VIRUS ALWAYS DOES.
Human nature being what it is..some smart government decided it was a good time to drop nukes on its neighbor while the virus was making a mess and so in a few days most of South Asia was an irradiated wasteland. Like any good human designed recipe, add in a few more invasions, a sprinkle of nukes and pretty much the entire planet got screwed.
In America Global Tech (Umbrella corp. types) starts buying up land and eventually turns into some corporate-feudal state owning the Grand Canyon region and surrounding areas. Global Tech + technology + scientific experiments = bad to sum it up. Naturally the rest of the world was busy blowing each other up at the same time while the US Government, actually doing some homeland stuff instead of abroad, was in a state of civil war with the Federal Emergency Manement Agency (who had US Military support).
"Hungrrry Neeed Brainssss"
Somewhere amongst this Cloning was discovered, maybe before, i don't know. But anyway nanite technology is a wonderful thing. And this is where the player comes into it. Yep starting life afresh as a clone.
The starting area i believe is undergoing a change to help new players acclimatize more with various aspects of the game, but even so the original starting area got me hooked to the game. A story driven walkthrough escaping from the Hoover Dam while it is under attack by the CHOTA faction (like the bad guys in mad max with axes and warpaint). During the tutorial you start at level 40 but along the way you get shown how to equip new weapons and how to raise skills to equip said weapons. I won't go into much detail as that would ruin the experience of the escape. Needless to say it was enjoyable.
Once you get out the dam you are down to level 2 (not sure why not 1, i guess so you get free points to raise some of your skills right away). You will get given a choice of 6 starting towns. This is really nice since there are 2 Combat, 2 Crafting and 2 Support orientated towns. Even if you want to purely PvP and never craft you can start easily in a crafting town. These towns really just set up what kind of missions and items are mainly rewarded. Like crafting towns you will get a lot more craft goods and recipies whereas support towns are Medic Labs etc.
The Gui is pretty clean and layed out not much different from other mmorp's. One difference is the single hotbar that you actually resize by dragging the corner to make it however many rows and columns you want.
Personally i used 12 x 5 but the lack of moving less used skills to say a sidebar was a little annoying but nothing game-breaking.
Quest givers are marked with radioactive icons over their head with different colors depending on what part of the Quest you are on and they also appear on the Mini Map and Strategic Map (aswell as resources and merchants etc) so it's easy to find them. There is a quest tracker also but it only 'tracks' one quest waypoint at a time which is nice if you really want to explore and not be lead around by the hand.
The Gameworld so far consists of 3 Sectors all set in some part of the Grand Canyon, having never been there i don't know how close it is to the real place but needless to say there are lots of cliffs to fall down and a ton of desert and dry areas in the beginning. Sector 2 is way more pastureland and Sector 3 is at least 50% if not more forested. *shakes fist at trees that autorun will always run you into when you go /afk*
For only 3 sectors its a huge place. On my Franklin Rider Horse (Kevin Costner mail delivery services) it took over 2 hours non-stop to ride from East Sector 3 to South Sector 1! and that was without stopping to scavenge resources (my bag was full) i hear there will be some kind of fast travel system implemented but it will be expensive and probably between the large towns only. For me this is great as why go to all the trouble of building a huge world if you can port all over it.
"Hey Jeff why da hero always get a Gyrocopter?"
There is a wide variety of vehicles available ranging from the trusty Horse to Interceptors with mounted macineguns to Electric Motorbikes. These all have their own stats which cover fuel effiency (you run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere then enjoy your walk), health, turning speeds and storage etc. I only tried the horses since i spent all my crafting time building my Wife a Dune Buggy and Interceptor /wrist but Motorbikes were way faster than my pony. Horses have the advantage of grazing and for example my Quest rewarded Postman Horse, i never had to buy food for it since he ate grass anytime i stopped. Heck it even ate rocks and sand i guess when there was no grass where i was.
There are no multi-person vehicles yet although hopefully this will change in the future. You know a Clan owned School Bus would rock.
Well i have gone on totally random tangents so i will finish this first part with my less that great system specs and how i really didn't have many issues with everything at 80% maxed out. Cities are a little laggy at times and i did experience a couple of freezes but the Development team is really on top of the performance updates and optimization aspect of the game. Actually the whole staff seem awsome with support for the customer...nearly always a GM online who answers questions and helps with bugged players nearly 24/7. This is super refreshing compared to a 6 hour queue then generic email reply. Fallen Earth is really great game.
Played on:
Windows Vista Ultimate 32
Core2 Duo 2.13ghz
GeForce 7950gt
4 Gig Ram
1920x1200 rez
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