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Fallen Earth is a post apocalyptic MMO. It "soft launched" towards the end of last year, and has gradually been gaining momentum, thanks to digital distribution via Direct2Drive and Steam.
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| A review of: Fallen Earth by: L. Harrison |
| Platform: PC | Publisher: Fallen Earth LLC |
| Rating: 9.0/10 |
Fallen Earth is a post apocalyptic MMO. It "soft launched" towards the end of last year, and has gradually been gaining momentum, thanks to digital distribution via Direct2Drive and Steam.
Fallen Earth is set in the year 2156. A series of natural disasters has left the United States in ruins, and the Shiva virus, named for the dance-like convulsions it causes, has spread across the world, devastating the population. As the virus spread across the world, various countries began to accuse each other of engineering and releasing the virus. The political conflict turned to all-out nuclear war, leaving less than one percent of the world's population alive. What's left of humanity lives in the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon Province. The nuclear fallout has caused mutations- in plants, animals, and people, and the world is a harsh, unforgiving place.
As a new player you start inside the Hoover Dam Garrison, which is under attack by the CHOTA, one of the factions that has sprung up after the nuclear war. You are tasked with saving the Dam, something you manage to do, but at a heavy cost. You are killed in the process. This shouldn't be an issue, because cloning exists in the world, but the DNA of your clone has been corrupted, and you need to stabilize it, otherwise one of your next deaths could be your last. The quest to fix your DNA is something that runs all the way through the first sector of the game.
The core of the game
Once you've saved yourself, you start to focus on the wider world. There are six factions, the CHOTA, Travellers, Techs, Enforcers, Lightbearers, and Vistas. Some factions want anarchy, some want to restore the world that was, and others want to build a new world, in their own image. The factions aren't divided into good vs evil - the factions work together, or against, each other depending on their points of view about certain subjects. For example the Enforcers will work with the Techs and the Lightbearers, while they are rivals with the Vistas and Travelers, and hate the CHOTA. The best way to visualise the faction system is to look at the game's "Faction Wheel" - you can change from one faction to another by working your way around the wheel, but as you gain standing with one faction, you lose standing with the opposing ones, and "spinning the wheel" gets harder as your standings grow.
Each faction focuses on certain skills (more on skills later) - they aren't totally locked out from using skills that they don't focus on, but they'll learn them later on in their career. For example, an Enforcer can learn First Aid abilities, but will find them harder to obtain than a Lightbearer, who specialises in First Aid, would. Trade between factions is possible, however, so a determined player can obtain most skills and items, since only the most powerful things require faction standing to actually use.
The goal of the game is PVP. In Sector One, the low level area, there are PVP zones littered all over the map. These areas don't really have a point to them, other than the fact that they have a huge amount of valuable resources in them, which makes them an attractive place for crafters, and offers squashy prey for those looking for some low level PVP. The Sector One PVP scene can be quiet at times, but there are opportunities there for people who are willing to look for them.
In Sector Two there and Sector Three there are PVP towns. These offer special missions, skills, and items to factions that control them. PVP gets busier from Sector Two onwards, and there are chances for both lone wolfs, and guilded players, to make their mark.
The map is pretty big, and it can take a while to travel from one side of a sector to the other. The map below shows part of Sector One:
Character Progression
Fallen Earth uses a skill and stat based system for character progression. As you gain experience you earn AP, which can be used to increase stats, or increase skills. You can also earn bonus AP by doing certain quests. The "average" character will have a little over 1000 AP at Level 45, but it's possible to have many more if you do all the bonus AP quests.
The basic skills in the game are Pistols, Rifles, Melee, Dodge, Armour Use, Athletics, First Aid, Group Tactics, and Social. These do pretty much exactly what their name implies - giving access to new equipment and skills in their category, and also affecting your chance of dodging a hit, or being seen on the radar in PVP zones. Your abilities will automatically increase a little as you level up, so even someone who has never trained in melee weapons will be passable with one at Level 45, but spending AP (One AP per skill point) will increase your skill even more.
The extent to which you can increase your skills is based on your stats. Stats also increase as you level, but you can raise them further (at a cost of 5AP per point) in order to increase your skill cap. The pistols skill, for example, is based on Dexterity and Perception.
When you leave Sector One and choose a faction, you will be offered quests to earn new abilities in the form of Mutations. Everyone starts with Alpha Mutations, and other mutations can be unlocked based on the factions that you choose. Mutations are raised like normal skills - at one AP per skill point, and there are numerous categories to choose from - such as healing mutations, telekinesis abilities, primal abilities, and thermal control.
For raising a skill to maximum level, you earn access to skill mastery rewards, which are typically items that you can equip in your storage slot, and that further augment your abilities. For reaching a very high level of faction standing, you earn a "Capstone", which is a special skill - for example the Vistas get a special damaging attack and DOT, and the Enforcers get improved defences.
For PVP-ing, you earn Deathtoll points for killing enemy players (you also lose deathtoll points for dying). Deathtoll can be used to buy items. To prevent players from farming lower level characters, there is a penalty debuff that kicks in if a higher level character attacks a character more than 10 levels smaller than them.
So how does it play?
Fallen Earth reminds me of old-style Star Wars Galaxies, in many ways. There's more structure - you're not just dumped on a planet and left to find your own way, but in many other ways it feels the same. After the tutorial, you're given the option of an extended tutorial, which gives you your first horse, and points you towards quests that let you get some weapons and armour.
Once you're done with the first starting town, though, there’s likely a gap between your character's ability level and the next set of obvious quests. If you explore, you can find quests to do, but I've noticed, from the help chat, that many players don't explore - they go straight to a higher level town and wonder why they find the quests difficult.
Fallen Earth is one of the few games I've seen in recent times that actually uses real ammunition. Pistol users go through ammunition at an amazing rate. Rifle users also need to carry a lot of ammunition. It's fairly easy to craft low level zip gun and crossbow ammunition, but the higher level ammunition requires you to level up the Science tradeskill and the Ballistics tradeskill.
Either that, or buy from NPC vendors - at a cost so
high it's the in-game equivalent of sending money to those Nigerian Princes that send spam emails in the hopes of getting even more money back in return.
The starting towns offer a small selection of skill books, and there are more available in other towns as you explore the sector. Finding all the skills you're able to use can be a bit of a challenge, especially considering some skills are only available in a couple of towns. The very low level skills are quite inexpensive, but as you get towards the higher end skills the cost skyrockets. Once you're in Sector Two, you'll find that different faction towns have different skills for sale, and vendors may refuse to talk to you if your standing isn't high enough.
Tradeskills increase by practicing them - when you scavenge for something, or craft something, if it's the right level for you, you will get an increase in the related tradeskill ability. You also gain experience for making things / scavenging appropriate resource nodes. Crafting takes time - some things, such as vehicles, require several components to make, and each component takes a few hours to prepare. You are able to set off a crafting queue then get on with playing the game (inventory space allowing), though, so it doesn't feel like a time sink, or a grind. Blaze found himself queuing up several batches of ammunition before logging off each night. The crafting continues while you're logged off, so that's a good way to keep yourself supplied.
This is part of what I love about the game. A genuine new character that is just questing, scavenging, and crafting / selling stuff as they level up, will find that they aren't always able to afford everything they want at the immediate moment they want it. You're never left naked, under-skilled, and unable to progress, but you do have to work for your skills and items, and there are occasions when your wallet doesn't quite stretch to meet your desires for cool stuff.
Items take damage through use, and also when you die. When an item "breaks", you aren't able to use it until you repair it. Repair kits are easy to make, however, and they're not too heavy either, so it's easy to carry a few around with you.
Just like the pre Jump To Lightspeed Star Wars Galaxies, there's no instant travel - in fact, there's not even shuttles between certain towns! OK, so there's only one planet in this game, but you get the idea. You can walk, ride, or drive between towns, but if you're at the top end of the map and you want to meet a friend at the southernmost part of Sector One, you'll have to drive there yourself. If you just want to give some items to your friend, you could post things to them - but it'll cost you. The in-game postal service doesn't work for free.
You may wonder why you'd want to spend your time struggling to get by, and travelling the hard way, but believe it or not, it's actually fun. We were given access to two accounts to do this review. Blaze has levelled two characters - a pistol and rifle using Enforcer, and a Melee character that uses a lot of mutations and can't quite decide what faction they want to go for. His experience of the game, as true combat characters, differed greatly to my crafting experience, and he found areas like Old Kingman to be a lot easier than I did. My crafting/support characters are perfectly capable of handling themselves in day-to-day combat, but, because they sacrificed some defensive skills, they struggle when up against Bosses or large groups of normal NPCs.
When I got my hands on an account I got to work on a CHOTA, a Vista, and a Lightbearer. That means running through Sector One three times. I can honestly say I didn't get bored. Yes, the quests are familiar the second and third time around, but melee, rifles, and pistols feel different enough that the characters actually play differently. Running through the towns a second and third time gave me a chance to listen to the NPCs and read the quest text — which is actually interesting, and funny in places.
There are pop-culture references all over the place, and the developers have actually thought about things. For example, during the seasonal events, there were NPCs singing something close to Jingle Bells - but they'd got the words wrong. It seems that as the song was passed down through the generations, somewhere along the line "Sleigh" had turned into "Slay".
Another example is the Speakers of the Net - who praise The Net, and cry "Alt-Tab! Alt-Tab!". There's even a quest called Soy Mint Green, presumably a reference to Soylent Green.
Each starting area has a different feel. Start in Kingman, and you spend your time assassinating people and rescuing hostages. Start in Clinton FARM and you spend your time making medicine and patching up injured people.
The dialogue offered by the quest NPCs is funny. Sometimes they even take the mickey out of the game itself "When clones die, do they forget what missions they accepted?" Other times, they're deadly serious. There are quests about everything from grieving husbands fruitlessly trying to bring their dead wife back as a clone, to mine workers dying of radiation poisoning because of radioactive toxic waste polluting the mine they work in. Yes, it all boils down to kill this, craft that, or fetch the other, but this is the first time in several MMO releases that I've felt like I'm doing all that stuff for a purpose. The Fallen Earth world feels real, and feels like it actually has real people, with real needs and desires, populating it.
The FPS controls mean that you have to aim, and time, your shots. It's possible, if you're not paying attention, to miss the NPC you're aiming at, hit an NPC in the background, and get yourself into a lot of trouble. It's also possible to hit neutral NPCs that are assisting you on a quest. In certain zones, you can lose faction standing for killing those NPCs, so you need to be careful.
The PVP zones are friendly fire, at least against people outside of your group. So, if you're solo in a PVP zone, watch your screen carefully =- some of your faction mates may accidentally run in front of you, and you will damage them if you fire while they're in front of your cross hair.
Controls, graphics, etc.
The game is fairly demanding, system requirements wise, but not without reason. On full detail, it looks gorgeous. I had to knock the graphics settings down a little once I got to the more populated areas, but Blaze is able to run the game in full detail without any problems.
On lower detail settings, the game looks a bit dated, but I think a lot of that is down to the post-apocalyptic environment. Wasteland and dull brown can only offer so many opportunities for eye candy.
Everyone plays on the same server, which means that at peak times, in busy areas, there's a lot of lag. The lag was very bad in the first few days we played, but has improved massively in the past week or so, and hopefully the current performance improvements will continue. The same can be said for bugs. Blaze encountered a number of bugged spawns and quest oddities on his first run through the early stages of the game, but by the time I reached those areas on my crafter, they'd all been fixed.
The controls are good, for an MMO FPS. I disliked the default settings, but it's easy enough to remap things so that changing weapons is faster, and skills are more readily accessible. The game uses hitboxes, so a hit to the head should do more damage than a hit to the body. The reticle changes size if you're moving / jumping, which adds to the realism. However, the NPCs do have a tendency to warp around, and the movement isn't always slick, so traditional FPS players may find some things frustrating.
There's a decent amount of speech in the game, and a wide range of animal sounds, and vehicle sounds. Some are better than others = the fact that your avatar goes "Mmm, mmm, mmm!"; when you feed your horse (rather than the horse making happy sounds) makes me laugh - but the variety is good. I still have sound on in the game, while I muted others like Eve Online shortly after starting playing.
Guilds and Solo Play
It's possible to create a guild in the game. Guilds need to pass a probation period by getting ten characters to join, but unlike certain other games, multiple characters from the same account will count, so a small group of friends can easily get together enough characters to make a guild. There are guilds for all tastes already created, from casual, non PVP guilds to faction focused ones. If you want to PVP with your friends, it's a good idea to work out factions in advance, so that everyone is on the right side.
If you want to play solo, you can get through most of the PVE game by yourself. Some of the group quests may pose a problem - especially the ones with Boss and Master NPCs, but you can always skip those quests, or come back and do them at a slightly higher level if you need the AP that they offer. If you prefer to group, then there are some decent grouping opportunities from level 10 onwards, especially in Kingman.
The tech support people are very helpful. Blaze encountered a problem with his ATV quest, raised a ticket, and got an answer via email within an hour. One of my characters got stuck permanently in the tutorial area, with no way to leave, and a GM teleported me out within minutes. On another occasion, I filed a bug report about an erroneous quest description. The response I received indicated that the quest was being fixed, and the person who answered the mail gave me a few suggestions to help in the meantime that made it clear that the QA guys actually play the game themselves.
Conclusion
For me, 2009 was the year of promising MMO games that were fun for the first few play sessions, but didn't really deliver in the long term. Fallen Earth is a refreshing change. Not just because it's not an MMO about Elves and magic, but because it's actually fun to play.
Leveling doesn't have to take a long time - you can reach level 45 pretty quickly if you want to. My first character spent ages exploring each town, delaying choosing a faction for as long as possible, my others knew what they wanted to be and are taking a quicker path, but I'm having a blast with all of them.
It's games like Fallen Earth that make me glad I get to do this job. If you're fed up with high fantasy, low challenge games where the fun allegedly begins in the "end game", then come join us in the apocalypse. This isn't a game that offers fast travel, infinite respecs, and prizes just for turning up. It's a game that offers a satisfying challenge, and rewards those brave enough to face it.
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