Fallen Earth is often compared to two other MMOs: EVE Online and Star Wars Galaxies. SWG mostly because of that game’s initial huge focus on crafting pretty much the whole game from the ground up, EVE because of the crafting and the skill queue that works offline even when you’re not playing, and both titles because of their sorta-sandboxy nature.
Some of the comparisons hold up, and some do not. For instance, I never could get into EVE, and I gave it the ol’ college try about five times. It simply was too convoluted, too unwieldy after so many years of release, and my skin crawled at their idea of PvP. Its character growth and crafting systems were just too mind-bogglingly huge and often unintuitive. So I bowed out and resigned myself that I would never get the geek credentials of being that hardcore uber 1337.
Yet with Fallen Earth, I can understand the appeal of those games. A lot of the people who are falling for this game keep repeating sentiments like “It doesn’t pander to me” and “It forces me to explore and learn the world” and “It feels immersive and persistent”. For one example, take Don’t Fear The Mutant’s latest testimonial:
“It’s been a long time since I saw a new MMO take immersion this seriously – as the genre goes forward, that trait becomes increasingly rare. Fallen Earth has many flaws, which I will return to at a later point, but it’s hard for me to shrug off the thought that this might be what I’ve been asking for so many times in the past.”
Although it’s certainly more user-friendly than EVE (in my opinion), Fallen Earth doesn’t have this kind of condescending hand-holding that most modern MMO developers have come to assume we want and need. For the past couple years, we’ve witnessed games touting how awesome they are for the casual player that you can instantly warp to almost any location, fly over the dangerous spots, queue up for distant battlegrounds and be teleported there, and have every action and decision in the game benefit you without penalty. In many ways, these are welcome refinements, but there’s a growing feeling that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and dulled MMORPGs to the point where it’s just a combat simulator that needs to look pretty and dispense shinies, and nothing much else.
It’s almost a silly example, but take Fallen Earth’s mounts. I don’t know how it was back in the old school MMO days, but since 2004 or so, most every mount that you obtain in a MMO has the magical ability to vanish back into your pocket when you don’t need it. *Poof*, it’s gone. It’s never explained, because it doesn’t really make sense in the game world, except that it’s convenient for the game’s players. Yet when you first get your mount in Fallen Earth, there’s a moment when you realize that you can never again put it back in your magical pocket — it’s in the world to stay. It needs food or fuel, it’ll stay where you leave it, and it can be hurt and destroyed. Suddenly something we’ve taken for granted over the past decade — the always-available magically appearing mount — is given weight and import. My mount matters in Fallen Earth, because I need it to traverse the wastelands, to store my extra goods, and to get around town quicker than a slow jog. It’s not just a run speed convenience in a world full of flight paths and spell portals, it’s my first and only mode of faster transportation. And that it always exists in the game world means that I notice it more and care about its status more.
This is not to say that Fallen Earth hasn’t benefited from the advancement of the MMO genre, because it obviously has. It’s got the “sandboxy” flavor while pulling in more user-friendly MMO elements, such as clear-cut quests, guided progression (levels and zones), and loads of prepared PvE content so I don’t have to play half the game in my head just to have fun.
Stop! I don’t have $50 to drop on this! I want Brutal Legend first!
Stop enticing me!
That is all.
Never! I am the Enticinator!
Listen to The Syp.
Question on the mounts:
If you have a live mount (like the horses I saw in beta), what happens to the beast if you go away for a week and can’t feed it? Does the poor thing just fall over dead from hunger? Is this like a little Petz mini-game smuggled inside the MMO?
Just curious. =)
Not a silly example at all. I started this whole “MMO thing” with old-school SWG which went both ways (bi-mountual?) with mounts (ie. speeders). I could make it go *poof* back into my datapad or I could just leave it in the world. That “mattered” in a few ways. First, the obvious bit of having to “work” in the game to earn enough to pay for a speeder. Second, if I leave it in the world, I need to remember where it is. Yes, there was a huge safety in that I could logout and it would be back in my datapad. I wouldn’t outright lose the thing and I don’t recall them being able to be stolen by other players either. So it’s not quite to the level of Fallen Earth (I don’t think?) but it was a step up from the Magical Mount Tour we’ve had since 2004. Third, there was the knowledge that someone else crafted that speeder for me. In SWG, crafters would typically put items on the Bazaar terminals and leave notes and coordinates for their shops, which often had even better prices. You’d get to know the best crafters (or at least your favorite ones), build a rapport with them and go out of your way to travel to their shop. Back then, that really meant something that I found a great crafter to make the speeder I wanted, knowing the amount of effort he’d put into achieving that level of crafting ability as well.
These days the only “meaning” our mounts have is that we reached the level gate to be eligible to buy a mount, and we earned enough money to buy it from the NPC.
@ Andrew – Horses require food to fill up their stamina bar, which is only depleted when running. So nope, it’s not like it goes down on their own. I even ran a horse to nothing on the stamina bar, and it slowed to a walk while the stamina slowly replenished (horses can bring their stamina back up gradually, while other mounts cannot).
While horses can slowly regenerate their stamina, it is slow. And I believe it only happens when you are in game. You cannot run the horse for a while, log out for a day and have max stamina again.
Of course, even with the initial horses (I have the second crafted one), their stamina bar takes a while to deplete. I have used my horse on/off for probably 6 hours now and I’m still at 18k/24k stamina. And I just keep some food in their pack in case I run out.
The more I hear of this Fallen Earth thing, the more I like it. There are some key things that will keep me away from the game, but I applaud some of these design decisions. The horse sounds especially interesting to me. (But then, I loved the horses in Zelda and Shadow of the Colossus… a game that makes a horse important piques my interest.)
I’m noticing a lot of similarities between Eve and Fallen Earth. I think FE may have a slightly more intuitive interface, but only slightly. I just realized recently that when dual wielding zip guns you have to use the left and right mouse buttons, and what to do with the Action Points I kept getting.
I’d like to read a really good review from someone I trust before I bought the same… although I am tempted. Any sign of a free trial?
A lot of what you love about Fallen Earth is what people have been commending Darkfall for. I hope FE fans can have a new appreciation for the value of niche games that take a new approach (or old with a new spin, as the case may be) on genre standards. The comments on the mounts reminded me especially of DF.
Though, I must say, like so many people who never gave DF a shot, I can’t see spending $50 on a game that’s a risk to my enjoyment. I’d love to try it but until the price goes down, I doubt I will. I’ll be keeping a close eye on it until then though. The game looks like it *could* be a lot of fun… if I can fall into the niche they’re targeting.
“It doesn’t pander to me”
Yes. This. Precisely.
Lately games, especially MMOs, are feeling more like M&M dispensers – soft candy with a pretty shell. You put in money, you get out XP and shinies.
From a financial point of view, I understand the desire to not annoy your players, to make life easy and soft and round-cornered, so they KEEP putting money in the bin.
But I think you can keep players, or at least a lot of ‘em, without making a game failure-proof and concequence-free.
And that’s what I love about FE – your choices matter, they stuck with you, and you CAN make mistakes. Which also means you can succeed… and that your skill as a thinker, not just a button-pusher, matters.
City of Heroes used to have that for me, but I’ve played it since Beta, and they’ve just been making it easier and easier, and now it’s just not a challenge anymore.