And cry.

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Well I love Fallout and Wasteland before it… “thug explodes like a blood sausage!” “all that’s left is a fine red mist” and all the old Wasteland quotes when you vaporized some thug.

Now, I completely disagree that FO and FE are totally far apart. There are many similiarities in the types of quests and that overall you are working on some much larger quest in the background of your running around the apolocolapse wasteland becoming a hero of the wasteland. That’s pretty much straight out of FO.

However, obviously its an MMO and not a single use game like FO so there must be mechanical differences.

There lies the rub. The mechanics of FE are tough to figure out. Like holding the mouse buttons down will continously autoattack. NO WHERE DOES IT TELL YOU THAT! Also as someone else pointed out you get EXP, the same EXP, for crafting, harvesting, questing and killing. So regardless if you want to be a Crafter primarily, melee or gun-monkey you can stay up with the Jones’ thoughout the game.

The EVE esq crafting off line is a great addition to an MMO because that too allows you to keep up. Often times in the cloned fantasy MMO of EQ2,WoW, et al if you have got more hard core player type friends with forgiving occupations who can spend 40 hours per week playing where you can only spend 20, you quickly lag behind. While the same is true here to an extent you can at least stay some what close to their range.

Also you aren’t stuck to one class! The suck! If you want to fill a different roll make a new character and spend the next few months leveling it to cap to rejoin your old friends. I call that the EQ2/WoW suck-zone! This game you simply learn a few different skills from the various skill vendors. My character Tiger Senpai is a Melee character first and foremost. However, I learned a few buffing skills, some healing and even a resusitate power to help my team not have to run back from the cloning stations. With a modest AP expendature I can be a very effective secondary healer and bring the healer back to life if he goes down, while still maxing out my Melee & Dodge skills.

I will be honest. In Beta I hated the game. If was after finishing FO3, again, that I thought hey lets give that FE another shot. THE DIFFERENCE between when I played in BETA and this time is that when I went in during Beta I went in with the thought and attitude that I didn’t need to pay attention to the tutorial and that it would be like every other MMO. I WAS WRONG. Post Beta I payed close attention to the Starting walk through and the opening quests that teach about combat and crafting after I was out of the cloning box.

Now I dropped my EQ2 and WoW subs and this is my only MMO.

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“Implemented new training areas containing missions to provide a kinder learning curve for players. Players will enter the world after the tutorial at 1st level and be offered additional training by the local LifeNet pod operator. This training will teach the player the basics of mounts, mail, crafting, etc. At the end of training they will advance to 2nd level. Players may elect to skip this training at the first step and those who do so will immediately advance to 2nd level.”

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I played FE to about level 6 in beta, figured it was good enough, pre-ordered and stopped ruining it for me till the early start. Then since 09/09/09 I’ve been playing it religiously until a few days ago.

There is a lot to like in this game. The main drawback imho, as evidenced by this review, is that the game didn’t even have a manual until a couple of weeks ago. Many of the reviewer’s problems would have been solved by a proper manual (and of course, the willingness to read one :) ). For instance, if the merchant markers are sometimes making it hard to see the quest-giver symbols, there is a “Y” symbol at the upper right corner of the map. Click on it and you can filter about 3 dozen of map marker types; remove the merchant markers and voilà, all the green quests markers are on display. The same “Y” on the inventory menu allows one to create tabs in the inventory for different item types (armor, weapons, ammo, etc.). Other windows have them.

I didn’t find leveling to be slow, on the contrary. Actually it was too fast imho. The current game is designed around 3 sectors, each supposedly designed for 15 levels, for a current cap of 45. But I don’t know if it’s the designer’s “rookiness”, but there is no proper quest flow in the game. Over the years we went from the EQ’s “go chain-pull stuff to level”, to WoW’s and EQ2′s carefully planned successions of quest hubs with controlled experience gain, allowing one to replay a totally different experience with an alt.

You don’t have this in FE. You have all of the sector 1 at the beginning to play in. You finish everything you have to do in the starting town, get a referral to a couple of other cities or just see them on the map and go there. You do everything you see in the new quest hub and move on to the next. Then you hear or read on the forums that there are quests, in every quest hub, that give AP rewards. APs, or Advancement Points, is what you invest into your skills and abilities to raise them. You get 20 per level, and any extras will make your character more powerful or versatile. So in the end you are compelled to do all the quests in every sector with each of your characters. Former long-time beta-testers and other fanboys will yell at you on the official forums for even bringing this up, because surely it’s the player’s fault that he wants these extra points. But if they had played at least one other MMO instead of just bragging about their hardcoritude, they’d know that in this world anything optional that could make your character more powerful or versatile becomes an instant must-have. That’s it for replayability. And at the same time we gain too much exp, so we are constantly fighting mobs of a much lower level.

I rather liked the combat system. I went Rifle, because finally we had an MMO where a rifle was used properly. Sure there is a bit of dice rolling behind the scenes, but actually sniping stuff in the head in an MMO is much more satisfying to me that the pre-NGE SWG “lock and auto-shoot” stuff that makes it not different from melee. And I didn’t have the weird feeling I had in Planetside where I was carrying a pea-shooter even as a “robot”. In FE I didn’t have to shoot someone 100 times as in PS, most single mobs were dead before they reached me, and I like it when things make a tiny bit of sense.

Never tried melee because it makes absolutely no sense given the setting. Who would bring a knife to a gun fight? In the desert? Someone to whom you must then give a ton of armor and stupid things like stuns. I have medieval fantasy games to swing a sword in.

What killed the game for me is the lack of fast travel. I was level 33 and had finished Sector 2. The maps are huge. It can take you up to 20 minutes to ride from one quest hub to another, 10-15 minutes being the norm. And sometimes quests send you from one hub to another. And you ride 90% of the time over an empty landscape, nothing to harvest nor fear. Even when there are mobs you can ride through them with nothing happening. Heck, at level 16 I went all the way to the heart of Sector 3 and never died. Try going in WoW, in the teens, into a level 30-40 area, you’ll draw aggro from beyind your visual range and get one-shotted before you can say “wtf”. Nothing of the sort in FE, you see a roadblock, ride through, you won’t get one-shotted, nothing will catch you on you horse, nothing can make you dimount, and even mobs 15+ levels above yours won’t aggro for more than about 20 meters away.

Yet for some reason the game makes you ride and ride and ride. You are not exploring anymore, you are not challenged in any way, yet you keep riding. By the end of Sector 2 in my thirties I was starting to feel I was spending more time riding than playing. Sure, for a fanboy’s 12-hours long play session it may be bearable, but for someone with a day job playing 2-3 hours in the evening it is way too much. Some guildmates I played with in other games joined FE a bit after me, there is a 15-20 levels gap between them and me. The other day they asked me if there was a way for me to come help them in a dungeon. Sure, if I spent my evening on the 1.5 hours boring ride to reach their low-level zone, one-shoot the Boss, then spend most of my next evening playtime to get back to my questing place.

In the last “State of the Game” the producer said they were caving in and will add a “limited and expensive” fast travel option (huge uproar among the tardcores). Which means I’d still have to ride to my current sector’s capital, fast-travel to the destination sector’s capital, then ride to my friends. Still at least 30 mins wasted for nothing. And I’d have to pay through the nose for the honour of helping my guildmates. Not gonna happen. I’ll be back in a heartbeat as soon as there some kind of cheap fast travel between every town, but they won’t see any of my money until this happens.

And another thing FE taught me: long quest chains spanning many levels are a good idea, but not when there are too many of them. When you have 2-3+ running at the same time, 5 levels after your last step you don’t remember what evil you were fighting at the time.

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Which is it, damn you? STOP PLAYING WITH MY MIND!

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The quests are a lot of the time same old MMO quests (incidentally even the “ooh it’s not just kill 10 rats” quests annoy me after a while in any MMO) and it’s a little confusing moving around at first.

Combat is different to the usual fare thanks to the aiming, if a little quirky.

However being able to go out, harvest some chickens and cook them for dinner is just cool.

Then go kill a couple of coyotes for their skins, salvage some fasteners from a wrecked old car and combine it with a couple of tree stumps you’ve chopped down to make yourself a pointy stick…

It probably helped that I tried playing gog.com’s Realms of Arkania (seriously hardcore RPG) shortly before I bought fallen earth, as it realigned my RPG difficulty/complexity balance so that I can cope with having silly amounts of choice with what to do with my skill points and not having everyone tell me exactly where I should be going next.

It’s not super polished, but it’s the first MMO I’ve played that’s felt more like a virtual world than just a game…

My first month’s not up yet though, so we’ll see. I’m hoping it stays as much fun :)

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The combat is basic FPC combat, not unlike FO3. There isn’t much dodging to be done in the open desert but it’s been pretty cool to be able to take cover during gun fights when fighting in caves. Headshots with sniper rifles are very satisfying, as is hitting a guy in the head with a pick axe( both of which do bonus damage )

The crafting system is all sorts of fun. I find it very satisfying to be riding through the desert and stumble on an abandoned farm house loaded with crafting materials. At this point I’ve done a large amount of crafting and still have never had to grind items to push myself to the next tier, which is a sign of a well designed system to me.

There were a lot of performance problems at launch but things have been solidifying nicely. It is very much the love child of pre-CU SWG and Fallout; if either of those things are appealing I’d recommend it.

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But yes, although your question is phrased such that you can get around it, I agree with the point you’re making… Its very hard to review MMO’s I would imagine. However this isn’t a review however, its not even a “Wot I Think” however as a start point for conversations its doing well…

:)

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–I’m not really sure that’s a fair criticism, especially with an MMO. Can you think of any piece of MMO writing – or really, any game writing – that /wouldn’t/ benefit from more time in-game?

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