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Fallen Earth: Beta Report
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Fallen Earth through the scope of an assault rifle.
I'll freely admit that I didn't think I'd be writing about this game. I saw Fallen Earth for the first time at GDC 2007, while suffering from what I believed at the time to be some manner of death virus. The people showing it off were enthusiastic, and they had a slightly playable build available, but so few of the games I saw that week ever actually materialized, and the game appeared to be hanging by so thin a shoestring, that I'd written Fallen Earth off almost automatically.
I was wrong. Fallen Earth doesn't have a huge marketing campaign behind it, but this past weekend marked the end of its open beta. It very much plays like the kind of MMO that a bunch of fans of Fallout would have made; it doesn't have the same kind of constant black humor as the original Fallout games did, but when it dips into that well, it works. (The instanced tutorial, for example, ends with a truly bizarre filmstrip.)
Players in Fallen Earth enter the game as freshly awakened clones, originally grown for purposes of organ farming, in a facility hidden inside what used to be the Hoover Dam. The Dam is now a battlefield, with members of every major faction in the game caught up in a massive multi-sided shootout, and your job is to somehow get out alive. The subsequent instance is meant to teach you about the gameplay, and ends with you choosing a location in the world to be teleported to.
One sour note, though, is that the tutorial takes place with you at level 40, and knocks you back down to level 1 the moment you're out in the world. You go from using an assault rifle, mowing down White Crow mercenaries like a tiny god of death, to plinking zombies with a zip gun. I like the instanced tutorial, but I don't like having to start killing rats two hours in.
Fallen Earth plays a bit more like a shooter or an action-RPG than most MMOs do. While the essential nature of combat is still intact - you still run up to another guy and beat on him, using cooldown-based abilities until either you or he fall down - you activate the combat mode by clicking the mouse button, and attack by placing crosshairs on a target and clicking. While combat resolution is still based on random numbers, positioning and twitch reflexes also play a role. It takes a little bit of getting used to.
Fallen Earth's game world, despite my initial mention of Fallout, is set in a near-future scenario where humanity's been ravaged by the Shiva virus, which first appeared in 2054. Soon, a burgeoning cyberpunk scenario was succumbing to a worldwide pathogen, and nukes started flying. A bit over a hundred years later, the survivors of humanity are trapped in and around the Grand Canyon by radioactive storms and virus-created mutants, trying hard to survive.
Right now, my character's fighting a bunch of zombies in and around an old ramshackle town, which has a tendency to leave large piles of dead people lying around. The leveling system's very freeform, allowing you to stick points in your abilities and attributes as you level up; if not for leveling being tied to the acquisition of more points, it'd almost be a completely freeform system. Crafting is unnecessarily time-consuming (forty-five seconds to make a stinkin' bandage? Really?), but I've barely scratched the surface.
What's really holding me back on Fallen Earth is that, for some reason, my computer runs the beta like a slideshow. There's definite potential here, though, both in the setting and in the game's systems.
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