So GamersFirst have finally announced the launch date for Fallen Earth Free To Play: October 12th. That’s all you need to know, good night!
But seriously, since the announcement is nowhere in the realm of new, aside from the date, let’s take a look at the breakdown in subscription tiers, shall we?
Most prominently, free players will have access to all content. All missions, all skills, all world areas. Free players can create and join clans, have access to PvP, bloodsports, access to the help-chat channel. So unlike many other games, there are no content barriers. Free players even have unlimited access to the mail system, auction house, and trading, which I dare you to find in most other tiered programs.
Where free players will find restrictions is in the game’s crafting system. Foremost, players can only craft 8 hours worth of goods per day, and crafting takes a 20% hit in speed. In addition, your harvesting speed is 20% lower than subscribers, and your leveling/AP/Faction/Death toll gain rates are all clocked at 75%. There is also a limit on your bank size.
Look for me on October 12th, I’ll be the guy looting your sack while you sleep.
A lot of people turned out to MMO Fallout today looking to see what the big announcement for Fallen Earth was, and now that I’m out of work I can tell you. In a ustream transmission today, Icarus Studios announced that Gamersfirst will be taking over Fallen Earth. I’ll wait for you to wipe the soda off of your computer screen.
Fallen Earth is set to come back at 11pm.
8:00 Transmission has begun.
8:06 “This is not a change we’re going to be making immediately. We are transitioning our servers and working on our hardware and solidifying that aspect.”
8:10 “Fallen Earth dev team will continue developing Fallen Earth. Business as usual.”
8:12 Multiple passenger vehicles coming out, you can quote as “really fucking big.”
8:13 Servers will be located on the east coast.
8:14 Factions are going to matter.
8:20 More sandbox oriented features.
8:30 All discussions on free to play are hypothetical, but Icarus has said that the cash shop would be as far removed from essential gameplay as possible, citing pay to win as a “dick move.”
8:41 The official corporate response to “will we be able to lease weapons (ala APB)” is “fuck that.”
8:44 There will not be destructible terrain, however player buildings can be destroyed.
8:57 I don’t think there are any more questions relating to the transition that can be answered so I’ll leave it here.
Fun fact: The announcement is not for content coinciding with the release of a Fallen Earth line of Lego minifigures and playsets, although those odds would be much higher were this the 1990’s. So what is the big major extraordinary amazing unannounced news? You’ll have to wait until Tuesday to find out.
The Fallen Earth team has a MAJOR announcement during the scheduled maintenance set for next Tuesday, May 31. We’re giving ya’ll a chance to sit down with Senior Game Designer Marie “Aro Sei” Croall as she discusses the State of the Game and plans beyond.
Take out the trash, call off work, heat up those microwave dinners, put your pets to bed and your kids in the kennel, you won’t want to miss this. You’ll have two chances to hear this amazing announcement live (or just check this website), which you can find here on Fallen Earth’s ustream. Once at 3pm and once at 8pm Eastern.
Of course, the question now is…what would be this major? Of those answers I can think of, it is either:
Fallen Earth is going free to play.
Fallen Earth is shutting down.
Icarus Studios is making a new game.
We already know of a lot of upgrades coming to the game. Combat changes, that housing system, and more. What better time than now to announce a free to play section? If the announcement starts out with “we want to thank everyone who supported Fallen Earth from beta to launch and onward,” then you might have grounds to be concerned.
Fallen Earth is great in the sense that you don’t necessarily have to resubscribe just to get a good idea on how the game has progressed. Rather than plunk down fifteen bucks on a month-long subscription you might regret, this particular MMO is known to throw out fourteen day passes every few months to inactive accounts, allowing them unrestricted access to the game, and hopefully to get them back to forking over some moolah.
If you are an ex-Fallen Earth player, including trial accounts, head on over to this website to activate your account for fourteen days, no restrictions. You only have until August 4th to reactivate your accounts before this offer expires. You might even see me reactivated at the upcoming Texan Invasion event on the 25th (My character’s name is Jomali…I think.). The offer is not for new accounts, although a fourteen day trial already exists for new players.
I’ve included the URL in its base form, as people unfamiliar with MMO Fallout may take me with less trust than your average MMO website. http://www.fallenearth.com/retry.html
If you head over to Direct2Drive, you will find a number of MMOs on sale for the time being. As there hasn’t been much in terms of information from Direct2Drive, I have no indication as to whether or not these are permanent price slashes, or temporary publisher price cuts. Either way, check out some great deals.
I’ll be checking Direct2Drive over the course of this week and next week until the sales end.
Log entry for the second week of June, 2051: It is nearly a month since I encountered the strange man in the ragged clothing. The prairie chicken eggs he gave me have yet to hatch, or do much at all. I am considering making breakfast out of them, as my supply of grilled chicken is running incredibly low. I find myself coming across more and more of the black chips that the strange man handed to me, in various places. Under a pile of coal, in the shirt pocket of a bandit I was hired to kill, on the person of several blade dancers, and even just sitting on the ground in Mumford. I have collected a substantial number of these chips, and continue to find more. I shall log in an entry when this mysterious use for them becomes apparent.
While delivering a bank notice to the vault in Embry Crossroads, I came across a sole man walking down the street with a dog. A pet dog! The man wore a ten gallon hat, and a light blue jacket over a ragged t-shirt, and jeans that would have been entirely white were it not for the small patches of unfaded blue sporadically placed on the garment. His eyes caught my own, and lit up in a fire of excitement. He motioned his hand to me, when I noticed his dog had jogged over and begun sniffing away. The man nodded his enormous hat and quickly blew into a sales pitch,
“Son, you may not know me, but I’m a traveling salesman you look like someone who could use a companion, and now this here fella ain’t no good for fightin’ (he’s a bit of a wuss when the going gets tough), but he’ll be the most faithful companion you’ll ever lay eyes on and if you don’t believe me you can take ‘im and lock ‘im in the trunk of yer vehicle along with yer significant other and see whose happy ter see ya when ya open it two hours later-“
I stopped him, and asked how much the dog cost. Ten dollars, “and I don’t take none of them chips y’all pass as cash.” Some paper money still exists, and if you want to look like a public moron the best method is to go down to the bank and ask to convert your chips into dollars. Luckily, the old American dollar had devalued so much that ten dollars was a pittance, and I purchased the dog. The man thanked me, tipped his skyscraper hat, and continued on his way. Oddly enough, I saw for a split second the inside of his bag, containing what must have been dozens of leashes and collars. On his way past, he removed a leash from his bag and, when I had turned around, he had yet another dog with him. Where did that dog come from?
I’ve decided to name him Pearce. It is a he, I made certain to check.
On a side note, I must investigate my cooking kit, as it has the unnatural ability to cook any meat I put in it into grilled chicken. After testing komodo dragons, cave lizards, cows, pigs, and even several bandits I discovered on the outskirts of town, I found all of their meat cooked into a fine grilled chicken.
In my defense, I did promise that I would do that again. Fallen Earth has gone the way of Blizzard, offering two items in a cash-shop store. The first item, already explained in the above, is a companion dog that follows you around. The Kaibab Cur doesn’t offer up a fight, nor will he aid you in combat. He does carry four items, and loves to go for long walks in the wasteland. The Kaibab Cur costs $10 USD and covers your whole account. A word of warning, however: The dog can be killed in PvP.
The second item is a pair of brass goggles that offer a small bonus, and alternately look awesome. The goggles cost $5.
We all have those MMOs that we’ve quit for various reasons: Lack of depth, that one annoying feature, lag, abundance of bugs. I, to set an example, recently started playing Fallen Earth again, which I had quit shortly before picking up Aion in late October. What I found was a much improved game, not to mention a whole abundance of features that were not in the title when I stopped playing. I’m looking forward to starting the construction skill, but most notably is the lack of lag. I’m actually disappointed that I dropped Fallen Earth so soon, although my reasoning was because of the intense rubber-banding.
On the other hand, I also started playing the Allods Online beta again, and was immediately reminded of why I quit. Allods is a fun game, but some of the quests I had in my journal made me want to set my computer on fire. Not to mention the fact that I quit Allods mainly for the same reason I quit World of Warcraft; because the game just got boring. The cinematic effects die off quickly after the tutorial, and the prospects of systems similar to, if not even more strict, than the Fear of Death mechanic or armor cursing make me hesitant to put any investment into the title.
So have you given your old MMO a chance? And what was the result?
Log Entry for the second week of May 2051: After my most recent encounter, I have determined it best to find myself a suitable permanent residence. Traveling for miles over these burned out plains, I pass by numerous, if not countless, houses and buildings in varying states of disrepair. Entire sides of the buildings gone, if not completely crumbled. In my passings, I find plenty of the various flora and fauna of the wilderness, and although I am not exactly living in style, there has yet to be a point where I become too hungry to walk.
But I write this because one day as I was foraging vegetables, a man approached me. Dressed in ragged clothing similar to my own, I presumed him to be the owner of the farm, readying my pistol only to find some cosmic force preventing me from willingly drawing my only means of defense. The man, however, simply approached me, extended his arm, and shook my own. When he spoke, I felt myself awash in heat, his voice reminding me of the depictions of God on the various radio shows, yet not as low pitched. He said;
“You have proven yourself to be a masterful survivalist, and you have foraged more than a thousand fruits, vegetables, and various other plants. For this, I want to give you a special reward.”
He reached into his pocket and retrieved an egg, which I immediately recognized as a prairie chicken egg, and number of chips reminiscent of my own poker-chip currency. Handing each individually to me, he turned and was gone in the blink of an eye. I will still remember his departing words;
“Keep hold of those. You will find use for them in the near future.”
Far overdrawn introductions aside, Fallen Earth has finally introduced achievements! The first batch of achievements, totaling five hundred, have been split into five categories of varying difficulty, and include everything from PvP encounters to killing bosses, scavenging, and crafting. The achievements are retroactive. And if you did not catch it from the above story, a second achievement pack is on the way, bringing with it rewards for achievements. The vanity pet reward system is really just speculation on my part.
Achievements are an interesting line in MMOs. On one hand, you have people who will grind out achievements just to say they got them all, even if that includes killing ten thousand of one particular NPC (I’m looking at you, Champions Online). On the other hand, you have people who absolutely hate the idea of grinding out achievements for rewards. Somewhere in the middle you have the casual gamer, who tries to go for the easiest achievements first and then sporadically goes up from there.
Achievements, if done right, can add a whole new level of involvement to an MMO. Warhammer Online is one of the few MMOs to take the achievement book and turn it into an integrated part of the game, the Tome of Knowledge, that gives you a lot of information on the world and the characters who inhabit it.
And to answer your question: Yes, I will be opening every Fallen Earth article with my little ongoing story.
Layoffs post-launch are not new in the MMO world. Once an MMO has launched, and most of the post-launch bugs are taken care of, a large part of the team (many working under contract rather than full employment) are let go. Think of it as seasonal work, but working on a video game rather than stocking shelves at a Wal Mart around Christmas time. A lot of people are not aware of this factor, however:
So when the announcement came that Icarus was restructuring and had laid off a reported 80% of their staff, I was not all too surprised. In an interview with Massively, Marketing Manager Jessica Orr revealed that a team of 110 employees was reduced to around 35, not including GMs, customer service, and (assumed) janitorial staff. Orr also doused rumors that the impending layoffs were the reason Lee Hammock had resigned, noting that he was offered a position at another company. Oh and future updates should not be impacted.
So there you have it. Fallen Earth is triple A and here to stay! As NCwest’s President put it…No, he was talking about Tabula Rasa.
On another note, take this bias spin as you will, being that unless Icarus has been planning their major patches with this layoff in mind all along, future updates will indeed be affected by having a smaller team. Are these layoffs post-launch normal? Absolutely. Is this a sign that Fallen Earth is in danger? No, nowhere near it.
MMO Fallout 
