Welcome!

Another day, another MMO. Sometimes it feels like everybody with enough spare time is putting together a game with the object of hopefully uniting millions and incidentally perhaps wrangling a few dollars out of them on the way. The latest title to fall under my stern glance is Fallen Earth, the near future post-apocalyptic FPS RPG adventure, seemingly set almost exclusively in the North American wilds.

If this offends your sense of what is good and right, take heart! Mutants substitute for monsters and non-human races, pseudo-scientific malarkey gives us magical abilities, and if your hunger for medieval weaponry is not assuaged, at least you have the option to beat things to death with your baseball bat covered in spikes.

Incredibly, despite being in development for only nine months, Fallen Earth LLC have announced that their task is near complete, with all content in place and alpha testing already underway. This is a pretty impressive feat, given that the game includes 70 towns, six factions, 50,000 lines of dialogue, 6,000 items, 5,000 missions, and 1,300 animations and emotes. A spokesperson for Fallen Earth LLC commented on their almost unbelievable speediness:

“When we set our milestones and started the scrum method nine months ago, we knew we had some incredibly high goals for the team to achieve,” said Colin Dwan, Fallen Earth project manager. “Since then we have run like a well-oiled machine and actually surpassed those original goals. The team has worked tirelessly to not only deliver an immense volume of material, but new and innovative play experiences. Quality has not been sacrificed on our path to completion. I can't wait to get more people in the world to enjoy this awesome experience.

There's a range of different vehicles, some of which will have you humming "Thunderdome", and yes, combat while in vehicle/mounted is possible. On that note, the whole thing is Mad Max enough that you'll probably be wanting plenty of mohawks, facial tattoos, and tribal piercings just to fit in, as well as plenty of scope to differentiate yourself from all the other chumps. My, it's just like adolescence... Luckily, Fallen Earth also allows thousands of character modifications: your player model has more than twelve customization slots, including head, mouth, eye and ear, rather than a good ol' "pick on of ten pre-rendered models". Clothing and armor is also diverse, being divided into separate equipment slots for jacket, pants, belts, gloves, and pads. All of these pretty-pretties are modelled with a high poly count, and textured using fine normal mapping, aiming for as much 3D realism as posisble.

Some delicious mutant enemies.

There's plenty of different weapons up for grabs, too, including bladed hockey stick, parking meter, Tesla hammer, the famous baseball-bat-with-spikes-in, and even a rolling pin if nothing else comes to hand. There's also a wide range of firearms and magic, and up to six different weapons can be carried at one time, visible on your character model. Item creation will play a large part in gameplay, with about 95% of all items attainable either singularly or cooperatively using various craft skills. Fallen Earth uses some sort of classless character development system to select and upgrade these skills, perhaps similar to that classic post-apocalyptic title, Fallout?

Comparisons with Fallout are inevitable, given the setting, and also with the upcoming Bethesda title and fairly-heavily-rumoured Fallout MMO, but while die-hard fans scorn the first and wait eagerly for the second, Fallen Earth might satisfy a few cravings. Play begins in safe starting towns, but 15 player-conquerable towns and countless own-able outposts are ripe for juicy PvP action. All this action takes place in a 7 000 square kilometre area around the Grand Canyon and Hoover dam.

There are a couple of videos on the server you can check out, although all of them are a good ten months old, and the second one is frankly amusing with its total lack of knowledge of domestic animal behaviour, meaning of the word "recent", and hunting tactics. However, they'll give you an idea of what to expect from Fallen Earth as it approaches beta testing stage.