Fallen Earth Developer Interview
| Written by: Etali |
| Date: 2010-01-06 |
Fallen Earth is the gritty, challenging MMO that many gamers have been waiting for. We had a chance to put some questions in front of the developers, and Colin Dwan, the Project Manager gave us some thoughts on the games that inspired Fallen Earth, player specs, their plans for a new sector, and more. You can read our review of Fallen Earth here. If you haven't already tried the game's ten day free trial, give it a look. I promise you won't find any orcs, goblins, or elves! There have been a lot of Post-Apoc games released in the past few months. When you originally started work on Fallen Earth, what were your main inspirations? When our early team first began developing ideas for Fallen Earth, the post-apocalyptic setting was still relatively untouched in the video game world. It was a setting waiting to be explored as an MMO–one that our team felt would resonate with players and create a unique set of emotions. It wasn’t all fantasy. Instead, the post-apocalyptic setting provided a rugged environment with conflict. You've mentioned that you have some plans for future content and expansions; could you give us some clues about what's on the horizon next year? We have a few game play aspects that our team will be focusing on in the coming year. PvP has been a hot topic among Fallen Earth fans and that is an area players can expect to see improvements. Of course they can also expect to see continued support on existing content, holidays, and new areas of wilderness to explore as the survivors push back radiation boundaries. The Grand Canyon environment is constantly shifting and revealing lost colonies and remnants of the previous civilization. Have you had any surprises in terms of players preferring one particular faction or skill set? Surprisingly, the faction wheel is playing out very similar to what our team had expected. We have noticed a pull towards the Enforcers and Techs, both of which take similar combat approaches, but as players progress, they do tend to branch out once they discover the benefits of other factions. The biggest surprise comes in how willing clans are to work cross-faction. Over the next few months we expect new features to help solidify the desire for clans to think twice before working with their arch-enemies. How long do you think it will take the average player to reach max level? From our initial perceptions, it looks like levelling is slower than in other games, but that you can enjoy most of the game's activities without needing to rush to an "end game"? While there are always some power-levellers that manage to blow away the curve, most characters are progressing at roughly the rate we expected. We tried to stay with typical target ranges of a few hours per level with that number accelerated early on to give low level players a break. There is a surprising tendency for players to hang around longer than intended in the first sector of gameplay, but we are in the process of adding new incentives to push players further into the higher sectors. This just goes to show that with all the content in Fallen Earth, players can really enjoy exploring and working with all the settlements rather than just focusing on their next “ding”. At the same time we are also adding new features to give the players at the top end more activities to keep them engaged. Many people have had problems getting the game to work under WINE / cross-over, etc. Is this something you ever plan on supporting? We would love to spend more time supporting different setups from operating systems to unique display drivers. However, as a small staff we have to stay agile and focus our efforts on the top issues. At the moment, that means continued support for optimizations and new features we have planned. We appreciate the scrappy nature of folks trying to get our game working on other systems and we’re looking forward to fighting alongside them in the future. |
