Fallen Earth Field Notes 7: Death and the Maiden

Pretentious title, I know. It comes of digging out the classical playlist on my iTunes while I write term papers. At any rate, it’s highly descriptive of my last-but-one venture into Fallen Earth, now about two weeks ago.

One of the key quests in the regional capital of Embry Crossroads involves using a sample collector to get DNA from a group of local creatures (and returning it to the local Royal Apothecary Society rep ).

I couldn’t figure out how to use the sample collector, so I decided to do some exploring. A couple quests had me report to the distant town of Oilville, and a nice ride on Sagittarius, my horse, seemed like just the break from technological frustrations.

As my WoW guildies know, I have a pathological aversion to roads. For an overpowered paladin, that just yields the occasional “/facepalm” from my questing comrades as I pull, then usually live through slaughtering, a dozen mobs. In Fallen Earth, well, it just yielded a quick death at one point.

Which would have been fine – except I resurrected far to the west, in the flyspeck of Hotel Nevada. My level 7 character was surrounded by level 10 and 11 mobs: the swarming fire ants were a particular favorite, along with the wolf pack, and several sets of murderous NPCs, including the group very effectively patrolling a roadblock.

I died. And died, and died, and died.

And died so many times my sword broke, and most of my gear redlined. And there was *no way out.* No chickenrocking back to a nice warm inn. No teleport pad to a lowbie region. I was stuck.

I finally resorted to calling for help in the local channel, but to no avail. As of level 5, you’re default logged out of the general help channel I’ve praised in these posts. And somehow, the checkbox to log back in was grayed out for me.

Desperation hit. It looked like I was going to have to abandon Kas to the fire ants, and re-roll.

I had one last thought: roll a new alt, who *would* be logged into the help channel, and ask for a forum mod or dev to escort my noob ass back to the kiddie zones.  Fired up by the prospect of utter shame, I made one last try on Kas.

Somehow this time – unarmed, and basically in my socks – I snuck past the wolves, ran straight up and through the roadblock, and kept running like hell, a few paces in front of a squad of guards, until they gave up the chase.  I spent five minutes running back to my horse, and rode like hell back to Embry Crossroads.

I think the lack of a chickenrock option (a “hearthstone” in WoW) – which could be implemented, using the resurrection chambers as a teleport network – is a problem.

On my subsequent visit, I *carefully stayed on the road* to Oilville, ran a few quests there, and came back to Embry Crossroads to set up for another session of crafting next time.

Whew!

Fallen Earth Field Notes 6: What’s The Appeal?

I wasn’t able to do a demonstration of Fallen Earth in EDT 691: Research In Virtual Worlds yesterday: after Steam rolled out an update, no servers were available. Elisabeth Hayes had been interested in seeing the game that had pulled me away from Dragon Age, and a compelling MMO without elves

She asked me what the appeal was: it’s hard to articulate, as it’s not any one thing. Let’s take a stab at it:

• The Setting: I *love* Southwestern and desert settings. If my first exposure to WoW had been Stormwind, I wouldn’t have stayed: green-brown nature, European-ish forests, put me off in RL as well as in games. Instead, I had the good fortune to rez in the Valley of Trials in Durotar, and was immediately in love. Fallen Earth begins near the Grand Canyon, and is expanding north towards Las Vegas and west towards Los Angeles, country I know very well and love.

• The Graphics: Less  cartoony than WoW (though I love WoW’s style), yet not excessively “realistic,” Fallen Earth has a painterly style that hits a sweet spot for me.

• Crafting: This is one of the biggest appeals for me. Crafting gear in WoW is pretty much an enormous waste of time, in gathering materials and making scores of junk items to vendor-dump, and the gear you can make is almost never better than regular drops, let alone instance drops. Fallen Earth doesn’t have gear drops, so everything ingame is either made or bought from a vendor, and vendor prices are high enough to provide an incentive for crafting and trading. 

• Mature, Civilized Chat: ‘Nuff said, even though the past few days I’ve closed the chat window, being tired, grumpy and antisocial. The chat’s available, there’s nice regulars in it, and it’s remarkably grown-up.

• No Rails: Another biggie. WoW’s a perfect first MMO in its gentle, hand-holding, theme-park design. I’m ready for something  more advanced, and Fallen Earth fills that niche nicely. It’s not too different or challenging, but just enough.

• It’s an Explorer’s paradise: I’ve had good sessions of not doing a single quest, but cruising around gathering and exploring, creating a mental map of the territory between North and South Burbs and Embry Crossing – where to find cotton, hides, copper, plant chemicals for dyes and pharmaceuticals. The leveling system’s vestigial: it’s not a game about dinging, but about building your skill sets, trying professions and tactics, seeing what suits and refining those skills. While one of the most popular templates seems to be DPS rifleman crafting weapons and ammo, I’m building a very WoW Paladin-like character, and so far it’s working fine, with an emphasis on armor crafting and use, melee fighting and first aid.

What I’ve been up to: Crafting, a lot. I’ve raised my Armorcrafting from 18 to 45. Well, I’ll be at 45 when I log back in: you can queue items to craft, and they fabricate while you’re doing other things, or logged out. So, I end each session by starting builds of everything I’ve got, so I can come back to more skill points and a pack full of goods to sell.

I’ve switched out all my gear 1 to 3 times while leveling from 5 to 7 (a level seems to take 4 hours or so, or about one per session). The gear’s good looking and well designed (I wish I’d kept the black leather pants, black and red bomber jacket, black hi-tops and red headscarf – that outfit rocked). I’m ready to upgrade my horse again, but haven’t found the trainer for my next level yet. First aid and all my gathering skills are in the 30s.

At the end of my last session last week, I’d left the starter towns for the sector capital of Embry Crossing – and gotten my ass kicked. I went back to North Burb to finish off the quests there, and found a long chain of faction quests to do while crafting. I’m back now in Embry Crossing, at level 7 instead of 5, and with vastly upgraded armor and melee weapon. I’m ready!

What I’m not doing yet: I’d like to join a guild in a while, and I’m keeping an eye out for active-looking guilds, but not pursuing anything yet. I’d be interested in a light to moderate RP guild, and/or a crafters’ guild. I might wait till I’ve joined one of the game factions, which I think happens around level 15.

I’m still, so far, set on joining the Lightbearers, the most paladin-ish faction, though their portrayal in Embry Crossroads is explaining why they’re by far the least popular faction in the game. In the starter town of North Burb, they’re portrayed as sort of cracked Zen warrior-monks, which is fun, but in the big city they’re hardcore loony streetcorner preachers with a compound full of true believers – very off-putting. We’ll see how things go – I’m still working on quests for faction rep with them.

Next up: I’ve got some quests to take me to one of the other starter towns, then it’s back to the huge locus of Sector 1 quests, the Junk Fortress. I’m still not studying up, or reading the forums, so I’m not sure if some or all of it is instanced.

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 5

I’ve approached Fallen Earth with a sense of immersed exploration: I’m running with the game’s lack of “keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times” progression, and I’m taking things as they come, trying out the vast array of options available.

Part of that exploration has involved avoiding the flood of meta-data I take in about WoW. I know, for example, that there’s information about specialization and assignment of AP points for various roles. Following the advice from several people in the global help channel, though, I’m going to use my first alt to explore and get a feel for what I like, then roll a new one to assign talents efficiently to my chosen specialization.

The one bit of outside exploration I will do, though, is check out the guild forums. I’m not sure when the best time to apply to guilds will be: level 5, on leaving the starter zone, or level 15, when I understand we can get membership in the game-world factions. I’m still thinking of going Lightbringer, and have been concentrating on quests for them and their close allies the Vistas. I’m very tempted to find a roleplay guild: given the impressive level of maturity I’ve found in the help channel, I think RP here might hold out the prospect of being less of a psycho drama nightmare than my time in a WoW RP guild was.

For each session inworld, I’ve had a rough plan, one or two things I want to accomplish. Yesterday afternoon the plan was, ding level 3 at last, and upgrade my horse. Level 2 was endless, part of the roughness of Fallen Earth’s teaching of its gameplay mechanic and philosophy, as I mentioned in the previous post. Having figured out how things work, and explored the area, I was ready to quest a little more effectively.

That session went well: I raised enough money from scavenging (gathering) to pay for veterinary training, and I traded in Mako the Old Nag for Sagittarius the Horse:

crafting a new horse:

et voila!

I discovered along the way that I needed to put significant AP into melee: the basic lowbie ranged weapon is a crossbow that does some real damage, but reloads slowly, and ammo is relatively expensive. After trying some options, I settled into a WoW warrior-like pattern of pulling with a ranged weapon then finishing off melee.

Weapon-switching is bloody awkward: weapons are mapped to CTRL+ number keys, and switching on the fly in mid-flight takes some piano-like dexterity, while trying to keep the aiming cursor on the target and ready. There may be some way to get weapons onto the taskbar -but how to get *anything* onto the taskbar continues to elude me.

Between several groups of faction quests and good materials drops, I’m rapidly developing my first aid skill. As with crafting in general, it feels broader, richer and more useful than in WoW, and it gives XP towards leveling, which is *terrific.*  I’m starting to think about going medic/veterinary, surprisingly, though I’m still building towards being a decent paladin-equivalent. We’ll see, but I’m really enjoying the relative sophistication, and better integration into gameplay and rewards, of the crafting system.

For my second session, my goals were to upgrade to the best horse available in the starting zone, and to get out of the clone-lab jumpsuit at long last. Both met with success. The starter zones max out at level 5: I’m about 4.2 now, so with one more good session, Fobos and I will be ready to move on:

For my next venture inworld, I want to explore as broadly as I can, and to try to find the town that specializes in support roles, to see if there’s any additional training I can pick up there. I’ll wrap up in the starter zone, and save my quest to report on until the following session.

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 4

Thanks to allergy medicine-induced insomnia, I got to spend a really substantial chunk of time in Fallen Earth yesterday. I’ve gotten into a rhythm with it, and am enjoying it so much I even chose it over the amazing Dragon Age to return to late last night.

Bugs

They’re gone. My two previous sessions were marred by dropped files, quests rendered impossible through vanished items, abilities that wouldn’t come off cooldown, and so on. In a full day of gameplay yesterday, I had not a single issue with bugs, and the amount of bug-related questions in the global help chat went from maybe one in four to a small handful over the course of the whole day. Good job on patching!

Teaching “Sink or Swim”

Fallen Earth is *not* an entry level MMO, but is designed for veteran players seeking more of a challenge (as I perceive it – that’s not based on company marketing statements).  It’s much more immersive a world than WoW, trading realism for WoW‘s scarily effective reward system.

In talking about the game with Alice Robison last week, I had to clarify: Fallen Earth is not at all a bad teaching tool. Quite the contrary: in keeping with its post-apocalyptic theme, the game mechanics stress the lesson of the environment: life’s rough, and nobody’s gonna hold your hand.

For the most part, that integration of mechanics and theme is highly effective. There’s much more player choice and agency than in WoW, and despite WoW‘s rich lore, much more of a feeling of environmental immersion.

That said, the level 0 to 2 experience is rough, both in the sense of “difficult” and “unfinished” or “unpolished.”

There simply aren’t enough quests for the first level. Yes, the game’s sensibility is that quests should be sprinkled in with gathering and crafting, rather than forming a point-to-point amusement park-style flow of attractions. But that approach needs to be explained to the players through the gameplay mechanic, and that’s where Fallen Earth falls short in the first level.  You don’t know that yet, and if you’re coming from WoW or a similar MMO, that moment of “OMG you’re not telling me exactly what to do next!” approaches existential panic.

It could even be fixed by having one of the town NPCs saying, “go out in the desert and get some experience – we’ll have work for you once you’ve gotten some skills,” or something of the sort.

Even “sink or swim” needs to be taught: if you don’t know from swimming, without that framing message, all you get is “sink.” And that’s a really, really good way to lose first-hour players.

Global Channel and the Tidy People

OK, seriously, you don’t need to be a PhD student to realize that if you create a global channel that everyone levels 1-5 is default subscribed to, it’s going to become general chat. Call it “help,” call it “discussions of Deleuzian rhizomes,” it’s gonna be general chat.

Every time I’ve been in, that chat channel has been half general chat, a quarter the GMs trying to push chat into the other channels, and a quarter people bitching about other people using the help channel as general chat. Last night, I suppose the GMs went home, and it became about 80% general chat, 20% bitching.

The GMs are making a big mistake by trying to squelch general chat in the help channel. It’s *exactly* what they should want: it shows newbies there’s a vital, friendly, mature, active community in the game, *and* one that’s ready to patiently (mostly) answer newbie questions. It’s not a gorram bug, it’s a feature!

Coming from the land of Chuck Norris, talk-radio politics and rampant racism and homophobia in the “Trade” channel, Fallen Earth‘s help-turned-general channel is like a weekend at a spa. Keeping an eye on the chat while riding around the vast open spaces of the desert makes for *great* gameplay. Voices stand out, and it’s fun to then run into the avatars behind them in town. It’s company on the road, like listening to NPR on the drive from Phoenix to LA. And it’s fun watching the tidy people get so upset that people are being *friendly* int the *help* channel zomg!

Next up: crafting, progression and gameplay choices

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 3

So, my first three hours or so of gameplay in Fallen Earth, without screenshots. There’s a game folder for screenshots, but nothing actually saves to it, as I discovered at the end of the session. Upshot? It’s a lot less of a theme park ride on rails than WoW, it’s buggier than a week-old corpse, and I strangely really love it.

You level really slowly, or at least I did, as a first-time noob. I just dinged 2, in the amount of time that would have take me to level 12, and through the first entire starting zone, in WoW. However, leveling seems much less important: a lot of the action is in assigning AP, for which you get 20 per level. There’s a bunch of simultaneous leveling systems – your overall level, AP allocation to a d2o style system, and AP allocation to skills.

Where WoW’s philosophy is “easy to learn, a lifetime to master,” Fallen Earth’s is more “sink or swim.” It’s complicated from the get-go, where WoW is very gentle in adding things one spoonful at a time.

I got pwned by another missing file bug, again in the very first quest. You’re supposed to use a mutant hit power in melee combat against giant mutant chickens, but I kept getting a “That ability is not available at this time” message. After multiple relogs and a trip back to the forums, I got advised to run the full file check again, and sure enough, it worked better. It still doesn’t work consistently. From watching help chat, it seems to be a pretty common bug. While I was too, um, mutant chicken to ask for help in chat, I was glad to be able to offer a solution to others.

I got my horse! He doesn’t live in my backpack! I can lose him if I wander too far, and then have to go to the stables and arrange to have him towed! (You’re probably starting to see why I’m kind of in love with this game).

(this is the only game I’ve been in where I can’t pan the camera to the front. In that tired cliche, I’m *actually* staring at a girl’s ass – or a horse’s – the entire time I’m playing)

(I’ve dismounted – and my horse is STILL THERE!!1! Her name’s Mako, btw)

You have your choice of starting towns, among specialists in combat, crafting or support. I took the crafting town. While I’m thinking of becoming an armorsmith (my main’s profession in WoW), materials are fairly hard to find so far, and I’ve been doing a lot of skinning and herbalism. And I’m totally going to go veterinary – the horses are awesome!

Crafting is a bit more complex: even the simplest items have multiple sorts of ingredients that take real work to find. Anything you want to learn, you have to buy the appropriate book from a trainer in town. You can learn any or all of the crafting types, and the trainers advise you to try several things before settling into a progression path.

There doesn’t seem to be clothing options aside from armor, though I could be wrong. My kevlar tracksuit is getting really old. Other avatars seem to have regular Western wear, though. Something to look into.

There are fewer quests, and the crafting system encourages exploring/grinding as a major alternative. The quests are a fair variety beyond “kill ten rats.” One had me get a honeycomb, and use it to lure a bear away from a farmer’s crops and back to a nice bear den – a pleasant surprise for the fairly grim setting!

I saw no direct player interaction at all. The Help channel has become the default General, and is very active, the regional and local channels much less so. General chat wasn’t as bad as Barrens chat used to be in WoW, or trade chat on most servers. Still, there was the person who screamed “I AM A FAGGOT!” in Help, and the avatar named Farmer Chang who used Asian-caricature speech to talk about gold farming.

Several avatars had racist names: I saw an “Aryan” and an “Aunt Jemima.” I wondered if the survivalist-type setting draws more overt racists, but then realized that the general chat really was extraordinary civilized by WoW standards.

There were a lot fewer female avatars around than in WoW, but still a fair number. And yes, there was one who was hunting, then hanging out by the trainers, in her underwear.

There were GMs readily available in Help chat, answering questions and trying in vain to direct general chat elsewhere :p

(just logged in to get some screenshots. On the login screen, the Tip of the Day is, “There are no elves in Fallen Earth. If you see one, kill it.”) LOL!

Next notes, the illustrated version. Lots of horse pictures, no doubt!

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 2

So after that little fiasco with the missing terminal, and a crash that left me logged in but unable to interact with anything, I got through Fallen Earth’s sandbox tutorial.

Yay!

• I could do it! I’ve thought of myself as someone who sucks at shooters, but even on my mouseless laptop, I was able to do it.
• It was really exciting, and fun.
• It felt immersive: the scenario plays off your lack of knowledge by positing you’re a newly awakened clone, who’s been brought to life to get you out of the cloning facility, which is under attack by anti-tech militants. You’re guided by a disembodied voice, one of the facility engineers, who’s asking your help in freeing her in return for her aiding your escape. The concept really wipes away the dissonance of a tutorial – there’s no reason for you to know anything in the story space, so it works that you’re being guided through.
• The signal that bodies have something to loot? A cloud of flies!

Fail!

• The system for switching weapons is incredibly opaque. After three or so hours of post-tutorial gameplay, I still can’t explain how it works, other than it’s CTRL+number keys, but how weapons are tracked to what key I don’t understand. So I died a couple times – well, a bunch – while trying to switch weapons.
• Fail for missing files for the very first quest.

Meh!

• One of the things that got me interested in the game is its faction system: rather than a two faction black & white (or, to WoW’s credit, gray on gray) system, and especially one in which you have to declare your allegiance once and for all before entering the game (WoW), in Fallen Earth you don’t start with a faction, but can choose to build rep with one or more as you go. The factions are a wheel, or asterisk, with allies, neutral, adversaries and an arch-enemy. The tutorial gives you a chance to meet members of all the factions, but unless you’ve done some meta-reading, you’ll miss the point. And it’s a very quick, “hi, this is our deal.” It could have been a little more explicit and richer, but it’s not bad. (I’m thinking I’ll go Lightbearers, btw – can’t escape the whole Paladin thing! )

All in all, the tutorial rocked, and sold me on the game.

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 1

I’ve decided to acknowledge that my cyclical frustration with social virtual worlds is in a deep trough, and choose something other than Blue Mars for field observations for EDT 691, Research in Virtual Worlds. I’ve taken on the post-apocalyptic MMO, Fallen Earth.

Sunday morning I read several blog posts in succession that gave the game glowing reviews, leading me to think that it was different enough from World of Warcraft to be intriguing, yet similar enough that some of my experience and skills would transfer. I’m sick to death of Tolkienesque fantasy worlds, and I’ve been actively looking for an MMO in another genre, but have been put off by bad reviews of Champions Online, and found my trial of City of Heroes aesthetically unappealing.

I decided to download the game from Steam rather than ordering disks from Amazon (or, gods forbid, going outside to a store!). I started the download around 10 am, stopped it in the evening to play WoW, and restarted it before bed. The download didn’t complete until early Monday morning, as my computer had gone into hibernation during the process. Then, on setup, it required a patch almost the size of the initial download. I set it to run while I went off to class, and came home to a (supposedly) complete and ready to play game around 9 pm.

Character creation is a huge part of the game experience for me, and will immediately make or break my gameplay. Avatars in Fallen Earth draw on an artistic style similar to that of Dragon Age Origins, sort of “realistically ugly” for the setting. As with that game, bodies aren’t customizable at all, except Fallen Earth allows a choice of height (one forum poster suggested pulling the slider to the lowest setting, to make yourself a smaller target!).

The body types aren’t egregious, but they aren’t great. The male is of fairly average build, the female sort of anorexic, with a hip-to-waist ratio I’ve never seen on an actual human woman, but seems the inevitable default in games. The skin tones are okay, with palettes intended to be “white,” “Asian” and “Black,” and all conventional human tones. Per usual, the Black tones are more “Florida golfer” than “African,” but the Asian ones are quite nice.

There’s a really good, broad range of tattoos and piercings available, which also seems to be a common feature currently.

I was able to recreate my cross-world “Kaseido Quandry” avatar pretty well, while my “older, badass version of my atomic self” rendering came off looking more like mental patient/hospital orderly

The game starts with a sandbox tutorial, with access to full game chat channels, including a default Help channel that’s become general chat despite the GMs’ constant efforts to limit the forum though calls to take general chat elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the very first quest in the tutorial revealed a flaw running throughout Fallen Earth: it drops key files like whoa.

Quests are indicated by a gold rotating biohazard symbol over the questgiver. In the tutorial, you rez in some sort of personal chamber or cell, and can see the symbol over a computer terminal in the next room. The quest is given by voice and text: it’s a woman elsewhere in the facility who says that she’s going to help you escape. She commands you to go to the next terminal and “activate the LifeNet” before proceeding.

There was no next terminal. Across the way was a bank of computers symmetrical to the questgiving one, except for an open space in the middle where the actual quest terminal would be.

So, I looked all over the room, and ran out in the hall, to find a door that wouldn’t open until the LifeNet was active.

I was too embarrassed to ask for help: I thought that failing the “report to” starting quest was the ultimate in noob stupidity. I relogged to see if that might make a difference, but no. I then went to the forums and searched for “LifeNet,” and found that the missing terminal was a bug that could be fixed by running “Perform Complete File Check” from the login screen.

And, sure enough, it found another 3000 files to download. I logged back in to find symmetrical terminals, activated the LifeNet, and was good to go.