We Fall And Then We Rise - The Unlikely Return Of Fallen Earth

A few days ago I read that Little Orbit were planning on bringing back the much-missed post-apocalyptic quasi-western mmorpg, Fallen Earth. Before I'd had time to assimilate that, they'd announced it wouldn't be in months or weeks or even days. It would be now.

I always really liked Fallen Earth. I was very sad to see it go. When I heard it was coming back I was determined to make some time at least to take a look. I hadn't made any plans on how that might happen other than that I'd probably wait for it to reappear on Steam, if only to make the whole process easier on the re-installing and re-registering front.

This morning I glanced down my blog roll and saw someone was already playing it. I checked the Steam page to see if anything had change. It hadn't. The game remains in limbo there, with a "Mixed" rating and a message from Valve that reads "At the request of the publisher, Fallen Earth Free2Play is no longer available for sale on Steam..."

I checked the Gamers First website. There's a big, orange "Play Free Now" button just begging to be pressed. I pressed it and of course it asked me to register or if I had an account already I could sign in. I did have an account already and I had the details. 

They didn't work. I reset the password. I thought I'd save myself the trouble of thinking up a new one by making my new password the same as my old one. I mean, logically, the old one hadn't been recognized, so the system checking it couldn't possibly know I'd used it before, right? I mean, if it did, then it would have worked.

Of course it rejected it on the grounds I couldn't re-use my current password. Which is a Catch 22 and a paradox, isn't it? Not the first time that's happened to me, either.

Anyhoo...

<Snip>

I just cut four long paragraphs where I explained in excruciating detail exactly how I nearly downloaded and installed the game and precisely why in the end I didn't need to. I wrote it before lunch then I came back and re-read it and almost fell asleep. So boring. The bit about passwords is edge of the seat stuff by comparison.

Cutting to the chase, in what felt like an indecently short time after deciding to do it, I was at character creation, making a new character. I did wonder as I was logging in whether my old characters would be there but no, it's a fresh start.

I have a post in mind about character creation and choice in Fallen Earth but I'm going to let it brew for a while. I'll just say I was very happy with the results.

I was also impressed with the tutorial. I'm not absolutely sure I've never played through it before. It seemed mostly unfamiliar but there were one or two moments when I did wonder if maybe I'd gone through it for a blog post or something.

It's very different from and much better than the tutorial I remember quite clearly from the launch era, back when you not only had to buy the game but also pay a subscription, something I did for about three months.

That tutorial made the almost unforgiveable mistake of letting you spend half an hour as an extremely powerful, fully-geared, high level character before finally dumping you into the real game, stripped of all your armor, weapons, skills and levels, a hobo in rags barely fit go two rounds with a chicken. I strongly dislike tutorials that play that trick.

The current one is much better. It reminds me of the original DCUO tutorial or indeed the original Allods one. Any tutorial, really, where an urgent voice in your head tells you what to do as everything around you falls apart and explodes. I quite enjoy those.

It took me maybe twenty minutes to get through that part and then it was out into the world. Fallen Earth is a very strange game, graphically, in that it manages at one and the same time to look primitive yet still breathtaking. It looked old-fashioned even when it was new but, rather like Lord of the Rings Online, the whole thing somehow manages to give the impression of being convincing rather than  outdated, weathered and authentic rather than tired and cheap.

It is, in fact, one of my favorite games for how it looks. It has an indefinable charisma. I guess it's all down to a combination of great design and good lighting but whatever it is, it really works.

With time pressing, I finished the first couple of quests, took some screenshots and logged out. Before I left I also made a chat window with none of the global or other public channels. I'd forgotten just how appallingly awful public discourse in Fallen Earth can be.

I don't know why but it's always been that way. It got even worse when the game went Free to Play but I remember it being very bad even before that. Something about the post-apocalyptic setting seems to attract the kind of people who not only know an astonishing number of colorfully obscene expressions but are determined everyone else should learn them too.

There is a bad word filter but it doesn't work. I went to put mine on and found it already was. I can't imagine what it could be set to filter out given what it was letting through. I tried to switch it off and on again to see if that made a difference but all that happened was I got a system message telling me "You are not allowed to run commands."

I'm guessing we'll just have to put up with both the bad behavior and the bugs, both of which were always a big part of the Fallen Earth experience. Gamers First have made it clear this is an as-is experience not a bona fide relaunch. That's fine with me. I'm happy just to have the chance to ride my horse through the desert sunsets once again.

When I get a horse, that is. 

Note to self. Next job: get a horse.

All The Tired Horses

Shintar posted this week on her World of Warcraft Blog, Priest With A Cause, that she was Level 40 with a mount. She'd posted a while earlier about how she planned to raise the cash, which is considerable, to make that happen.

I found myself commenting somewhat testily on both posts. There's something about mounts in MMORPGs that gets my goat these days. Not that I have a goat. Although I could, seeing as how I play a dwarf in both WoW Classic and Lord of the Rings Online. Theoretically, that is. I don't have the money in the first or the levels in the second but it could happen.

Do I really see myself astride a goat, though? It's fantastical, sure, but it's not a fantasy I've ever entertained. Not that I've never fantasized about riding.

When I was a child I went through a peculiar pony phase. I made my mother promise that if she won the Football Pools (the 1960s version of a lottery that would require a lot more explanation for the uninitiated than I'm prepared to get into here - just think Terry Pratchett and you're half way there...) she'd buy me a pony. I even knew what it would look like - black with a white blaze on its brow.

Motorbikin', motorbikin', motorbikin'

I grew up surrounded by horses. There were a couple stabled in the field above my house and several more running loose in the field next to our orchard. Yes, I had that kind of childhood. I liked them but I was wary. Horses have a wicked sense of humor. They're not to be trusted.

I sat on a horse exactly once. It was loose on the common outside my school, just standing there. I was with some friends. There were girls there. I ran at the horse and vaulted onto it. It let me. It barely moved, just carried on standing there. Once I was up I had nothing. I slid off and that was that.

Lucky it didn't bolt or turn around and bite me or throw me and kick me I guess, but that was how we rolled back then. Eight years old and no adults between breakfast and tea. Half Huck Finn, half Just William with a smidgeon of Lord of the Flies to keep us honest. The past isn't just a different country, it's a different universe.

Other beasts I have bestrode include donkeys at the seaside when I was tiny(ish) and a camel when I was full grown. I can't say any were expreiences I wanted to repeat. I've been on the back of a motorbike a few times. Never wanted to own one.

If you gotta go, go, gotta go motorbike ridin'

When it comes to games my views on mounts have changed. Are changing even now.

The first I remember were in EverQuest. Norrath didn't have any mounts when I arrived nor for some while afterwards. If you wanted to travel you got on Shanks's Pony as my grandfather used to say.

I don't remember when horses were introduced but it must have been fairly late on. I know they came before the Legends of Ykesha expansion in 2003 because that was when we got Drogs. Drogs (real name Drogmor) are large, lizardy creatures you can buy at the Lighthouse in The Gulf of Gunthak, a place where I've spent many hours and a good deal of platinum across the years. I wanted one for my Ogre Shadowknight because an ogre looks silly on a horse.

By the time LoY appeared my Gnome Cleric had been riding his own, tiny, horse for a while. For him, at the time, having a horse was far more important than having his "Epic", something all clerics were supposedly obligated to own but which he never bothered with and never missed.

The thing about having a mount in EQ was this: it wasn't primarily a means of transport. In most MMORPGs mounts are visually aggressive run speed buffs. In EverQuest their primary function, particularly for casters, was as mana batteries and aggro reducers. Still is, at least when I play.

A bug briefly brings Fallen Earth to EverQuest

In those days both mana and aggro management were key gameplay components. Casters had to sit to meditate to regain mana at an increased rate but the very act of sitting radically increased mob aggro. A healer who sat down mid-fight to regain enough mana to cast a vital heal would often find the mob peeling off the tank to come beat on an apparently helpless target.

If you had a horse, all that went away. On a horse, the game treated you as though you were simultaneously standing and sitting. You could cast freely but you regained mana at the seated rate. Mobs perceived you as standing so your aggro stayed low.

Also, as an added bonus, if I'm remembering correctly, you didn't suffer from encumbrance while mounted. Yes, you did go a bit faster as well - there were different grades of horse to improve your travel speed -  but that was the least of it.

In other MMORPGs, Fallen Earth springs immediately to mind, mounts operate as mobile inventory. They have saddlebags. That's a more interesting proposition to me than just going faster.

The real thing

Fallen Earth, of course, had the best implementation of mounts that I've experienced. There, your horse was an individual entity in the world. You couldn't fold it up and put it in your backpack or wish it away to some nether-dimensional no-space.

If you wanted to get off your horse in Fallen Earth you had to dismount and there it would be, standing next to you. If you wandered off and forgot about your mount, predators could attack and kill it. I left my horse by the side of the road once and came back to find it half-eaten by giant ants. If you wanted to leave it safely you had to find a stable and arrange for room and board.

Over the years I've seen a huge variety of mounts, from the quasi-realistic versions in Fallen Earth and Lord of the Rings Online to the extremes of whimsy in Riders of Icarus. The trend over the last decade or so has definitely been towards the spectacular and the ludicrous.

Right

Retail World of Warcraft offers a mindbending melange of creatures and vehicles, some of which seat several players and come equipped with NPC services. EverQuest II long abandoned even a hat-tip to sanity, seating its characters on everything from distorted cats to full-size dragons, flying discs and leaping lizards.

As the decades pass, the frog of my suspended disbelief has slowly boiled dry. The last drops of my patience turned to steam with the introduction of mounts to Guild Wars 2 (and here I am running very much against the herd because there are many who feel ArenaNet's implementation of mounts represents some kind of gold standard for the genre).

I loathe them. I detest the hypersaturated bling they bring to what was once one of the best-visualised fantasy worlds in the genre. I condemn the unapologetic, unashamed, crass commerciality of the skin market, something that smacks of both desperation and the abandonment of principle.

More even than their appalling appearance, I abhorr their practical implementation. I detest the way they lurch and jolt and skid and stutter, every nausea-inducing plunge and check. The way each mount comes with a specific movement function turns fantasy role-play into a game of creature-feature mini-golf as you stop, assess the obstacle ahead of you and select the most appropriate "club".

What mounts have done to GW2, other than turning every public gathering into a six-year old's sugar nightmare, is to weaponize one of the most annoying of its original features - jumping puzzles. With mounts there's now no content that can't be reduced to a test of hand-eye co-ordination and keyboard dexterity. Accessibility can go drown in a bucket.

Wrong

I think it's almost entirely down to GW2's doubling-down on all the worst aspects of the concept that has soured me on mounts everywhere else. I used to quite like the silliness and the showing off. I still do in games like Riders of Icarus, where crazy rides are the whole point of the game.

In anything that still feels like it might just have a chance of passing for a virtual world in a dim light, though, I'm not feeling the love for mounts any more. I may have become inured to the merry-go-round in EQ2, where population density at least renders visual pollution no more than a sporadic problem, but it's notable that even there my own choice of mounts tends towards a discreet set of wings that leave my characters looking much the same as if they were on foot, except when they're actually in flight.

That's why I'm not at all bothered that I don't yet have a mount in Classic as I bear down on Level 50. I can't afford one and I don't intend to make any effort to change that. I'd rather spend my gold on things that matter, like better weapons or more inventory space.

I'll get a mount eventually. Probably that goat. Maybe a horse. Nothing flashy. When I have it, I'll use it sparingly. Long before my current discomfort with the concept I already found the constant on-and-off nature of mount implenmentation in many MMORPGs annoying.

One of the main reasons I don't have the same degree of dislike for mounts in EQ2 and Riders of Icarus that I do in other games is that they allow your character to do much the same mounted as dismounted. Either that, or they handle the mounting and dismounting automatically so I don't have to bother with it.

If and when I finally get a mount in Classic I plan on using it for long trips on auto-run and not much else. And I won't be buying one until I have enough money that the initial cost leaves me with at least as much left in the bank as I just spent.

If I'm mounted before I hit sixty I'll be surprised.

Road To Nowhere: Fallen Earth

I told myself I wasn't going to do this. What would be the point? I'd just be picking at a scab that closed over long ago. Best leave well alone. And then I went and did it anyway.

It was Syp's fault. I read his short news item on Massively OP yesterday and I thought "oh, the hell with it. Why not?" So I did.

I expected I'd have to download the whole thing all over again, but no. To my considerable surprise, not only did I still have Fallen Earth installed but the icon was right there, on the desktop. I clicked it. It took me straight to the login screen, where, naturally, my password wasn't recognized.

Easy fix. New password accepted. The patcher told me it would take nine hours to bring me up to date.  Then it went away to check its calculations and came up with a revised timetable: two minutes. I was back.

Back where, though? Not to mention back, why?

I have a long and fractured history with Fallen Earth. I bought it just after release, which, since the sunset is unhappily timed to co-incide with the tenth anniversary, must have been in 2009. I thought I was playing World of Warcraft exclusively in 2009 but who am I to know what I was doing? The past is a different country. I did things differently there.

At release Fallen Earth was a subscription-only MMORPG. Most were. I paid for the box, although I don't believe there ever was an actual,  physical box. If there was I can't find it and I have all my old games boxes going back to the early 1980s. I have a dim memory of it being one of the first digital downloads I ever paid for but don't hold me to that.

I subbed for a couple of months. Could have been three. By then I wasn't playing often enough to justify the spend so I stopped. Paying and playing, that is, since the two were conjoined.

While I was playing I got my one and only character just into the twenties. I remember it as being slow going but highly absorbing. Fallen Earth has some fairly simple combat but some pretty deep gameplay. There are a boatload of factions to balance, a sprawling skill system, some extensive and extremely time-consuming gathering and crafting options and a huge, vast, open world to explore.

If anyone thinks travel in WoW Classic is slow they really ought to take a look at Fallen Earth. Go on, it's free and you still have a couple of weeks. There are only a few zones but they are insanely huge. On foot it takes maybe half an hour - probably closer to forty-five minutes - to get from one end of Sector 2 to the other. On the road. If you survive.

I rode down that road yesterday on my Racehorse, the fastest of my four mounts. I started about three-quarters of the way North and it took me more than twenty minutes to get to Sector 1. I stopped a few times to take screenshots but mostly I just cantered.

And that's all I did. It's all I ever do. It's why I eventually stopped logging in, casually, every year or so, even though the game's been free to play for a long time. It's the same problem we all have, going back to former MMORPGs; all my bags are full and I don't know what anything's for. I have no idea where to go or want to do so I just ride around for an hour or two, take a lot of moody photos, then log out.

Endgame Viable had a post up yesterday about the new(ish) scaleable font in Lord of the Rings Online (who knew?). He ends with a zinger: "Now if only they could do something about those inventory icons…" He should see Fallen Earth!

It's an unfair comparison. FE's icons are orders of magnitude better than LotRO's. They're neat, detailed illustrations that have clear relevance to the objects they represent. There are always highly explanatory tool-tips, often with a good joke thrown in. They've been prepared with intelligence, wit and care.

Only there are so many of them. It's overwhelming. My entire inventory (and that includes a separate vault in each sector and large saddlebags on every mount) is completely full of things I obviously thought worth keeping when I last played "seriously", which was for a few sessions after the free to play transition. That overlapped with the start of this blog and I managed one proper post about it in May 2012.

I came back a few times after that. I remember logging in after they added craftable camps. I made the basic one. I thought I blogged about it but apparently not. Mostly, though, I log in, become overwhelmed at the prospect of doing anything substantive, ride around for a while and... that's it.

That's why I was going to skip the sunset. What would be the point? I know what the world looks like - unearthly, haunting, elegiac, atmospheric, mesmerizing in its stark, desecrated beauty. Then Syp mentioned there was an actual event leading up to the server going dark...

Plus, when I looked, it seems I have almost no screenshots of Fallen Earth. How that can be, when I know I took scores, maybe hundreds, and I have many much older shots from other games I can't exactly say, but it's an omission that needs to be rectified.

I took over forty screenshots yesterday. I hope to visit several old haunts and take a few hundred more before the apocalypse of the apocalypse. (With hideous irony, FE's rarely-used full title is "Fallen Earth: Welcome to the Apocalypse").

There used to be a way to hide the UI. The excellent wiki tells me it's Alt-F10 but it's not any more. As Wilhelm observes, information on the internet has a limited shelf-life, especially for games that change ownership and payment model. 

Having to crop around the UI isn't going to stop me taking the shots. If anyone knows the current key combo to hide the UI, though, I'd love to hear about it. That's assuming anyone else reading this is still playing. Or ever played.

If not, well, they say it's never too late to start. There's a whole two weeks left. That count as a good run in some of the imports I've played over the last few years.

And it might not be The End. Little Orbit, the current owners, have showed great good faith since they took the game over from Gamigo, who... didn't, much. LO say they would like to bring Fallen Earth back, somehow, sometime, with an engine they can maintain and with some kind of plan for the future.

I really hope they do. Fallen Earth is a gem of an MMORPG that somehow slipped through the cracks. It deserves a post-apocalyptic survival story of its own.

Once Bitten : Fallen Earth

Who can say what made me decide patch up Fallen Earth after all this time. The recent flurry of publicity all came later.   It's pushing a year since Gamers First refitted it for Free to Play and beyond a couple of quick pop-ins I've scarcely thought about the post-apocalyptic sandbox-lite at all. Then on a whim a few days ago I dug out the launcher and stepped back into New Flagstaff.

It always seems to be sunset when I wake up in Fallen Earth. Night and day cycles are long here. Day's bright, night's dark and sunset is orange. Really orange. Skyshrine orange. Once my eyes adjusted to the glare, everything looked a lot better than I remembered. Often  does coming back to an MMO after a long break. I can think of several reasons for that, not least a new monitor and graphics card but developers do have this odd urge to keep tweaking the graphics up and there's been a little of that, definitely. Whatever, a wasteland never looked prettier.

Oh no, not you again

Mounts in Fallen Earth live in the world. There's no packing them away in your haversack. "How do I put my horse away?" is a question I must have heard in the help channel a dozen times an hour when the game was new and bless me if I didn't just hear it again twice in five minutes. It's not my place to poke fun, though - I know my horse doesn't go in my pack but do I know where my horse is?

Tastes best roasted in its shell. Allegedly.

See, I had a horse, but I haven't seen him for nearly a year. Or fed him. If this was a real sandbox, he'd be a bleached pile of bones by now. Then someone would have stolen the bones. He must be dead.

Nope! He was right where I left him! And even in the middle of a bunch of horses all standing around outside New Flagstaff's open-air bank looking pretty much the same, I knew which one was mine! I really did. I looked at them all, said to myself "That's him over there", moseyed over, mounted up and rode away. That's the true, unbreakable bond between a cowboy and his horse, that is!

I'll bend your flamin' ariel pal!

Yes, they say Fallen Earth is a post-apocalyptic MMO but we all know it's at least half a Western. It's like the Wild Bunch meets Westworld. With chickens. I like to think of my character there as a cross between Ian Hunter and Clint Eastwood, although I'm not sure Clint beat bandits to death with a sledgehammer and I'm almost certain Ian Hunter never did.

So I rode out of town. With the sun going down I cast a long shadow. Anyone would in that hat. I was ready for trouble. Alright, I was looking for trouble and I found some, too. More than I could handle, since it turned out I couldn't remember how to fight. I tried everything - left click, right click, double-click, A for Attack. All the obvious options.

Know what it is? Middle mouse button.

My complacent horse watched me take three long, embarrassing jogs up the cracked highway towards Post 23 before I worked that out. He wouldn't have been so complacent if it was ants not bandits chasing me. Ants eat horses. Takes them a while, too. Remember that next time you give me that horse laugh, Old Glue.

So now I know how to swing a baseball bat, I'm safely holed up in the Enforcer stronghold at Post 23 and I even fed my horse. I always wanted to make it to Sector 3. It's too late for Monkeytown but I'd still like to see some real trees. Have horse, will travel.

A Glorious Future Awaits: Allods

Revolutionary Dawn (please to ignore smokestack)

I re-installed two MMOs this weekend. One was Fallen Earth, because it's gone Free to Play and I always liked it. The other was Allods.

I played Allods in beta, like a lot of other people. I was planning on playing it when it went live, but somehow I never did. It wasn't really because of the infamous cash-shop debacle, although that didn't help. It was mostly that the break between beta and Live, which I remember as being a few weeks, just derailed my attention. When the official Allods launch arrived I was playing something else and I just never really got back to it. (That, by the way, shows the importance for a F2P game in allowing open beta characters to carry over to Live. Most F2Ps do that. Allods didn't. It was a mistake).

Those tabs didn't used to be there!

So, why did I decide to have another bash at Allods after all this time? Well, because of this blog. (And no, I don't mean because the full name of Allods ought to be Allods:Inventory Full either, although lack of bag space is probably the defining trope of the game).

When I got this blog up and running at last I was imagining it would mostly be about writing. I've been writing since I was about seven years old. It's pretty much what I do. Only, just like when I had a website many years ago, back in the homepage day, it turns out that I like fiddling with images as much as I like writing. Maybe more.

I've been trawling through my old screenshots as I prepare these posts. I have a lot of them. I was looking for something else when I ran across my Allods beta screenshots. WoW. Erm, no, wait, that's not what I meant... WOW! Allods takes an absolutely stunning screenshot.

Seasonally Appropriate Screenshot

Looking through them a couple of thoughts popped to mind. I'd just done that post mentioning the good/bad bad/good sides in Rift and it occurred to me that Allods has a similar moral set-up. It also occurred to me that it has almost exactly the same Nature/Religion vs Science/Steampunk dichotomy. And it occurred to me that I'd only really experienced one of those sides.

Sweetness and light...

Just as in Rift I began by playing the Nature/Religion faction, so I did in Allods. Almost all my time in Beta was spent as a Gibberling on the League side. Well, three Gibberlings. And a Squirrel. I'd had a brief look at the Empire capital but about all I remembered was the excellent pastiche Constructivist design.

Until their backs are turned

Anyway, after a fair-to-middling nightmare of a battle with the awful Allods patcher, resolved only by manually downloading the patch files and a new type of unzipper to unpack them, and having to remake a new account from scratch since my old one apparently has time-expired, (you have to wonder if gPotato actually want anyone to play this game) eventually I re-entered Allods as an Orc Shaman of The Empire.

Thus far I am extremely impressed. Details will follow.