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Alright, some basics and first re-impressions on Fallen Earth: If you're not familiar, FE was released about four years ago and the premise was a Fallout MMO without the IP. IIRC the apocalypse was nuclear and it happened in 2026 or something. I forget when "present day" is in the game world. I think it's about forty years after the fall. Maybe sixty. The gameplay is shooter based and weapons range from sniper rifles, battle rifles, assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns, PDWs, pistols to Ka-bar knives, ninja swords, axes, lead pipes, bats with nails sticking out of them, et cetera. That being said, it's currently much better than it was but this is a small-budget indie MMO so don't expect combat of the quality of Defiance. Man, if Defiance's combat gameplay could be put into Fallen Earth I'd probably never play another MMO again. AI is, for the most part, abysmal. The array of aesthetic character customization options is awesome. There are a billion clothing and armor pieces and your character has like a dozen armor slots that can have stuff equipped on them. Weapons can go on two back slots, two belt slots, and two hip slots. There also a secondary "wardrobe" system which allows you to equip gear that overrides the appearance of stuff you have equipped in actual armor/clothing slots while still retaining those stats. So you can have the super duper uberest gear in the game and still run around looking a raider from The Road Warrior. Virtually everything can be recolored now as well. This doesn't come standard and must either be purchased through the marketplace (costs about twenty bucks) or it can be bought slot by slot in-game off the AH. Vehicles are very cool and like Defiance but more realistic. They consume fuel which depends on what kind of engine it has (batteries, petrol). There are horses too. There are horses, a few other animal mounts, motorcycles, ATVs, dune buggies, and a Mad Max-esque sports car. Unfortunately NONE of them can hold passengers which is a bummer. All of them can be custom painted. FE has probably the best gameworld of any MMO I have ever played. It's of a scale that is truly epic in proportions and much, if not most, of it was very well thought out and there are some incredibly cool and unique locations. Exploration in this game is really flippin' fun. There's a single server and gameworld and instancing is few and far between. Though the gameworld is bananas huge there is instant transport between sector capitals to speed things up a bit. The economy and crafting of the game is predicated on scavenging. All over the world there are "nodes" and these nodes have X% chance to spawn a scavenge point on them. Once one spawns, and they are varied and plentiful, players can go pick through them and see what can be taken. Some nodes are more difficult to scavenge than others and there a skill check is run against your character. If you lack the skill you cannot harvest. Resource/inventory management is a huge part of this game. There are a billion crafting components and each one has multiple quality grades. Crafting is an every day thing for every single player. It's queue based and a simple do-you-have-the-shit-for-the-recipe based system. You have the ingredients, click to craft it, and it takes X amount of time. You just play the game normally during this. Free players can only queue one thing. Depending on the subscription you have you can get up to twenty crafting slots for the queue which make a big difference especially since one has to craft cartridges for firearms. Back in the day I'd line up like ten packs of ammo so when I got back 5,000 rounds would be waiting for me. The questing is the usual stuff in terms of mechanics BUT the storylines and quest text are quite good. This is truly a sto-and-smell-the-roses kind of game. Some of the storylines are really fucked up, some are hilarious, et cetera. The game has HUGE roleplay potential. If we ran a patrol in FE it would make our Defiance stuff look like the kiddie pool. We could have a truly unique look in FE and it offers a lot more roleplay potential. One of the crafting lines is construction and through this crafting knowledge one can make some kickass stuff like something as simple as a campfire to a giant ass military tent complete with town amenities to a fully operational farm. If we put some thought into events we could do some truly fun stuff. There's an interesting faction system in the game. When one picks a faction you become allied with the factions on either side. These are called "shoulder factions." Now, the game isn't super rigid so if you're, say, an Enforcer (six o'clock on the wheel above) and you kill CHOTA, which is opposite Enforcers on the wheel, you'll gain Enforcer faction and a fraction of that faction will also go to each shoulder faction so you're building up three factions simultaneously. Now, the flip side is that when you kill a CHOTA you also lose faction with THEIR shoulder factions. So if you're an Enforcer but you want to grind some Tech faction so you can unlock their faction equipment you'd go kill some Vistas BUT you'd lose Lightbearer faction in the process. In FE I have both Enforcer and Tech maxed out. Having two factions maxed out will cost you positive rep the other shoulder faction. You could just grind your main faction's enemy and use the smaller payout to build up both shoulder factions simultaneously but that would take forever. The unfortunate side of factions is that they are largely irrelevant. Faction means virtually nothing in most PvP areas except for one two specific faction PvP areas. There's some pretty fun PvE to be had. FE has something much like Defiance's sieges called "progress towns" which are a great way to level up and you can get some awesome crafting mats and stuff from them. There are multiple boss mobs in tough areas and there's also "serendipity mobs" which leads to a random encounter with a boss mob. Basically, if you stick around in an area long enough and clear it out there's a chance for a big ole baddy to spawn which drops some good stuff. Well, if you made it this far I recommend you check the game out. It's F2P and free accounts can only have a single character. If we get enough people back in the game I'll roll back to S1 on my main and help peeps out; there's some good potential here. The main reason we quit this game the last time (back in... 2010, it must have been?) was because there were just four or five of us and we couldn't get much of the hard PvE content done and didn't have the numbers for PvP.

Originally posted here.

Alienware is running a promo for Fallen Earth. The page can be found here. You must register with the Alienware Arena website and then they'll give you the code. To activate the code: Launch the game and log into the world; In the chat window type "/key" and hit enter; and Copy-->Paste the key into the pop-up window.

If anyone still gives a shit. I didn't find much of interest in it, personally. Originally posted here.

Wow, this certainly isn't good news: Geez, man. That sucks. More coverage here.