Closing Doors

If you spend any time over on the Fallen Earth forums, you might notice that a large number of threads, regardless of where they begin, end up with someone mentioning “respec” and derailing the thread into the same old arguments.  On one side you have people who think there should be no way to respend points and that a poorly made character should be deleted and the player have to start over from scratch.  On the polar opposite you have people who think there should be a way to respend points at any time, or with a very minimal cost (the joke is, they suggest a cost, but unless a game has sufficient money sinks, eventually everyone is rich, just look at a game like WoW where money sinks of 1 gold were put in early in the game but new money sinks are much higher).  In between you have all sorts of ideas, like allowing people to respec once a year or other time frames, or attaching a huge cost to it, or requiring people to re-earn their points, essentially de-leveling to respec.

Where I fall in the argument is that given the design choices they made with the game, there does need to be some option to change your point spending.  Every time you spend a point in Fallen Earth, you are closing a door.  Most games are actually built on closed doors.  In WoW, if you make a warrior, you have closed a door — you can’t be a priest, or a rogue, or a shaman, you are a warrior, forever.  In a game like Fallen Earth, the closing of doors is more subtle.  A point spent at level five may not seem like its doing anything, but when you get to level 45 and you are one point short of being able to buy that one skill you need to complete your character, now you’ve hit a brick wall, one you cannot climb or break through or go around — delete and start over is your only option.  The result is that in order to not screw up a player needs to spend time researching choices, spoiling the game in order to make sure they aren’t gimping themselves by just playing and having fun.

Where I fall in the argument is that the game shouldn’t have been designed this way to begin with.

Anything, not Everything

A player in a game should have the capability to do anything they want.  People, specifically the hardcore players who demand that choices be permanent, will tell you that hard decisions are “just like real life” but they are only partly correct.  Yes, real life is full of things you can’t undo, but in real life you also do not have to lose your entire identity to choose another path.  If you spent the first 25 years of your life going to school, to college and working hard to become an accountant, you are not required to be an accountant forever.  You can go back to school, or pick a new career, and you can do this without changing your name or losing your friends.

Of all the game systems I’ve seen over the years, in my opinion, EVE Online is the only game that has done it right.  I’m not talking about the real time based training system.  I’m talking about the fact that you can start a character and decide that you want to fly Amarr frigates that fire missiles.  You train your skills and fly your frigates and shoot your missiles.  Later, however, if you decide you’d like to fly Caldari Cruisers, you simply start training those skills, eventually buy yourself a Caldari Cruiser and there you go.  The limitation in EVE is that you can learn and do anything, but you can’t do everything at once.  When you step outside the starport in your Caldari Cruiser, your Amarr frigate skills mean absolutely zero.  If your cruiser is armed with cannons, your missile skills mean absolutely zero.  In a sense, in EVE, you are what you drive.

Guild Wars also works somewhat like this.  Yes, you do have to pick classes to level, but for each class you have you can learn tons of skills, but when you leave town you can only have so many of those skills equipped.

I would love to have seen Fallen Earth follow those models.  Let you grind and train an unlimited number of skills, but limit your character’s carrying capacity and make him be what he wears.  Right now in FE you can carry kits for all the trade skills at once, but I’d prefer it if there was no limit to the training of your skills, but you could only carry two “active” kits at any time, so you’d have to choose what tasks you were planning on before you left town.  Rather than force you to pick one kind of combat to specialize in, I’d prefer letting you learn them all, but having to choose primary and secondary weapons before leaving town.

The main thing here is that if I spend the next six months playing this game and making friends and joining a guild only to learn that while I was having fun leveling I was making decisions that would make the game totally un-fun later with no chance at all of correcting those decisions without starting over, that point, the point where my character isn’t fun because of misspent points is where they will lose me as a customer.

I really hope that Fallen Earth can come up with a solution to let players salvage “broken” characters, and I hope more games in the future consider implementing more dynamic character creation paths that don’t so heavily utilize closing doors.

Welcome to the Apocalypse!

So, you’ve decided to sign up and play Fallen Earth.  Allow me to impart to you my tips for making your life there enjoyable.

1) The only forum you should bother going to is the Technical Support forum on the Fallen Earth website, and only if you are having a problem with running the game.  Pretty much every other forum on the Internet, even on the Fallen Earth site, is posting spoiler information about build trees and maximizing advancement and lists of which quests are “worth doing” and so on and so on.  Look, unless you are the type of person who only enjoys a game when they reach the max level and go grind end game content, unless you are the type of person who spends their time running their EVE Online galactic empire, you need to stay away from all that information because it is going to do nothing but spoil the game.  You’ll end up racing through with the “perfect” build and you’ll get to the end and wonder why you bothered…  Just ignore all that and play the game.  You might be saying to yourself that you want to read up on those builds so you don’t “gimp” yourself, and I understand that.  But remember that this month’s perfect builds won’t be next month’s perfect builds, you should just feel out the game and play it the way you want to play it.

2) One of the cool things you can do in Fallen Earth is make tabs on your chat window.  So, right after you get in to game, even before you take one step out of the pod in the tutorial, click the small tab right next to the tab labeled “All” to create a new tab, check the “New Players” box, uncheck the “Local” and “Flash on New Message” boxes, name the tab “New Players” and save it.  Now right click the original “All” tab, choose Edit, uncheck the “New Players” box and save.  What you have just done is to move the “New Players” channel to its own tab where it can be largely ignored.  The reason you have done this is because, while that channel is good for asking a question when you get stuck, 99% of the time it is nothing but people spamming questions and spoiler info.  Have you played WoW?  Did you play on the Horde side?  Remember Barrens chat?  Its like that, only every question is “Where is Mankirk’s wife?” and it is always followed by complete directions to her and people giving their opinions on if you should even bother to find her.  If you do find yourself in need of help, you just click that tab, make sure your chat is set to go to that channel, ask, get your answer, then go back to your other tab.  You might find yourself needing to do this for the “Region” channel also as people tend to treat it the same.  (In fact, people pretty much treat every channel in game like a Q&A spoiler channel because people don’t even try to play games for themselves anymore, but that is a rant for another post.)

3) Down in the bottom left corner of your screen is the menu bar, all the way at the right end of this bar is an icon that expands and contracts this bar, just to the left of that is one called “Filter”.  Click “Filter” and then check all the items on this list, then click “Filter” again to make the list go away.  One thing Fallen Earth’s tutorial is not good at is teaching you anything beyond moving and fighting and navigating dialog boxes.  Take a few minutes and click each and every icon on the menu bar and learn what it opens and play around with each window.  Of great importance is the “Actions” item as this is where the game hides all your abilities you need to put on your hotkey bar.  By the way, while the hotkey bar appears to have only 12 buttons (“1” through “=” on the top of your keyboard), if you resize the window you’ll find that there are actually 36 buttons, the regular, shift+ and alt+.

Once you’ve done these three things, follow your quests, through the tutorial and in your first town, they really will explain how most of the game works.  And have fun, because, I hope, that’s why you are there.  Feel free to look me up, Jhaer Buegren.

Fallen Earth

This isn’t exactly zombie news, but…

Over the past few months, I’ve been participating in the beta for Fallen Earth, an upcoming post apocalyptic MMO.  Before I get to the good stuff, let me just get the bad stuff out of the way.

The graphics.  And I don’t mean the style, but the performance.  My PC isn’t exactly new or top of the line, but I beat out their required specs and I play a great number of games released in the last couple years very well.  When I venture off by myself or in a small group, this game plays great.  But when I get to town or any large gathering of people, the game turns into a slide show.  Unplayable.  Obviously, I could buy a new PC, but my PC should be enough to play if I turn all the effects off… it doesn’t help though.  Even with minimal settings, low resolution and playing in a window, the game gets better, but never what I would call good in busy areas.  To make matters more confusing, if I stand still in town, I can sit and watch everything run great, but the instant I try to move or turn, slide show.

That aside… Fallen Earth captures the post apocalyptic world perfectly.  First off, the world is huge, so when you run off into the wilderness, you are literally running off into the wilderness.  One day I just picked a direction and started running.  Two hours later I was still running… I’d seen one other person and some critters, some salvage and ruins, but little else.  The best part of this… I started to get worried.  Am I lost?  Where is everyone?  I’m gonna die out here… This is what a world after Armageddon is supposed to feel like.  In other MMOs I would complain about all the empty space, because those games are littered with NPCs and stuff and are supposed to be full of people, but Fallen Earth is supposed to feel empty, and it does, and it works.

The combat is a little different from your standard MMO.  Ranged weapons require aiming, and melee weapons have standard swings but need you to be facing the target.  There is no auto attack or auto aiming, you don’t automatically hit something just because you have it targeted and hit your attack button.  This makes fighting moving targets more difficult, and it makes movement matter in combat.  Speaking of movement… you know how in real life if you are running and then jump, you pause when you land?  You know how strafing is slower than turning and running?  Both are true in this game.  So, if you are looking for typical First Person Shooter mechanics of jumping around like a coked up jackrabbit all while running sideways at full speed in a circle perfectly nailing your opponent all the while, you won’t find it.  Personally, I love it.

Another aspect of the game that I really enjoyed is the crafting.  Not because crafting is so awesomely fun to play, but because so much in the game can be crafted.  If you are familiar with EVE Online, it works like that.  People go out and scavenge from the wilderness, then craft items (and the crafting is all done “offline”, meaning you don’t sit at a bench and make stuff, you just set it to be made and it will be done in time).

In fact, the EVE comparison is important, because, to me at least, this game plays a lot like a ground based version of EVE.  While I could never really get into flying around space in a ship mining materials and joining corporations, I could easily get lost in walking the Earth, surviving.

I’ll make another post later with some screen shots, but to close off this post I’ll just say that if they can get the graphics issues sorted out, or if I win the lottery and can buy a new PC, I’m definitely on board for this game.  If I could take this game’s design and put in zombies, I think I’d have my perfect MMO.