Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

For you number crunchers and min-maxers out there, Fallen Earth will have a huge variety of skills, stats, resistances, and damage numbers to deal with. From what I could tell, each piece of armor or equipment will have some sort of stat adjusting quality. For instance, Hammock analyzed the shirt he was wearing on his back and stated that it had "decent piercing, slashing, and crushing resistances but it doesn't do much against radiation, acid, stuff like that. Basically everything that you wear will have armor numbers attached to it. Nothing in our world will have stat buffs though, because it doesn't make sense for a shirt to give you +10 strength. We do have stat debuffs, however. For example, those folks that decide to wear really heavy armors might get hit with some dexterity or coordination penalties on top of being really loud."

Your first weapon in Fallen Earth is a pipe. You'll advance from there.

For the first time in an MMORPG, your noise factor may be taken into consideration. While single player roleplaying games like Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines have been using features like this to make compelling games for ages, MMOGs have yet to touch it. Fallen Earth could be making a very brave leap into an immersive new world.

"Everything in the game has a noise level attached to it in terms of clothes you wear or weapons you use," Hammock stated. "When you're playing you'll have a sound meter that tells you how noisy you are. We compare the sound meter with the NPCs perception to see if the creatures perceives you or not. If you're standing in front of him, he'll obviously see you, but if you're behind him you can sneak up on him. To sneak up on a player, you'll have to go prone and crawl towards them. We don't have players going invisible in Fallen Earth."

Going invisible seems to make sense in certain cases, however, especially when you're supposed to be playing a stealthy character and sneaking up on other PCs. Since humans don't have a built in "perception meter", how are player going to sneak up on other combatants in PvP without actually doing the whole invisibility thing?

"Just pull out your sniper rifle and sneak up on them," Hammock said. "That's not 100% in the game, because we've had some issues with floating names and that sort of thing, but we've been working on it."

Speaking of PvP, Hammock has made statements in the past that Fallen Earth will have PvP, but I had personally yet to hear the exact details on that sort of thing. I asked Lee if he could describe the PvP situation that the Fallen Earth developers had devised and how they're planning on implementing it with their targeting reticules and that sort of thing.

In Fallen Earth's PvP, you'll have to fight other players for control of particular towns.

"Our PvP is zoned. When you enter a particular zone you become PvP active," Hammock said. "In these particular zones there are town you can fight over and take control of by doing missions that influence the town. These aren't "find twenty players from the opposing side and kill them" type quests because that would encourage griefing. Instead we give you a mission to kill an NPC, but the opposing players have a mission to guard that NPC. It may not be necessary to kill other players in this mission, but it certainly seems like the only way to get things accomplished. That's the sort of mission we're talking about."

At least from this statement, it sounds like PvP in Fallen Earth is going to be a sort of "realm versus realm" or faction versus faction encounter. Hammock made sure to straighten out those thoughts, however, as it wasn't exactly what he was trying to say.

"In the PvP zones you can shoot anyone you want except people in your own group," Hammock said. "You can even shoot players in your same faction. You'll take a faction hit but sometimes those assholes just deserve it."