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

On top of shooting the assholes, you may also want to be wary of your own faction members on occasion. In Fallen Earth, the developers don't openly declare what anyone's faction is with a symbol above their head or anything like that. It's simply your belief that they are part of your faction, which they may - or may not - be a part of.

"We also don't visibly display the faction symbol for the players," Hammock said. "So either players will have to wear faction oriented colors or they'll have to be careful who they're shooting. This is a game where we want players to have fun, but we also want them to pay attention to who they're shooting."

"There are abilities in game that allow you to disguise yourself as the opposing faction," Hammock continued. "And there also abilities to stop that from happening. So you could technically disguise yourself as the opposing faction to sneak into the enemy camp and get missions from other factions and so forth. But those same players also are get a 'Reveal' ability that allows them to strip away that false faction. If a player does that to you in the middle of a hostile town, you're screwed."

Eventually players will have access to mounts and pets..

Since PvP has been integrated into the game, the developers behind Fallen Earth wanted to create incentives for players to actually want to participate in the combat, but make it more interesting than simple side vs. side combat. So instead of having pitched arena type battles or even completely open-ended PvP warfare, the developers created several towns that are a contested part of the Fallen Earth landscape.

"As far as the towns go, we've created it so that players will have an increasingly difficult time holding the town, but the longer they do control the town the more content will emerge inside that controlled area," Hammock said. "NPCs will spawn to try and drive the players out, but we really wanted to include a reason in the game why players would want to control these towns."

"We'll also eventually have PC constructed settlements that players can fight over and that sort of thing," Hammock said. "Over the course of the game, we're slowly ramping up the complexity of the gameplay for the players. So in our first sector players can kill stuff and get used to the game, in the second sector there's PvP elements and we introduce factions, in the third sector you get pets and mounts and things of that nature, and eventually you'll begin building settlements and cars."

Dying in combat certainly shouldn't be ignored, since PvP is obviously such an important piece of the game. I asked Hammock what sort of death penalty there will be, and he explained it quite thoroughly.

"Our death penalty is basically on a sliding scale," Hammock said. "If you get killed once, you suffer a minor XP earning rate penalty for 10 minutes and incur some equipment degradation. If you die twice before the previous penalty wears off, the XP penalty becomes greater. If you die a third time before the second one goes away, you start receiving stat penalties. We're making a system where people can go PvP, but at a certain point it's best to just go home because you will not be able to keep up."

Along the same lines as death, our group also wanted Hammock to talk about the healing portion of the game, since players don't necessarily want to die. With Fallen Earth being partially based off of a real world model, it seemed inappropriate for the developers to introduce instant heals or anything that might thoroughly heal a character in a short amount of time.

Fallen Earth has yet to enter Alpha, so don't get your hopes up for a release anytime soon!

"There are going to be 'healers' in the game, but it won't be what you're used to," Hammock said. "It won't be an instantaneous heal. We wanted to get away from the guy that stands in the back waiting to dump out heals. We decided to go more for a heal-over-time sort of scenario, where a player and a healer have to run away from the fight, go around a corner, and have the healer patch up the wounded soldier before he's sent back out into the fray. Another tactic would be to place these 'heal-over-time' abilities on players before they go into combat so they heal while they're taking damage. It's going to be more of a long time tactical strategy than anything else."

"Healing is also a skill that we've made accessible to everyone, so while we'll still have specialized healers, they won't have to heal every nick and bruise a player gets," Hammock said.

Even though Fallen Earth was obviously in a very playable version of the game, Hammock stated that the game has yet to enter even the Alpha testing phase. Rest assured that Ten Ton Hammer will have the scope on the story when it does break, but as our final question, we asked Lee what was currently happening with the game's progress if they weren't yet in Alpha.

"We're still looking for a publisher," Hammock said. "We have the ability to self-publish, but we don't necessarily want to go that route. If we don't get a deal we like, we'll do it ourselves, but we'd like to go through a publisher."

With that, we thanked Lee for his time and headed out back onto the show floor with our new thoughts and ideas spinning in our heads. Fallen Earth obviously has a ways to go before they can launch the game, but if they can achieve every bit of detail and polish that they'd like to extract from the game, those of us looking for an escape from the common fantasy MMORPG will certainly have our savior in Fallen Earth!

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