The End of the Earth
as We Know It

And we feel fine, as Icarus Studios' Lee Hammock fills us in on Fallen Earth.

by Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle

At GDC last week, we were privileged to speak with Lee Hammock, Lead Game Designer for the Icarus Studios dystopian sci-fi adventure MMO Fallen Earth, and watch a brief in-game demo. The game was showcased as part of the Vivox booth, as Icarus plans to make use of both pre-recorded voice and live voicechat, via Vivox’s mixed-stream solution currently used in EVE Online and Second Life, to help tell the Fallen Earth story.

The storyline requires more than a modest mention, as it’s far from a lofty sidebar to your adventure; indeed, it seemed to have had bearing on every aspect of the demo. The tale of Fallen Earth, Hammock explained, is the really story of its factions, each with their own ideas of how to keep civilization safe in a post-apocalyptic world. The Chota ( or “Children of the Apocalypse”) believe that the only way to prevent the re-invention of nuclear weapons and other broadly destructive weapons is by chaotically frustrating society’s attempts to develop beyond covering the barest necessities. The Enforcers believe that authoritarian government and an emphasis on law and order is the way to go. The Vistas, like the operating system of the same name, seek to send everyone backwards in time, believing that repairing and fostering nature is the only way to restore balance.

Fallen Earth Screenshots

Each faction has its more militant provisional arm, and the worldview of every side is conveyed through not just through dialogue, but also in costume and architecture. The Chota, for example, wear a ragtag assortment of clothing and inhabit decrepit buildings. Not that any of the factions are particularly well off. Hammock explained that in a character’s first tech progression, your weaponry would be fairly primitive – a nail board, a length of pipe, working your way up to a crossbow – and progress by degrees towards modern day weaponry; you might come across a paintball gun that fires iron balls, for example.

Fallen Earth’s anarchic nature is also conveyed through its class-less character development scheme. Players essentially get points they can spend on any ability they like. Should you elect to spend some of those points on crafting, you’ll be in for a unique take on the staple mechanic. Depending on the complexity level of the item being crafted, it will take real time (online or offline) to craft it. On a small percentage of the time will require your character to be in the shop working on the item.  A precision rifle might take a few hours of real time (and 15 minutes or so in the shop), a car will take up to a few weeks. Crafting will also be fairly specialized. “We wanted to take the bottleneck from finding the materials to finding the crafter,” Hammock explained. He went on to say that of the game’s 4,000 plus items, around 99% are craft-able.