Fallen Earth at GDC - Page 2 of 2

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Posted March 15th, 2007 by Ethec

Lee Hammock -Fallen Earth Update - Page 2 of 2

Character creation was interesting. In addition to all the usual sliders you usually get in an RPG, there are lots of fun tattoos to choose from. Facial hair for the gents has two layers, stubble and the actual facial hair. You’ll not only have a number of clothing options to choose from, and just about every item came from an assortment of colors. Wearing a jacket? You can go zipped or unzipped. Ball caps can be worn backwards or forwards. And I guarantee that one thing you will not find in any other RPG is a slider for body hair (girls get bellybutton rings and tats).

His very own Mad Max created, we watched as Hammock’s character woke up in a lab before a busybody lab tech. The voice acting was superb as the tech said he was the last scientist left on the base. He went on to asked if Max was itchy (apparently the “infected”, Dawn of the Dead-esque zombies who can blame their condition on a bad case of itchy nanites) explained that your character is… wait for it… a clone. This, of course, sets us up for a broad-sweeping story arc, not that you’ll have time to dote upon your existential validity. The game takes on a dollup of survival-horror as in come the infected to dispatch the tech. Fortunately, pipe in hand, Hammock easily dispatched the foes, nanite superpowers or not.

More Fallen Earth Screenshots

Hammock explained that one of their design emphases was to make branched quests, where you don’t have to do the very linear questline with a shady NPC just to get the experience. “If you think he’s going to stab you in the back, you can work through an alternate quest to maybe stab him in the back first.” It’s great in theory, perhaps complicated in implementation, but its storyline nuances like this that, if carried out, will make Fallen Earth a must-play for anyone who cut their RPG teeth on games like Fallout.

Icarus hasn’t yet announced a release date for Fallen Earth, but the game is currently in closed beta. For more information on the game, check out the Fallen Earth official site