We Fall And Then We Rise - The Unlikely Return Of Fallen Earth

A few days ago I read that Little Orbit were planning on bringing back the much-missed post-apocalyptic quasi-western mmorpg, Fallen Earth. Before I'd had time to assimilate that, they'd announced it wouldn't be in months or weeks or even days. It would be now.

I always really liked Fallen Earth. I was very sad to see it go. When I heard it was coming back I was determined to make some time at least to take a look. I hadn't made any plans on how that might happen other than that I'd probably wait for it to reappear on Steam, if only to make the whole process easier on the re-installing and re-registering front.

This morning I glanced down my blog roll and saw someone was already playing it. I checked the Steam page to see if anything had change. It hadn't. The game remains in limbo there, with a "Mixed" rating and a message from Valve that reads "At the request of the publisher, Fallen Earth Free2Play is no longer available for sale on Steam..."

I checked the Gamers First website. There's a big, orange "Play Free Now" button just begging to be pressed. I pressed it and of course it asked me to register or if I had an account already I could sign in. I did have an account already and I had the details. 

They didn't work. I reset the password. I thought I'd save myself the trouble of thinking up a new one by making my new password the same as my old one. I mean, logically, the old one hadn't been recognized, so the system checking it couldn't possibly know I'd used it before, right? I mean, if it did, then it would have worked.

Of course it rejected it on the grounds I couldn't re-use my current password. Which is a Catch 22 and a paradox, isn't it? Not the first time that's happened to me, either.

Anyhoo...

<Snip>

I just cut four long paragraphs where I explained in excruciating detail exactly how I nearly downloaded and installed the game and precisely why in the end I didn't need to. I wrote it before lunch then I came back and re-read it and almost fell asleep. So boring. The bit about passwords is edge of the seat stuff by comparison.

Cutting to the chase, in what felt like an indecently short time after deciding to do it, I was at character creation, making a new character. I did wonder as I was logging in whether my old characters would be there but no, it's a fresh start.

I have a post in mind about character creation and choice in Fallen Earth but I'm going to let it brew for a while. I'll just say I was very happy with the results.

I was also impressed with the tutorial. I'm not absolutely sure I've never played through it before. It seemed mostly unfamiliar but there were one or two moments when I did wonder if maybe I'd gone through it for a blog post or something.

It's very different from and much better than the tutorial I remember quite clearly from the launch era, back when you not only had to buy the game but also pay a subscription, something I did for about three months.

That tutorial made the almost unforgiveable mistake of letting you spend half an hour as an extremely powerful, fully-geared, high level character before finally dumping you into the real game, stripped of all your armor, weapons, skills and levels, a hobo in rags barely fit go two rounds with a chicken. I strongly dislike tutorials that play that trick.

The current one is much better. It reminds me of the original DCUO tutorial or indeed the original Allods one. Any tutorial, really, where an urgent voice in your head tells you what to do as everything around you falls apart and explodes. I quite enjoy those.

It took me maybe twenty minutes to get through that part and then it was out into the world. Fallen Earth is a very strange game, graphically, in that it manages at one and the same time to look primitive yet still breathtaking. It looked old-fashioned even when it was new but, rather like Lord of the Rings Online, the whole thing somehow manages to give the impression of being convincing rather than  outdated, weathered and authentic rather than tired and cheap.

It is, in fact, one of my favorite games for how it looks. It has an indefinable charisma. I guess it's all down to a combination of great design and good lighting but whatever it is, it really works.

With time pressing, I finished the first couple of quests, took some screenshots and logged out. Before I left I also made a chat window with none of the global or other public channels. I'd forgotten just how appallingly awful public discourse in Fallen Earth can be.

I don't know why but it's always been that way. It got even worse when the game went Free to Play but I remember it being very bad even before that. Something about the post-apocalyptic setting seems to attract the kind of people who not only know an astonishing number of colorfully obscene expressions but are determined everyone else should learn them too.

There is a bad word filter but it doesn't work. I went to put mine on and found it already was. I can't imagine what it could be set to filter out given what it was letting through. I tried to switch it off and on again to see if that made a difference but all that happened was I got a system message telling me "You are not allowed to run commands."

I'm guessing we'll just have to put up with both the bad behavior and the bugs, both of which were always a big part of the Fallen Earth experience. Gamers First have made it clear this is an as-is experience not a bona fide relaunch. That's fine with me. I'm happy just to have the chance to ride my horse through the desert sunsets once again.

When I get a horse, that is. 

Note to self. Next job: get a horse.

Talking To Strangers

This corner of the blogosphere seems to be passing through some kind of reflexive wavefront right now. Everywhere I look I see thoughtful, analytical, detailed discussions. Mechanics, metaphysics, motive, all the tropes of academia - or at least a lively student bar - directed at dissecting, discussing and determining what makes an MMORPG.

There's more to react to than there is time to react, which is both frustrating and energizing. I note with pleasure the long comment threads (and the long comments) that trail many of these thought-provoking posts. Blogging dead? Doesn't seem like it right now.

One of the recent wave of posts that particularly struck a note with me was Naithin's commentary on the Transition from Social to Solo in MMORPG gameplay. We've been round this track more than a few times but there's always more nuance to tease out.

For one thing, I hadn't ever really thought about the provenance of the term "Pick Up Group" before. I tried to think back to when I first heard it. I'm not at all sure it was in use back when I was joining - or recruiting - pick up groups most evenings and every weekend. Google, for once, doesn't have an awful lot to contribute. The earliest reference I could find only went back to 2006. There's a very interesting and detailed game-by-game rundown of usage at TVTropes , which strongly implies a much older heritage, but it sheds little light on provenance.

As far as I recall, we used simply to refer to "groups", without any need for further definition or clarification. I'd probably played MMORPGs for several years before I ever heard the term "Guild Group". People often used to speak of their guild responsibilities and it was commonplace for people to have to leave to "help a guildie" or go on a guild raid, but I can't recall anyone ever leaving a group I was in because they preferred to join an exclusive group of people from their guild just for regular, everyday play.

When I was in a cross-guild chat channel in EverQuest that satisfied most of my grouping requirements, we would fill spots from outside the channel by asking if anyone had friends or guildmates who wanted to run with us. If those people fitted in to our culture we'd invite them to join the channel.

We prided ourselves on being competent and capable but there was a wide variety of skill and experience. We had some very casual players who were great company but needed a degree of direction and some top-end raiders who were there just to chill and relax. We liked to get things done and we liked to challenge ourselves but clearly what was cutting edge content for some of us was slippers and cocoa for others.

In twenty years of playing MMORPGs, the couple of years I spent with the people in that chat channel represent the zenith of my grouping experience. It offered the flexibility and variety of pick up grouping but with the familiarity and structure of a guild or static group. In some ways it prefigured, in social terms if not mechanics, the kind of open group play that eventually grew out of Warhammer's Public Quests.

While, as I said, the members of that chat channel liked to get things done, the real reason we were all there was to chat. Okay, not everyone would have listed their priorities in exactly that order, but fitting in socially was the defining factor on whether guests ended up getting an invite and the way we assessed social suitability had much more to do with affability or snappy repartee than whether you mistimed the odd heal.

In the comment thread that follows Naithin's post there's a discussion about the changing role of text and voice. Jeromai has a theory, to which I also cleave:

"...the design of action-focused games has steadily made it physically impossible or inconvenient to maintain a good typed conversation. Typed conversation has more stately pauses, and takes your fingers away from WASD, causing your characters to pause in whatever they are doing. Given that most people want very much to be actually playing during their game time, every potential sentence is briefly weighed (subconsciously or otherwise) for whether it’s worth utterance."

When I was googling "pick up groups" I came across a fascinating piece of academic research at Wiley's Online Library, entitled "Where Everybody Knows Your Name". It's a dense and very heavily referenced paper and I haven't even begun to dig into the detail, but just on a quick scan some paragraphs positively jump out:

"Text‐based interaction in such worlds is incessant and ubiquitous. There is not just one chat channel but multiple simultaneous ones: public, private, and various group channels. Together, these function as both a one‐to‐many and one‐to‐one communicative space..."

Despite the encroachment of voice chat, that seems to me still to be the case, at least in the MMORPGs I play. In Guild Wars 2, for example, voice communications are almost de rigeur in many World vs World squads but that doesn't mean no-one talks in type. Quite the opposite, in fact. It just adds yet another layer.

It's become a truism to state that the exponential growth of social media and the mainstreaming of instantaneous global communication has stripped the magic and mystique from talking in real-time to strangers on the other side of the world. And it most likely has.

Whether that has very much to do with the changing attitudes to running dungeons with strangers, I'm becoming less certain every time I think about it. As for the accepted narrative that people no longer want to talk to strangers in MMOs these days, the more I think about that, the less convincing I find it.

I talk to strangers every day, in GW2 and EverQuest II and pretty much in whatever MMORPG I happen to find myself. Not, as I once did, in group chat seen by no more then five or six other people, but in open channels where the conversations bounce between dozens of participants in front of an unknowable audience, any of whom might join in at any moment.

It's entirely commonplace for me to be calling out scouting information in Map chat, arguing with someone in Team, making sarcastic comments to Mrs Bhagpuss about other players in Guild and bantering in Squad, all while I'm on auto-run across the map in the middle of the Zerg. It's much the same as I've been doing in a variety of channels in  a multiplicity of MMOs for two decades.

The only element that's missing from the mix are those rambling group chats on personal and out-of-game topics we used to indulge in between pulls and those, it seems to me, were more a function of the specific combat mechanics of those games than any kind of end in themselves. If you have to sit down and do nothing for anything up to five minutes after every big fight you have to pass the time somehow...

I don't feel there's been quite as much of a move away from the old methods, either of communication or socialization in MMORPGs as has sometimes - often - been claimed. I'm not sure there will be, either. People do like to talk, and text is orders of magnitude more efficient than voice in the context of the shared "third spaces" of MMOs.

Which isn't to say that online games in general aren't travelling in a different direction. They are. The widely-praised non-text, non-speech communication system built into Apex Legends suggests that mainstream gaming is evolving away from the kind of personalized, intimate relationships we've so long taken for granted towards a more functional, gameplay-directed future.

Battle Royales aren't MMORPGs, though. Not hardly. MMORPG players like to chat. If they can't do it during fights they'll go sit somewhere safe and do it there instead. I don't see any sign of that ending any time soon.

Broken Social Scene

 No not this although that would break pretty much anyone's social scene, I should think...

Stargrace was talking about how socializing has changed in MMOs. It's a topic that comes up often nowadays, usually around the campfire in the rosy glow of nostalgia.

Are you sure that's nostalgia ?

 
I get less and less social in MMOs as time goes on. I started off mostly soloing, back in Everquest nearly a dozen years ago. After a while I began grouping and developed a friends list but it was only when I moved to DAoC when it launched that I started joining guilds. From then, going back to EQ, then to EQ2 my MMO experience was mostly social, in guilds, groups, chat channels and so on.

By the time I went to Vanguard the social side had already started to decline and for the last four years or so my interest has been mainly in soloing and duoing with Mrs Bhagpuss. We keep saying we're going to join guilds, get to know people and do more group stuff but we never really do.

EQ2 housing, now with added PvP.

Most of the things we like doing , like decorating houses, crafting, harvesting and questing are better done alone anyway. While talking in chat channels, in my case. I really do talk a lot in chat.

That said, we now have a very nice, very small guild in EQ2. Mrs Bhagpuss and I created it for ourselves when EQ2X started but we soon had a couple of people join and though they didn't stick with EQ2X for long it was quite jolly while it lasted. Pretty soon Mrs Bhagpuss met a couple more people through her interests in housing and it wasn't too long before they joined our guild.

A little later they brought some people along with them and everyone who's joined has been a real pleasure to chat to and play alongside. They looked after the guild while Mrs Bhagpuss and I went to Rift and now our guild is Level 30.

Yeah, yeah...just show me the bank space.

It's fun to log in and see what other people are doing and occasionally get together and do something without anyone feeling there's any kind of agenda or plan.

The way MMOs are developing I think socializing will be an option not a requirement. Public quests, open grouping, open raiding, solo dungeons, mercenaries, henchmen, companions, no-one will need any kind of formal arrangement or conversation with another human being just to get stuff done in an MMO. And that's fine. 

There must be someone here who likes model railways and Rammstein.

 

 

None of that is going to replace actually talking to people because you have things you want to say to each other, though. Nor doing stuff in game together because you like each others' company. Nothing's going to change that.

Is it?