Yeah, I just made a Devil Wears Prada reference. I think we can be mature enough to move past that. Maybe.
If you’ve been following the blog then you already know that I’ve become somewhat addicted to Fallen Earth in the past week or so. I’ve been playing it pretty non-stop for a while and it’s everything I could hope for. It very much reminds me of Ultima Online without the annoying getting killed and having all of your possessions looted.
To really get into a game like Fallen Earth, Ultima Online or other games of the type you can’t expect them to tell you what to do. Sure FE’s tutorial does a decent job of getting you read to move around and figure out what you MIGHT want to do, but that’s where the handholding stops.
If all you do is quest like you’re playing World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online then you aren’t going to enjoy the game as much as you could. The point in Fallen Earth is not to gain levels, though that does happen, it’s more about raising skills. Attribute Points are granting for some quests and for reaching certain percentages of a level in experience. This AP is used to raise your base stats and your skills. Your skill caps raise based on stats and level.
The real enjoyment for me is the crafting system. Unlike the rest your crafting skills are not raised with AP but by use as in other games, Ultima Online and Darkfall to name two. There is no “job system”, you don’t choose to be a tailor or a blacksmith, you can simply do it all, or you can focus on one profession if that’s to your taste.
Anyway your best bet for enjoying Fallen Earth is to choose something that you want to accomplish at any given time. This could be as simple as “Find a way to craft and wear a Duster” to as complicated as “Make every piece of gear I can find up to skill armorer skill level 45, take pictures of it all and put it on my blog.” In case you haven’t figured out the obvious that last one is what I chose to do. Sadly I thought I had all of the books for items up to skill level 45, but I found out yesterday that this wasn’t the case.
I was cresting a dune in the early morning, that picture up at the top to be exact. I was busy gathering cotton and wool for my project. The good thing about gathering cotton and wool is that they are plants, which means they have a chance to drop Weak Botanic Chemicals, which are used to make dyes, which in turn are used to make certain pieces of clothing.
I left my horse on a hill (your mount does NOT disappear when you get off of it. It stays where you left it and if you left it in a dangerous area a mob may kill it.) and heading down into a valley picking cotton as I went. My cowboy is training in melee so he’s not dual wielding pistols and he’s not sniping people First Person Shooter style (possible in Fallen Earth). Instead he is wielding an axe handle. Previously his weapon was a sharpened wooden closet rod.
I wasn’t paying very close attention to my surroundings and I ended up in the middle of what I can only describe as a cyclone of wolfy death. My axe handle was swinging as fast as it could and I realized that you can use bandages WHILE fighting. It’s the only thing that kept me alive as I took down around twenty mobs about my level. Of course it was not all at the same time, but chaining one after the other. When I finished I took turns skinning wolves and killing them as they respawned.
I finally finished and made my way back to my horse, loaded down with cotton, wool, wolf skins and meat. The beautiful thing about this game is that wolf hides count as wolf hides, but also as ragged leather for crafting purposes. This is an amazing idea. It allows me to farm ragged leather, or any low level creature hide I choose and still get the same result. The meat works the same way, it can all be cooked into Grilled Chicken, I guess because everything tastes like chicken and the chicken in the Fallen Earth world are far too scary to pluck and eat.
This is a chicken. No wonder people just cook coyote.
After all of this I am even closer to finishing my goal and when I do I’ll add pictures of all of the armor below skill level 45 that I can find. Unfortunately to equip it I’ve got another level to get so I can raise my Use Armor Skill to 45. Sadly until the 1st I don’t have enough to subscribe, so in the meantime once I’ve finished with my project I’m going to be giving EVE Online a shot. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions for games, or for things to do in EVE.
Manifest Pixel 