It's been far too long between updates, but as some on you may have noticed I made a post on Twitter on the 2 year anniversary of taking down the Fallen Earth servers. After that I posted again in response to a tweet.
While I should have posted that here to begin with, I am happy to confirm that "Fallen Earth Classic" is going to be a real thing. We are now at the very late stages of getting the servers back online, and as some of you on Discord have noticed, parts of the game are responding again. There will be an announcement soon on the day of launch, but before that goes out, I want to raise a couple discussion points here to set expectations properly.
1) I'm doing this in the spirit of fun and just getting the game back online.
There were decisions that had to be made in order to pull this off. As we go through the rest of my bullets, just know that in each case I had to balance getting this back online in a reasonable amount of time versus the laundry list of things I'm sure players would have wanted. We did our best. My hope is that players will enjoy the challenge of re-conquering the wastelands from scratch while they wait for the next version of the game.
2) Steam doesn't work right now
We are waiting on Valve to restore the old game. As soon as that happens, then we'll post an update here.
3) Previously, we had some major issues hosting the game.
Nothing changed here. Those issues are wide ranging. They include being forced to host on old, out of support 32-bit Linux servers, attempting to work around a horribly bloated database with item duplicates everywhere, and expensive external hosting costs.
This time around, we worked through each of those issues as we built the plan for bringing the game back online. We successfully recompiled under 64-bit and we're using new operating systems. We also completely wiped the server. (SIDE NOTE: I sometimes refer to this as "servers", but only because the physical implementation of Fallen Earth requires more than 16 different services spread across a number of boxes). That means that you wont have any previous progression - including characters, items, or G1 purchases. I know that's a bummer. Trust me. We looked at other ways to do this, but many of them would have required a lot more work, testing, and time.
This is an experiment. We wont really know how the game is going to perform till we get a bunch of players online.
Which leads me to...
4) There will be no paid options for the game.
For various reasons, I don't want to monetize this version of the game. It is truly free-to-play (refer back to #1 above). I'm going to look at turning on the highest level subscription rewards for everyone, but there wont be any ability to purchase anything from the online store.
With that out of the way, I look forward to seeing you guys online.
Thanks,
Matt
Man, this game really takes me back. It wasn't long but I was an intern for a couple of months in QA at Icarus Studios just before the game launched.
Fallen Earth Classic
in General Discussion
Posted
Man, this game really takes me back. It wasn't long but I was an intern for a couple of months in QA at Icarus Studios just before the game launched.
Gonna have to check it out again for sure.