My Twisted Love Story with Fallen Earth (IRL story)

[Ardenn 41]

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I tried to keep it short as possible, but its hard to make 4-5 years of game play history 'short'.

Despite the fact that I "left a long time ago" for other games, Fallen Earth has remained in the back of my mind for years in ways that other games have not. I think I have had more unique experiences in this engine and universe than any other game I've played, after more than 50 MMO titles I've ground my way into late game stages. Most of them are a blur that fuse together and become the new korean standard of color coded difficulties and bland use of random number generation promoted as 'content' or mega-monoliths so old and crammed with trivial minigames that their own communities struggle to explain things to new players. Where more and more companies promote cloud servers and megashards that do more to split up people who are like minded that want to play together in favor of always having an active "Pick up group" random dungeon generator where you never have to get to know anything other than basic mechanics. I run into more and more people in new hip videogames who feel alienated by the very technology that is trying to reach out to satisfy the lowest common denominator for the biggest bucks, preying on those who cannot control themselves financially or feeding fame to those who do nothing but harm the people behind the screens.

Fallen Earth was a strange experience for me from day one because when it was promoted to me, I basically hated Post-Apoc games, and I found basically all of the Fallout games to be interesting on an engine perspective but actually really boring to play. I was pretty angry with the guy who was trying to get me to buy into Icarus Studios and this grunge, dirty, violence laden hellhole of a game that looked like it was full of rejected WoW skins, and the game was still subscription only at this point. Not to mention it looked like it was an Mature/Adult rated game, and I had suspicions that adult games were all full of really creepy people. I'd already determined at that point that the more 'realistic' a games graphics were, the more disturbing the trolls got, and this was later enforced when Wildstar came out and massive amounts of people I considered scary refused to play it entirely based on "I dont want to look like a cartoon". But I digress.

This fellow ended up convincing my Boyfriend to play, so if I wanted more time with him, I'd have to play their stupid, dirty game they were probably going to get bored of in a few weeks and abandoned anyway. The guy I was angry with (more now that he had talked my mate into playing) had a hardcore boner for all things Enforcer, right on down to strangling out the CHOTA and Vista for being terrorist scum. This immediately became a problem and started fights because I thought the CHOTA lroe actually looked really cool, but he demanded we all be the same faction as other games taught us we werent allowed to be buddies if we werent the same faction. Eventually over time a compromise was made when we found about the old shoulder faction data and how we could share points on certain quests just by being allies. So my friends went Tech, and I agreed to be a Traveler, since I sure as hell didnt want to play a military character.

As I predicted, the guy pushing the game basically got to a point where he couldnt progress in missions without treating us like slaves and got mad any time we wanted to spend time alone together. Refusing to play with other people already in the playerbase who were actively helping people (like 1st Canyon Army was really active at the time), he quit the game outright when I ran into something I really grew attached to and completely stopped paying any and all attention to what my IRL friends were doing.

More specifically, I had my PVP flag on because I used to play on PVP servers in WoW and had gotten addicted to the thrills of being hunted by strangers in the wild and just randomly needing to fight for my life over a crafting resource. Back in the day I used to be notorious for fishing in high end combat zones just waiting for someone who was bored enough to fight to the death, because all the rules people kept applying to regarding what was 'fair' in a duel was annoying.

This is how I met Aiidoneus and got introduced to the Fallen Earth Roleplaying community.

The game was a lot different back then to how it was now. Melee was king in the hands of an experienced twink. There were three different stuns nearly anyone could use that could screw up melee, but at the same time, if they got close enough to you and you didnt have that stun ready, you were essentially dead in one hit, two if you were high level. As I continued to play, it felt like a good balance compared to how much damage dual pistols could do to the same melee player if the gunner had decent aim. I started to specialize specifically in heavy pistols to fight Aiidoneus because he actively went out of his way to hunt me down and kill me "In Character" as a method of teaching me how to pvp better, read the minimap better, and above all; recognize when I was fighting a weaker player who was more likely to quit if I kept killing them because they were there.

His stories inspired me to go out and seek others, start reading things posted to the FERP website, asking questions, seeking out and participating in events, and being genuinely shocked and amazed how hard people were working to make their little sandbox game alive and vibrant despite the gloomy nature and subjects of the genre. There was battles between CHOTA and Enforcers in a 'cops and robbers' kind of back and forth, there were Biker Gangs peddling smuggled goods and drugs to those who would buy them or escorting people to strange monuments off the beaten path, there were weekly neutral rides where 30+ people got together to dance in a tavern for an hour then pack up their gear to ride to S1 as a unit and put on a show for newbies, the Market was always packed with every facet of the community and celebrated each other for existing, and there was an honor system in place with the higher PVP clans to support fair play and not just non-stop camp lowbies at the spawn point.

By my 5th week of play, I had started writing in character journals for the things I was experiencing because I wanted to keep track of peoples names, places I'd been discovering, and because the wiki was spotty at the time, certain quest lines I wanted to remember the dialog for and how I felt about them afterwards. I showed these journals to the person who inspired me to get into MMO gaming in the first place and his response was to keep paying for my sub in the event I promised to write a new post every week for him to read. He didnt have time for new games but was interested in the Telepath lore and asked me to follow up on learning more about the All-Mind.

It was also his belief that the only way for niche games to survive is to take notes from the EVE universe and how its been written entirely by the fans for other fans for years, blowing up everyone's expectations of the longevity of the game system.

Basically all of my old fanbase and any of the new fanbase I gained from writing about my Roleplay and PVP experiences have told me my writing style evolved a lot while working and playing here. After about eight months of recaps, people started asking me to make an actual e-book out of it and offering to buy it to continue funding my writing and gameplay, helping people express their characters and get their stories out because some people just didnt feel like they could write a story format out of a conversation or one line idea. There was even discussion about taking my "book" to Icarus themselves and asking if they would be interested in backing it as 'official' promotional material, so I could maybe get an editor into my writings and make a better, cohesive story of players and player history (I got permission from a good 190 or so people to write about their characters, I think only three ever asked not to be mentioned/removed).

But I didnt, because the announcement of G1 buying the company happened before I finished the book I was working on. Then the HDD I had the final chapter and all the reference screenshots and logs on got corrupted. In the roleplay world, the "Real Ardenn" got assassinated, and the clones people have been experiencing since then have been husks and shades of his former self. The "End" of the story is now just player speculation about how the war between Saints and Condemned actually ended, and legends were born out of every persons different version of it.... and it was promptly forgotten as G1 started to change things for the worse.

I was leading a Plague storyline during the Free to Play transition. I wrote up some short fictions for why weird stuff was happening like entire species of plants going missing because G1 decided we had too many crafting mats and recipes were too complicated (and sucking a lot of charm out of the crafting system in the first place, not to mention the need to explore new areas when everything gave the same generic meat/fruit all of a sudden). I watched G1 ignore the hand crafted spawn zones of materials that made sense to their surroundings and the week of crashing when they forcefully implemented node randomization, making everyone who played feel alienated in their own homes (Did they ever fix the bugged spawns inside walls and the unreachable trenches around LA?) ... And the release of incomplete content, finally devolving into a constant stream of reskinned vehicles and outfits as the new owners seemed to down right give up and just frantically seem to want to pump as much money out of the loyalists as possible.

I just shook my head when KNIGHT Online closed and didnt thin much about it initially as anything other than 'another failed KR game'.... Until their team was added to the Fallen Earth team, and then GORE happened. Untested, released into a world where it immediately broke the slow power creep and completely turned the game up side down because it worked on the korean model of "Every upgrade should have a chance to fail so bad you lose all your progress" then claimed it was okay because you could grind for the upgrades very slowly through an end game defense point that felt like a dead end for progress and story both on a level that made EA look fair. I'm sure the new owners have heard enough about this topic so I'll get past it.

Despite its negatives, despite how often I found global chat to be toxic (I'm just not a very aggressive person, I legit had global chat off 90% of the time), despite the fact that there was a scary crazy russian squad of gamers who were hunting peoples IRL information and threatening families of people because their dad was popular in a videogame, despite the creepy stalkers who hunted me for years demanding attention or making erotic art without my consent of my characters and selling them to other people, despite how buggy and chaotic and the obvious decay of the engine as technology continued to advance.... I really love this goddamn game and on some level I low key hate the community who keeps reaching out to me to let me know when the anniversary events are, asking me to come back for special roleplay reunions or most recently, the excited prattle and screams about Little Orbit buying the game and maybe a chance at Fallen Earth 2, in a sense.

But I also really love all of you, even the trolls and the crazies and the Heretics. You all made this game freaking special and I'm not going to forget the times I spent here easily. I still log in from time to time and check up on people. I still see some of the things I started being maintained, and I'm glad to see someone picked the Market back up when I just didnt have the energy to do it any more. My Boyfriend still hates it every time he sees me booting up the launcher because he knows the second I get into a conversation, he's going to lose me for 8 hours while I talked to people and ask about what they've been doing and how they entertain themselves without new content.

Maybe its not a multi-million dollar blockbuster MMO with millions of players to give it a 200 man team of artists and coders.... But it's Home.

For all its flaws and problems, its still Home.

~ Ardenn, Former CHOTA/Condemned Warchief

PS; Should I send the CEO my old journals?

[Ardenn 41]

A few things that didn't fit into the rest of the ramble, mostly misc memories and thoughts about experiences I havnt had in other games in a while... Specifically the engine and what kept making me want to come back, not just the people who lived here.

- "Off the Beaten Path" is a phrase I saw someone else use and it spoke to me. I've always been kind of an eccentric player so when someone told me to walk out of a cloner and pick a random direction and keep going, I did it, just to see what I could find. I expected to find bland flat orangy-yellow rock like everywhere else in Sector 1 in those first few weeks of play. Instead, I found; A campfire and a tent with a dead man inside (never found a quest related to it, it was just there), The Carhenge (before Global faction control existed, there was no reason to head out there), Amazing rock sculptures and archways (I hid just inside the edge of Windfarm between the walls and the radiation zones, writing my journals because no one looked there), an abandoned hunting lodge surrounded by man hunting bears, The mysterious voices of the dead in Sector 3 (I dont know if they are still there, G1 might have removed them), The sobbing, lonely scientist in Alpha with the only voiced line that ever made me feel bad for leaving him behind ("Please dont leave me alone...")... Theres so many more but I cant list them all. What mattered were things were there to be found, even if they had no meaning to the main story.

- There were Rare spawns that actually felt Rare, either because so many other people were looking for the spawn and killing it, or by the sheer fact that I never knew exactly where this rumor I heard about once actually spawned. Monsters that could potentially show up and path around anywhere in the zone gave me a reason to keep looking through zones I'd already completed the story for. In particular, I had someone challenge me to find a roaming White Gorilla and bring back his drop as a badge of honor. I NEVER FOUND HIM. At some point I actually became convinced he never existed and camped in Kaibab for an entire week, running back and forth across everything and learned the place like the back of my hand. Never found him. People swear he's there. The drop exists. I like to think I was just really unlucky and that he does exist, but I've never seen a screenshot of him from people who say he does exist. It was my Bigfoot/X-files moment that kept making me go back to Kaibab when I had free time... looking for proof.

- I want to talk about my experience with Earthwalker because despite all my experiences with Warcraft raids and epic level events, I still like taking a rag tag group of various levels of kids and veterans alike to go and fight the Earthwalker. When I first met him, Aiid was helping me get a Fast travel point and try to find a crafting material I needed. For the most part, the guy was dead silent most of the time, spoke in one or two word sentences when he wasnt just smacking me up side the head with his axe  (I kept pvp on for years). He'd let me get ahead of him because I saw this weird change in the terrain and everyone had always encouraged me to explore. It took me a while to realize Aiid suddenly wasnt following me any more. I looked back at him and he was backing up. The ground and the screen shook. I heard a roar and suddenly a massive foot mashed my body into a pancake. Aiid was laughing his patootie off and calling a nearby GM to rez me because he felt bad and they werent busy. The GM laughed. Aiid laughed. The Earthwalker laughed. Aiid got stepped on. The GM kept laughing. Good times. Some time later I got to tag along and learn how to do the Wolf run, and found the strategy to fight the beast was similar to one of my all time favorite bosses from WoW.... But better! And in the open world, so I wouldnt be restricted by faction or super specific level range or elitist item levels to invite anyone who just wanted to see the beast to come hang out and give it a try. It was like going to my own little Rodeo and I was always excited when I heard someone was doing a run and asked if I could go.

- It'd take too long to explain everything, but Fallen Earth completely changed my perspectives on PVP and understanding of combat up to that point. I was never a heavy pvper and stuck mostly to self defense mechanics or counter-ganking when it did occur but I rarely ever personally hunted people. I mostly avoided Bloodsports once I figured out it was mostly Capture the Flag with the same group of people all the time. Between WoW and all of Halo, I was really tired of CTF and pretty much refused to play, which meant if I wanted the armor related to pvp, I had to learn about World PVP and Territory control. I'd basically never played a long term control game before, nor had I been exposed to the long term negotiations of PVPers. I was only just barely starting to grasp that there were honor systems with regular fighters when I came into Fallen Earth, and the hybrid maps that had claimable PVP cities but werent mandatory to enjoy the game was FASCINATING. In five years I only ever managed to kill seven players by my self, and most of them were when I was level 35. Because once upon a time, the system's power creep was slow enough that a smart player with a bit of decent aim could overpower and take down an overconfident capped player. I chased people higher level than me because I felt bad killing questers my own level. I could go on for days about stuff I learned about people and gameplay both here and how the different nationalities of the PVPers I met changed their tactics and shifted negotiations and on and on and on and be excited about it even though I probably had the worst k/d ratio for years. And I don't consider myself a PVPer.

- The only time I really felt the closed in feeling was the Wall in Kaibab. Most other games I play these days have obscure reasons you cant go beyond invisible walls or convenient impassable mountains or a three inch heigh ledge your character cannot pass even though you just climbed and jumped off a hundred foot tower. I know, this is another 'off the path' feeling, but I specifically wanted to embrace the Dead Zone for giving me a feeling like maybe some day the world would get bigger and I could go further into the rad zone and maybe I might find something this time before my husk collapses and LifeNet forces my consciousness into another unit. There are a few special places in every map where I kept trying to push, just because I wanted to see how far it rendered, where I'd start to bleed to death from invisible death. In Sector 1 theres a valley with a path that goes down into a long dip that has no warning that its going to lead you to death. I still want to know whats out there. Another is behind the small PVP zone near the LB outpost in Sector 3. I regularly went behind the CHOTA outpost in Territory Control and just drove beyond the rim of the map and set up a camp, then challenged people to find me. I even used it in PVP a few times, either to force spawn myself back to the cloner because I got chased too far out, or to mess with the naive people chasing me and we all died while I laughed maniacally (and got shot in the back when I stepped out the cloner. Yeah, I deserved it. ;) )

- Combat buggy + Pup Tent glitch. It made my year the first time someone showed that to me. It was the most beautiful bug I'd ever seen and I spent months trying to figure out how to use that mechanic in some kind of game. Eventually I heard about a group that used to do a combat motorcade event but no one had done it in a while. I asked around but never found the guy and eventually worked up some basic rules and donations to do my first Buggy Demo Derby which I eventually ended up handing over to Hooligan. Seeing a dozen or more players in combat buggies in bright colors launching over tents trying to dodge or break a chaser is really something that needs to be seen to be believed. The screenshots I had just never did it justice.

- Dont tell a Turk and a Greek to stop fighting, hug and make up. Man, that was a lot of yelling and several days of history lessons.

[Vaako 1]

Hello There!
Reading your post brings out memories of when I was very active playing FE, unfortunately to RL and G1 made it impossible for me to play as often would have liked.
I enjoyed playing FE for hours and hours till late at night while chit chatin in Vent with fellow clannies and other friends

My interaction with Aiidoneus was during and after the so call war between Saints and Condemned, help me out a few times with random stuff while in KINGS which was all Traveler Clan and ally to the Saints. 

Thanks for the read, I like your post. 

Vaako




 

[Ardenn 41]

I'd have to list like 250 or so people and like fifty clans if I wanted to really name names of everyone who influenced my gameplay, but mostly I was trying to focus on stuff I liked about the game and hoped got preserved in the new system.... Buuuut I've also been pretty gosh darned sick in the past few weeks, so I see my posts kind of ended up in a long ramble, and I'm sorry for whoever slogged through all that. XD

Of all the games I've played online, people from the FE community are the only ones who still check up on me and ask how I'm doing. I actually had to step out of the old war games and event planning schedules due to a developing health problem that badly needed to be addressed. I'm more stable now and getting better, but I've been surprised by every message I see floating its way into my mailbox or via messenger to see how my progress is coming along or whatever I'm playing now.

I have to say, I love the optimism that is coming out of people talking about the sale of the game to Little Orbit. I havn't seen people this hopeful and optimistic and discussing future plans in a long time and its brought a smile to my face, even when I'm stuck in bed and too weak to sit up some nights.

I wish I could help somehow, other than posting walls of nostalgic text.