gamebunny fallen earth interview

Fallen Earth Interview with James Hettinger, CEO, Icarus Studios

by David 'spridal' Moore

Fallen Earth is being fashioned as a "collective cross-media experience...that thrusts you into a post-collapse Earth in about 150 years from now." We here at gamebunny say "And, about damn time too!" We've been waiting for years for a nice, post-apocalyptic MMO featuring vicious mutants, warriors festooned with feathers & leathers and environments filled with dangerous, defiled terrain.

We grabbed hold of James Hettinger, CEO of developer, Icarus Studios for the latest word on the state of the game. Read on!

gamebunny:
The Mad Max films surely must have played an influential part in the creation of Fallen Earth - what other media (films, books, games) were inspirations?

James Hettinger:
There’s a whole body of post-collapse, post-apocalypse media that influenced us – and that we feel we’re adding to. In films, not just the Mad Max series, but also their precursors, the Planet of the Apes movies, Logan ’s Run, The Omega Man, as well as some recent films such as The Postman, Waterworld. And of course there are the lesser known ones like Le Dernier Combat, Luc Besson’s first feature, and a million B movies from the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties.

But it’s more than post-apocalyptic movies. The Matrix (which has post-apocalyptic underpinnings), X-Men – in short, the whole group of films that deals with questions of what comes next…and what can come next, the way books like The Stand, Lucifer’s Hammer, Earth Abides, Alas Babylon, the novels that The Postman, The Omega Man, and Logan’s Run were based on. Comics such as Judge Dredd (not the movie!) or Jeremiah (both the comic and the Showtime series.)

In games, there’s Fallout, of course, Gamma World, and some obscure titles from the Eighties and early Nineties, board games like Car Wars and so on.

In short, there’s a variety of thought and speculation about the nature of post-apocalyptic futures. From the beginning, our goal has been to create our own take, molding our vision of the world to come by studying today’s world trends and adding our own insights and approaches to the question of what comes after.…

The Icarus Studios team has quite an impressive background in the telecommunications industry. Why create a game and why an MMO (one of the most notoriously difficult types to develop)?

James Hettinger:
First and foremost is our passion for playing MMOG’s. Both individually and as a team, our history is in MMOG – we’ve worked on titles including Warbirds, The Kingdom of Drakkar, as well as online versions of board games, war games, parlor games. Our skills and energies have been focused on MMOG’s. We feel that, done right, MMOG offers the ultimate gaming experience, adding interpersonal play to well-crafted online worlds.

Other than the apocalyptic backstory, what sets Fallen Earth apart from its competition? Are there features you are particularly proud of?

James Hettinger:
Absolutely – what we’ve tried to do is improve the online game experience in as many ways as we can, putting a great deal of effort on multiple fronts – gameplay of course, but also sound, music, art quality and animation, an attention to detail and cohesiveness…to approach every aspect of the game from our own perspective, and to develop them in ways that makes them distinctive.

As far as gameplay specifics, we’re particularly proud of having created a game that doesn’t straightjacket the player into a class-based system. The players themselves pick and choose the ways they grow their characters, rather than being inserted into rigid classes. We’ve worked to make our creatures more intelligent, to add levels of strategy and tactics that keep the game from becoming formulaic.

The world of Fallen Earth is rich, complex, and expansive. The terrain can also be deformed by players and events in real time, adding to the ongoing and constant sense of exploration and discovery we want to create – and taking the player away from the “sandbox” environments of other online games.

You are boasting some impressive stats (zoneless environments, unlimited players, worldwide servers)- can you tell us a bit more about the nuts and bolts of the game? What will character generation be like? What kind of skills and/or classes are available?

James Hettinger:
We chose a classless character development system because we felt that class-based systems inevitably constrain what players can do. And there really is no reason to do this. In a lot of ways class-based systems are holdovers from the original D&D role-playing game. They have a lot of history but they carry a lot of baggage – they are virtually impossible to balance a class-based system. A single ability can alter the balance of the whole game. Trying to seek equilibrium becomes an endless process of chasing a moving target.

As far as players go, a class-based system restricts them to a specific character type. Our goal is for players to define their characters by their actions - what they have and what they want to pursue, rather than a pre-defined template.

The result is that players develop their characters themselves, and make them as individual as they, themselves, are. Their characters’ skills and abilities will be developed naturally within the game itself. The only thing the players define for their characters is initial appearance – actual character definition comes from gameplay (the appearance of characters can later be altered in gameplay…).

Our ambition led us to feel that unconstrained characters deserved an unconstrained world. Fallen Earth is zoneless because bounded play areas are not only highly artificial, they artificially constrain gameplay and game-flow. We wanted, and we created, a large world that was open and seamless. And huge: Fallen Earth takes place across an 83 kilometer by 83 kilometer area in real-world terms. Such a region naturally encompasses all manner of terrain, towns, underground complexes, the ruins of the world, and so on.

Is trading or crafting available and can a player avoid battle, surviving exclusively with these skills?

James Hettinger:
Trading and crafting are important elements that players can choose to pursue. Again, as with other elements in the game, trading and crafting not only function as aspects of rich gameplay, but reflect the sorts of challenges and needs that a post-collapse environment would impose.

Bear in mind that this environment is harsh, dangerous, and that sooner or later everyone will face combat, but trade skills do offer a fruitful approach to the game. Resources, refined goods, virtually everything is rare providing a variety of needs for players to fill.

Will there be “Magic” in the game?

James Hettinger:
Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So, yes, there will be powers and abilities deployed in the game, but they’re the result of technology, engineering, mutation, rather than supernatural magic per se.

Vehicles sound fun. Very few MMOs have them. Can you elaborate? Will both air and land be available? Mounted weapons?

James Hettinger:
The world of Fallen Earth is just beginning to rise from a near-complete collapse - any kind of advanced technology is rare and expensive. Knowledge, parts ...need to be re-discovered but there are land vehicles that players will be able to fix and acquire over time, that they can develop and enhance in various ways. They are scare resources that will take time to recover, assemble and re-fit before hitting the roads.

My thanks go out to Christophe Watkins and James Hettinger at Icarus Studios. For further info on Fallen Earth you can check the link below:

fallenearth.com