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The Summit
The Philadelphia Game Expo and Industry Summit ran this past weekend at the Greater Philadelphia Area Expo Center and it was rockin’! A full line-up of some of the industry’s top developers were on location and we had one interest in particular: Fallen Earth Lead Designer, Lee Hammock.

Hammock was a summit keynote speaker made up of a panel of some great industry professionals including Damon Albers of Burst Online Entertainment, 38 Studios’ Steve Danuser, and Alexander Macris of The Escapist. The keynote was titled, Beyond Raids and Ganks: Exploring Next-Gen MMOs in a non WoW-Killer Context, and it was absolutely brilliant. I really believe this was one of the best keynotes I have ever heard simply because it was a topic that players could listen and relate to. It’s one thing to be a member of the Press and hear various industry speakers go in great detail on game development, budgets, production costs, etc., but this discussion I identified with solely as a gamer. Below is what I gathered from the keynote and my conversation with Hammock afterward. You can also listen to our audio excerpts from the summit Hammock spoke at on episode #6 of the LifeNet, Fallen Earth Podcast here.

Fallen Earth iPhone App
Much was discussed in terms of MMOG development, but one of the more exciting topics was Lee Hammock discussing the upcoming iPhone app for the newly released Fallen Earth. Through this iPhone app, players will be able to stay connected with Fallen Earth through their user account. Features like the auction house, clan chat, viewing of crafting queues, mail, and viewing of gear will be functional and accessible via iPhone app. The idea is to keep Fallen Earth players connected to the in game experience even when they are away from their computer. Long-term, they hope to implement features that will allow you to affect your character while away from your PC. No official pricing was given, but players can rest assured that there will NOT be a monthly fee for the app and if anything it will be like a small one-time fee for the purchase of the application itself.

Server and Population Architecture
A lot of players enjoy the current single server design that Fallen Earth currently boasts. Personally, I think it’s fantastic and enjoy logging into a consistently populated server. From a social perspective having a single server is a great way to get to know lots of other players and really allows guilds, clans, or players to build a name for themselves across the entire game, rather than just on one particular server. FE Lead Designer, Lee Hammock, did reveal however that they do have a threshold in place that will trigger the launch of a 2nd server and 3rd server in the event that the population explodes. Hammock seemed confident that if need be, three servers would be the absolute most they would ever do, which supports the idea that their architecture is designed to support one to two heavily populated servers similar to EVE Online’s single server architecture.

Player Camps and New Construction Tradeskill
Two items discussed that go hand-in-hand are the player camps that were mentioned in the State of the Game and a new tradeskill called Construction. Construction is a new tradeskill that won’t be implemented for a while but is the first step to player housing. Construction will work very similar to the current Science and Nature tradeskills whereas it won’t have as many “trees” as a tradeskill like Ballistics, but will still be fairly complex at launch and will be heavily expanded on over time. Players will be able to research and construct expendable objects like advanced camps. One example scenario given by Hammock was a player could use Construction to build a target range. If a player stayed within X feet of this target range for X amount of time, it would then give them a buff to their rifle skill or the like.

Constructed buildings, walls, and other structures also have stats. An example used to explain this was if a player built a wall within the range of other structures within a town or camp that correlate with that constructed item, they will interconnect and become a part of that town which will give the items better stats or other benefits like increased town defense. If you built a bank for the town it would then increase the town commerce, but you don’t want to have too much commerce with too little defense, “the raiders may come for the easy pickens.”

Hammock also explained that of course the long-term goal would be to allow players to destroy player-built structures which would fall heavily into the PvP side of Fallen Earth, but that side of it depends on technology available, and at this time the development team is still planning the technology for the construction feature therefore Hammock could not guarantee destructible structures will be implemented at launch of the Construction tradeskill or at all. But according to Hammock, the new Construction tradeskill as a whole is being designed with PvP heavily in mind. You can expect the Construction tradeskill to cap out and work very similar to the existing tradeskills that are currently in game. When mentioning whether Construction and Player Camps would come in Patch 1.2.0, Hammock simply stated, “It’s going to be a ways off because we have a lot of things we want to put into it.” Hammock did say that instanced housing would probably be a part of it, but certainly not all of it.

He also went on to say that they are currently using around 20% of the map with another 40% planned for story-line leaving 40% for housing space.

Pet System
“It hurt to cut [the pet system]…but do you want an aspect of the game that’s gonna suck and bring everything else down because of it? Or do you want to cut that and have everything else be that much more awesome?” Hammock stated. Hammock mentioned the Fallen Earth Pet System quite a bit throughout the day and really seems anxious to get it right and get it into the game. But don’t be looking for this to come in the next few weeks. Hammock is adamant that the system be complete and right before it’s released to players.

Turrets
Another exciting feature the team is working on for Sector 4 are player-made turrets. Players will be able to spawn a turret similar to how you spawn a vehicle currently, then sit down in it and blast away, meaning there are some very heavy weapons coming down the line.

Lore
We briefly touched on story-line during our conversation. One faction in particular mentioned were the CHotA. If you thought Fallen Earth already had a great back-story and tons of lore, well, get ready for more. Hammock stated that the CHotA lore specifically goes much, much deeper than what has been revealed so far and that lots more info is to come regarding Redhand in particular.