Fallen Earth state of the game letter previews economic fixes, new content

by Jef Reahard on Jan 5th 2011 5:00PM

Sci-fi, Fallen Earth, Economy, Patches, News items, Post-Apocalyptic

Another year dawns fresh on the wasteland, and Icarus senior game designer Marie Croall checks in on the official forums for Fallen Earth's latest State of the Game update. 2011 looks to be an exciting year for fans of new stuff, as the game will see a combat revamp, new high-level group content, and of course the new Sector 4 portions of the map.

Icarus plans to release Sector 4 across four counties with the first one, Alpha, raising the level cap by five and bringing new gear, mutations, recipes, and abilities to the game. Look for it to debut on the live server in the second quarter of 2011. Why the delay? Croall explains that the team needed to address balance issues prior to rolling out new content. "There were several areas of combat that we needed to adjust before we could properly design encounters and instances as we moved forward. Additionally, our art team has been taking these past few months to make huge improvements that are necessary for the gameplay, story and setting. As important as it is to us to get the new content out, it's more important to get it out right," she says.

Croall's letter also clues us in to the next patch, currently scheduled for February. In addition to skill and mutation balancing, the update will feature the new scavenger boss system (with new bosses and encounter areas) as well as the team's first crack at a round of economic fixes. Icarus is taking some of the concerns raised about Fallen Earth's economy to heart and is going to be addressing everything from supply and demand to drop rates, trading concerns, and general crafting fixes. "A thriving player driven economy should be a central part of our game and we're working very hard on getting it there," Croall writes.

Source: Fallen Earth forums

Tags: aro-sei, crafting, drop-rates, economy, fallen-earth, fallen-earth-llc, fallen-earth-team, fixes, icarus, icarus-studios, marie-croall, patch, scavenger-boss, state-of-the-game, updates

Reader Comments (3)

I was somewhat encouraged when I read (earlier) that combat has been made more difficult - I always found it ridiculously easy. And their changes to address the whole faction wheel-spin nonsense also sounded much needed.

I don't see anything new here, though, that would make me want to resub to check it out apart from:

"Skill and mutation balancing – Our systems team lead, Sarah, is hard at work bringing the skills and mutations into line with the physical combat changes."

I always thought their original vision for mutations was the right one. Maybe they're going to ungimp them a bit? Though I suspect it's the other way round and this balancing will involve gimping them even more.

I don't know how they will make an economy appear in FE without severely nerfing the ability of people to craft everything in the game. It's kind of scary that they are revamping the core of the game's systems like this.

Having no actual economy to speak of is why I left this game after hitting the lvl cap, twice. The AH should be a place to dump your unneeded materials to, letting others snag them for themselves. As it stands, the deposit needed for listing items is too high, and since very few people use the AH due to those prices, the 48 hours max duration keeps ppl from keeping a supply up, due to losing more chips than they'd ever gain from actually selling the materials.

So you end up farming locations for things that sell well as vendor trash, stuff that I would much rather sell to others. I had full bank stockpiles of things i hardly ever used, maybe for an odd recipe here and there, but most was unused for weeks.

The combat never really bothered me that much, the lack of a need to group with people and the high travel times didn't do much to improve my "doing things with others" fun. Fix the AH to make it a materials depot and stuff could get interesting again. I'd have rather gone around gathering and selling semi-rare (in S1, later sections they much more common) but much needed materials for new players than go farming 1-3 high lvl locations just to vendor all the drops for chips, then craft more ammo and do it again.... ugg.