Friday, November 27

Two of the best things to come out of the 80's



And just because it's so awesome:

Sunday, November 22

Tip Of The Day

You cannot brush your teeth in Fallen Earth.
NOTE: This tip does not apply outside of the game.

Tuesday, November 17

Legal Status?

I wonder how legally binding Terms of Services published to your browser using a wrong Character Encoding really are?
I mean, sadly the bit where you state you read and agree to them is legible, but I only understood and agreed to the bits i could actually read, which is "Google".

Thursday, November 12

Fallen Earth Free Trial!

Update for the lurkers! The Escapist has a Fallen Earth free trial offer available. They have 5000 keys to give away, so get one while they last. You won't regret it.


Click >>HERE<< to get your key.

Tuesday, November 10

Contemplating

All dressed down in the latest urban gear. Now comtemplating where to go from here.

Monday, November 9

Life and times in Odinville

Odinville Highstreet

A couple of days ago I had made my first visit to Odinville. It was my first journey away from Midway. I spend my time just having a look around town. Before I had a change to talk to the local people I got whisked away to fight Zombies somewhere between Midway and Clinton FARM. And as I had posted earlier that adventure left me stranded in Clinton FARM. But before I left I had the change to visit the high street. The two people you see walking there are an estate agent showing prime real estate to his customer.

After our zombie adventure I hang around in Clinton FARM and had a few interesting courses in pathology, surgery, and medicine. As well as some search and rescue operations. I even did my bit together with other clones to stop a full scale attack by the blade dancers on the local mine. (the game had a different swing on the concept of a public quest.) In the end I had more or less learned everything there is about the area. I had been tasked to do a full scale sweep of the mine, but it requires a team. (We should team up and give this a try together with another attempt at the zombies soon!)

Posing for the camera with my new horse

So I packed my bags, and headed back to Odinville. Along the way I passed a container storage facility, which is turned into a free for all killing zone. Since I felt all knowing after my work at Clinton FARM I decided to have a look. Before I properly realized what it meant some bully was shooting down my horse. Old nag is not exactly the toughest of horse so she collapsed almost instantly. I managed to get off in time and run to safety. Still not having learned my lesson I walk back in and *pew* *pew* I am dead.

There is a lifenet terminal very close by, but I had enough of playing shooting target so I set off to walk to Midway. While hiking the wilderness I realized I so need a new horse. As I reached the outskirts of Midway I stop at the horse merchant to buy an untrained horse, some feed, and a training kit. It was all I needed to train myself a new horse. In the end I was only set back 3 blue chips, so not that bad. Of course it takes some time to get the horse in shape, so I continued on hiking to Odinville. By the time I reached there, and helped out a poor farm girl along the way, my horse was ready for its first ride. (As it turned out Old Nag was not really lost. I could tow her carcass to the stables and probably heal back to life again, but for now she is parked there.)

A view from Odinville's watchtower

Now that I made it back to Odinville it was time to get busy. Plenty of work to do in this fancy town. A bit surprising those CHOTA fools actually made such a decent town. There was even a completely stable and intact watchtower. It gave a nice view over the city. Of course there are problems too. And a lot of them of the nasty kind. The villains and critters around are quite a bit tougher than in Midway or Clinton.

Me, my horse, and a grave robber

Another very surprising yet very cool thing happened just outside town. I was just roaming around a bit after visiting the mining facility where its miners seem to be turning into zombies. I ran into a valley that was filled with roaming grave robbers. I am not completely sure why they were there, since I actually didn't see that many graves, but that is not too important. What was surprising how they reacted when I tried to attack one of them. I shot an arrow from my crossbow, and in stead of that the robber came running to me, he dropped to the ground to take some cover and started shooting arrows back at me! The sneaky girl! I was a bit dumbfounded, but realized quick enough I could do the same. It was pretty epic.

(I even had some time to play my usual Sunday City of Villains fun. And that went successful too. Our entire group made it to level 50. Woohoo! Corporal Picker can now hang up her Arachnos uniform and open the inn she always dreamed about.)

Saturday, November 7

Common decency

This is pure a rant. And it are probably the first signs I am turning into a crumpy old guy. But it irritates considerably nonetheless.

In Fallen Earth a lot of the NPCs are inside buildings, often even upstairs. Although the game allows it, I wouldn't think of crossing the doorstep on horseback. But plenty of players are just barging in without a second thought. I was at the ER in Clinton FARM, which is on the second floor. There are three beds where some NPCs are twitching in pain, and I am trying to heal them a bit with bandages and in comes this rude ape on horse crushing through. Of course telling him to get off didn't help much. Is it really that hard to use normal common decencies in a beautifully crafted online world?

Thursday, November 5

The Science of Fallen Earth

This isn't a Post of Wisdom, just me thinking and rambling out loud.
Feel free to join in and start a discussion.

Fallen Earth Crafting has two spheres:
Sphere 1: Baisc gear
This sphere encompasses Armourcrafting, Ballistics and Weaponry.
These are pretty much selfexplanatory.

Sphere 2: Reusables
This Sphere encompasses Cooking, Mutagenics and Medicine.
These different takes on what you'd be used to from Fantasy MMO's. Cooking is pretty normal, providing low level buffs for extended time (usually an hour, probably longer at higher levels) . Mutagenics provide bigger short term bursts, more like potions in Fantasy MMO's and Medicine is the usual band aid and debuff removal.

Gathering
Split up in Nature (harvesting/skinning) Geology (prospecting/mining) and Scavengning (dumpster dumping)
These are essentially the same ability with a few themes. Regardless of what your crafting specialty is, developping these skills is recommended as there's an obvious interdependency at least on the materials level.

Odd ones out:
I left ou Science so far. Also the Horse Training Tradeskill set. The latter is arguable not crafting. Animal husbandry normally isn't considered such. But Science, which is the miscellaneous catch all set, allows for motorized mounts and definately is a crafting skill. Besides. Horse Training is set up as a tradeskill with producables such as feed and veterinary kits.

Science is a bit of an odd one out. You can make perma-buffs for weapons like scopes with it, or components. Making it a bit like Augmentation crafting from Fantasy MMO's. But it's also the Dyes tradeskill, and you can make vehicles through it. It's almost as if this was supposed to be a third Sphere (Augmentation) but they didn't have enough parts for it, or decided to keep the number of Tradeskills down and they ended lugging Vehicles in with it. Odd that Horse Training isn't part of Nature then. Or is it?

Actually, my description of each Tradeskill except maybe the first three are too narrow. The developers did a nice job of making things just a little not so clear cut. Very Anarchy Online-esque in a way. Actually that's what Fallen Earth feels like.

A Modern Day AO.

Just slightly less heavy on the ovscure interdependency and Excell sheet skills requirements.
Also without waiting 24-49 seconds for your "Automatic Rifle" to be able to fire another few rounds. And that's a good thing in my opinion. I'm glad Phè convinced me to give it another shot.
Anyway, it's probably a good idea to pick one Tradeskill from the first two spheres, all the gathering ones, and either Horse trading or Science. Player trading and / or buddy gift culture should take care of the rest.

Gathering isn't a necessity at first as basic components can be bought at premium rates from NPC's. No doubt though that later on this will either disappear or you'll find you need rare parts which aren't for sale at the least. Actually I hope the components will always stay available from NPC's. Even at high rates. Good money sink. I still recommend lots of Gathering. From what I can tell each Gathering skill provides components for each of the Crafting Tradeskills.

In closing, Phèdre found a very nice information site here:

Tuesday, November 3

Zombies nibbling your neck

It has been quite a long time. Maybe going down the Ksaravi Gulch during a short return to Vanguard. Or a journey into the subway of Borealis. And that was already last year. So I was thrilled and excited yesterday when I go run off into the unknown with Lani at my side once again. The task we set out to do sounded easy enough. We just had to upload some computer program on a lifenet computer station.


(someone'd just ridden out of the frame...)

As we were getting near the station the we started to see zombies wandering aimlessly around. Fortunately on horse back we were fast enough to avoid all of them. Then we reached the rim of a rather large crater with a bunker like building at the bottom. Which was of course where we needed to be. What I didn't expect was that the roaming zombies all came from there. They were everywhere!

We found a good spot to stall our horses, and we started clearing the path towards the station. The zombies really acted like zombies. Unlike other creatures, shooting them didn't make them rush towards you. They just kept coming at their slow steady pace. We managed quite nicely to drop them with our crossbows before they reached us. And so we reached the door feeling pretty confident. Our team play worked wonders! As soon as we opened the door ten more zombies swarmed us. It got a bit hairy and panicky, but we managed to disperse all of them.

So we proceed inside and find a lot more of them down the stairs. It looked like a perfect funnel for us to tick them off one by one. And we did. But we heard some other sounds and then I felt it too! We had zombies nibbling at our necks. No idea where they came from, but they were there. And they had us trapped. A few seconds later we were piled up on the floor with the other pieces of meat. It was a hard lesson learned.


Good way to filter your Inventory

Fortunately we got ourselves reanimated at the nearest lifenet terminus. Which turned out not to be familiar Midway, but some farmstead called Clinton. We stood outside a bit dazed for a moment, and then the reality sank in our horses were still near the computer station. And we were 'here'.

It was wonderful!