How does this go again?

A multifunctional title there :-)
First of all it's such a long time that I posted something here, I'm having some trouble with some controls.

The same is also true for playing Fallen Earth. Such a simple chore as mining a copper node (Left) took some doing at first. I also haven't recalled yet how to make screenies in this game without telltale UI elements, so you'll have to put up with those for this post at least.

Fallen Earth relaunched as a F2P/P2P hybrid game last Thursday, and since appears to be buckling under its own success. Thursday evening I barely managed to be in game at all. I spent a lot of time in an empty character creation / selection screen waiting for my characters to load in from the old character server or wherever they were stored.

Oddly enough only one of my characters had made it through the original account merge process.
Due to some slight stupidity on my part I unlocked the freebie spiked chopper on this account before checking my old one for leftover characters. I later did go back and discoered that my L20 character and another toon were still there.
Since the account transfer/merge thingy overwrites any toons you may have on the gamerfirst side of things I ended up doing a second account for Olwyn (my L20) and my new toon Arezou which I'm using to get through the "How does this go again" phase of returning to any MMO.

On a side note. Have you noticed how global chat is really the same in any MMO? Regardless of the business model? It always seems to be full of people who are in the wrong game. Bitching about how "was/is/will be" so much better than the one they're currently playing. Either looking at an awesome game through the binoculars of nostalgia (while for some reason *not* playing said game) or with the pinkly tinted glasses of overexpectation at the Next New Thing (to disappoint them). Weirdest of all are the ones compalining how that other current game is so much better. Why aren't these people playing the games they obviously enjoy more? Sure, some comparison chatter is to be expected, and no game compares favourably to every other game on every topic. It's particularly hard to measure up to people's expectations of yet urneleased games, but often the bitching goes way beyond that.
Oh well. Some people just need to be muted.
On that note, the Help channel is really handy. Take a peek every 5 minutes, block everyone who asks questions USING ONLY CAPS and you're golden...

Getting my account sorted out and trying to get into the game e.t.c. took me most of Friday evening. About half the time servers were down and you'd be told to "check your Internet connection" by the client, showing how dangerous that is for a default message... Luckily the transfer service was still up. But due to a *lot* of people returning to the game this week as well as loads of newbie players giving it a go, the single server isn't really handling the load.

The game's tutorial has been revamped since we saw it last so it's about half the original length before you save the day by blowing up. Unfortunately one problem at this time is you get stuck at starting zone selection if you go through the tutorial. Took me a while to figure out I could bypass it at the start of the tutorial after a (possibly therapeutic?) pummeling of some in-the-way tech.

Once I got passed all that and wisely picked a Medium Population spot (Southern Burbs) over the High ones it was smooth sailing all day long. Well, a smooth ride, right up until the US woke up and doubled the load on that single server which promptly went down.


So, is the game worth all this trouble?
I kinda think it is. :-)
One of a studio's greatest fears for a Launch is (should be) being too popular for the infrasturcture to handle. This is clearly what's happening to Gamersfirst and the boys at Reloaded Productions. With eagle eyed hindsight it was probalby better to launch with at least one server each for EU and US.

Despite all that, the game's still very much fun, compulsively harvesting every node I come across and doing every crafting related quest I still managed to get up to Level 5 in about 6-7 hours of play and that's with the supposedly XP-crippled F2P account. I don't know if the feature was added by Fallen Earth LLC or Reloaded Productions who took over the torch, but someone seems to ahve added some nice features for toons having to play catch up. You now have a sleuth of Training Mutations. Abilities that you can sue up to level 15, giving you a little boost levelling up in a possibly rather lonely environment and giving ou a sense of the different ability trees at the same time.

All in all I'm very much enjoying my return to the apocalypse, when I can get in anyway.
My one point of criticism at this point is that Gamerfirst doesn't seem to really 'get' Marketplaces yet. With most of the buyable items over $10,- it's hardly a microtransactions scheme. The succesful F2P projects understand that you should primarily offer items under 5$, preferably around the 1-2$ range. Oh well, we'll see how things unfold.

Not sure if you guys are enjoying Invictus Europealis, I hope so. But if not, come see the Apocalypse (when/if the serverpark allows)