[MUD-Dev2] Fallen Earth

[Damion Schubert]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Mike Sellers <mike at onlinealchemy.com>wrote:

> Okay, the first easy question:
>
> If I'm already playing WoW, or have played it in the past, why would I play
> Fallen Earth instead?
>
> And if I played WoW and didn't like, why would I play this game?
>
> MMOs have their 800 pound gorilla and it is (still) WoW.  I've been amazed
> at the number of MMO pitches that have no answer for this question, and
> don't even consider it worth asking to themselves.
>

How different does an MMO have to be before it's *different enough*?  Are
MMOs
the only game genre where the existence of one market leader means that no
one else should ever do any features that are at all similar?

Not to say that every game should be a WoW clone, but I've seen way too many
MMOs come on the market with way too much half-formed wild-assed
experimentation
that turned out to be broken, unbalanced, not well thought out or just plain
not fun.
Too many people designing features because they'll provide 'interesting
social
dynamics', and not focusing enough on whether the game provides a cohesive
experience on its own.

The fact that FPSes and RTSes tend to be similar is not a bad thing.  If
you've played
Quake or Starcraft, you pretty much know how to play Unreal and Command and
Conquer.  This is a good thing - it dramatically reduces the learning curve,
and the
learning curve on MMOs is a monstrously huge beast that scares off many a
noob.


(Anyway, to answer your question, Michael, I haven't played FE, but the game
has
a post-apocalyptic setting, classless advancement, FPS-like combat requiring

some level of twitch skill, and an integrated, 6-sided PvP faction system.
So its
pretty unlike WoW.  Whether it succeeds will probably depend on whether or
not
it's controls are FPS-like enough that new players can immediately grok the
game).

--d