Interview: Fallen Earth Lead Designer Lee Hammock, Part One

The MMO Gamer: I want to try something a little different this interview. I’ve never asked anyone this question before.

Are you familiar with the Bartle Test?

Lee Hammock: Basically, yes.

The MMO Gamer: I’d like to ask you, if you could break it down, what Fallen Earth has to offer for each of the four Bartle archetypes. So, let’s start out with Achiever.

Lee Hammock: For Achiever we have a number of ranks they can get through different systems, such as faction ranks. You can choose to align yourself with a faction, you can get a nice cool title, you get cool armor based on your rank, we’re basically working on a badge achievement type system, so there’s always this feeling of, “Hey, I can get this nifty thing, I can put it over my head, I can put it on, I’m going to look awesome, and everyone is going to know that I am the man because I did this.”

We’re basically doing the same sorts of thing with exploration.

We’re going to give people lots and lots of goals to achieve, and when they achieve them they’ll have something to show for it, saying, “Hey, look at this cool thing.”

The MMO Gamer: Next up would be Killer.

Lee Hammock: That one’s pretty easy. It’s a first person shooter based interface, and it’s the apocalypse. Shivving people is a daily pastime. We have lots of means to murder people horribly.

We have weapons from ranging from the basic lead pipe and the metal shiv, up through the pool cue, the bladed hockey stick, the nail bat, the aluminum bat wrapped in razor wire, swords, cricket bats, assault rifles, knives, pointy sticks, pretty much the whole gamut.

We have lots of PvE combat content, lots of people for you to shoot who are not played by other players. And, we have lots of people to shoot who are played by other players.

Our PvP is zone-based, you walk in and you shoot anyone you want, regardless of their group, your faction, someone annoys you in your faction you can tap them, that’s great, we love that. There are towns you can take over through PvP conflicts for your faction, basically combat is a major part of our game.

I think killers will get a very visceral thrill to some extent, because there’s no sense of, “I target, I auto attack, and then I hit a few buttons.” It is a constant movement, of “Ok, I’ve got to keep you in my reticule to hit you.” Combat, especially between players, is very, very fluid. There’s lots of running around, and if you stand still, you’re pretty much a dead man.

The MMO Gamer: The third would be Explorer.

Lee Hammock: For explorers we have a huge map. Our total game area is a map based on an actual map based on the Grand Canyon based on the US Geological Survey that is 83km by 83km on a side, creating about 7000²km of space.

All of this exists in the sense it is there—you can’t reach all of it at launch because of plague zones, and radiation barriers, things of that nature—because we can’t fill all that initially. We don’t want you to go to the empty parts and complain, “Hey, this is boring.”

So, we’ve limited the game to a smaller area which is still several hundred square kilometers of space, and would take you about ten hours to walk across. We have cars and stuff like that if you want to get there faster, horses, all kinds of stuff. Throughout this area we have of course maps of all this, and major towns are marked, but there are lots of things that don’t show up on any map. Lots of encounter areas, lost towns, levels, things that if you just go exploring, if you see a road or a path and wonder, “Hey, I wonder where this path goes, there’s nothing on my map.” If you follow it, you’ll find something.

It may be another time that has been lost to time, it may be an enemy camp, it may be a bunch of really nice scavenging nodes that most people just don’t know are out there. But, for the explorer there’s always something more to find. We have in the launch material almost a hundred different towns players can visit, and a bunch of encounter areas on top of that. So there’s this constant feeling of “Hey, what’s over the next horizon?” And, the draw distance in our game is so far you can see towns two or three kilometers away. For example, in the demo I have here you can stand in one of the towns we’re demoing that is an abandoned zoo, and to the north about three kilometers away you can see the rollercoaster from the abandoned amusement park town that’s just north of there.

The MMO Gamer: Last but not least are Socializers.

Lee Hammock: Basically, for socializers we have a lot of the standard structures such as groups, guilds, but we’re trying to make them a lot more interactive, a lot more developed. We have built-in VoIP chat, any time you form a group it has built-in VoIP capability through Vivox, which includes a lot of different options such as you can actually call people on the phone from inside the game, so if one of your buddies is late for his raid you can call him on his cell phone without leaving the game and say, “Dude, where are you?”

The MMO Gamer: I’ve had that happen to me once or twice.

Lee Hammock: And, people can call into the game to say, “Hey, I’m running late,” or “Hey, I’m doing this thing.”

For guild functionality we’re actually working on developing a system where guilds can advance and level up, so if you have a bunch of people in your guild and you go through and achieve certain objectives, such as large-scale missions or things of that nature you can actually level up your guild and get guild-wide abilities for everyone in the guild. If a guild is really well-known with the merchants, you get a 5% discount when dealing with all merchants.

Or, you get a small speed bonus if you’re an exploration-heavy guild. So there are basically different ways to create this social group and then do things together. A lot of missions these social groups will have to do you can only accomplish with 20 or 30 people, and they’re not necessarily “Hey, go kill this one guy, you need 20 to 30 people to kill him,” it’ll be, “Hey, we need a hundred assault rifles.” One person making them would take weeks, but if you have a whole guild, you can do it in a few days.

A lot of the crafting elements also encourage socialization, because building things like cars take weeks if you have one person to do it. If you have multiple person to do it, one guy makes the tires, one guy makes the engine, one guy makes the frame, it gets a lot more involved and you can get done a lot faster.

We’re really trying to create mechanical reasons for players to work together. We have a lot of emotes, facial expressions for our characters that show emotional states, we have a lot of social spaces. Every town has a bar, and empty buildings players can go into and say, “Hey, this is going to be my place.”

We have the capacity for players to rent out shops, if you go into a town you can talk to a shop rental guy, one of the buildings in town, the sign will change to show your character’s name, and you can go in there and buy and sell stuff through the shop. We’re trying to create all these different ways for players to interact mechanically, as opposed to just “hanging out.”

Click here to continue to Part Two of our Fallen Earth interview. Topics covered include the game’s background and storyline, methods for its dissemination among players, and the reasons for mixing FPS controls with an RPG back-end.

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