Interview: Fallen Earth Lead Designer Lee Hammock, Part Two

The MMO Gamer: While watching the demo earlier, I believe you said that your combat system is essentially FPS on the surface, with hit-calculation being dice under the hood, correct?

Lee Hammock: Yes. Our hit determination system is completely FPS-based. You have a reticule, you have to have it on the target, you can play it first or third person, but, in either case your reticule has to be on the target to damage them.

The damage you do is based on an RPG system of your weapon damage vs. their armor, your attack skill vs. their defense skill. Hit locations are going to be implemented that are not necessarily going to be damage modifiers, they’re going to be behavior changes—for example, if you shoot somebody in the legs, they slow down.

We don’t really want to have a lot of one-shot-kills in the game, because that’s really not any fun for the guy getting shot.

So basically, the combat system is effectively first person shooter for hit determination, and RPG for damage determination.

The MMO Gamer: The reason I asked is, I know a lot of people who enjoy the pure RPG system, and a lot of people who enjoy the pure FPS system. But, I also know a lot of people who complain about mixing the two up.

It’s very hard to get that right. Why did you decide to go with FPS/RPG, as opposed to a straight FPS, or a straight RPG?

Lee Hammock: We felt that with straight FPS we wouldn’t get the character advancement you really need in an MMO to bring the people in.

And, we felt in an RPG we wouldn’t get—modern combat does not work as well under a purely RPG system. Machine guns, stuff like that, just doesn’t feel as visceral.

We really wanted to go with a combat system that gives us the feel of the way shooting a gun actually works, but has the involvement of an RPG system of, “Ok, I’ve got to advance my character, level up, get new guns, new gear…” In most first person shooters, you get maybe ten guns over the course of the game, and that’s about it.

Our hope is we’ll end up with a good enough product where the RPG people, even if they don’t like first person shooters, they’ll say, “Well Ok, I don’t like the aiming so much, but with melee combat he’s right in front of me, it’s hard to miss, so it feels like an RPG.”

And, the first person shooter guys can be like, “Well, I only have to buy my equipment every once in awhile, and deal with these crafters every once in awhile… in between I’m just buying ammo and health packs, it feels pretty much like a first person shooter,” they can just play that part of it.

The MMO Gamer: Last question. Have to throw a little red meat to the fans:

When are you planning on opening up the game to additional testers?

Lee Hammock: When we have more to show, basically. Our feature set is not complete, we have features that we need to get ironed out before we’re ready to go to that stage. Right now, basically we’re about 75% content implemented, and we want to get 100% content implemented before we go to beta testing.

Implemented means it’s just in the game, and it hopefully works. It’s not balanced, it may not be fun yet, but it works in some capacity. We want to get to 100% content implemented before we go to widespread testing.

We’re 75% of the way there, effectively. I got in trouble the last time I said something about, “Oh hopefully in a few months we’ll be able to do that,” but, we’ve gone from being 25% content implemented to 75 in about nine months.

So, we’re making really fast progress now after everybody’s trained up, we know what we’re doing, we know where we’re going, it’s something that’s going to be happening relatively soon.

The MMO Gamer: Was there anything we didn’t discuss during this interview you’d like to tell our readers before we go?

Lee Hammock: Just check out our website, FallenEarth.com. On our forums we have a Question of the Week segment where I answer questions every week that people ask. It’s a really good source of information.

Other than that, just thanks a lot for doing the interview.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you for taking the time to sit down with us. We look forward to speaking with you more in the future.

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