Lee Hammock Talks Post-Apocalyptic Storytelling in Fallen Earth

By Steven Crews | June 23, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

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The MMO Gamer: On the subject of setting, what is your favorite work of post-apocalyptic fiction?

Lee Hammock: That’s pretty tough. For sheer enjoyment value I’d actually probably say Six String Samurai, but I think for book probably The Postman, and for movie, probably The Road Warrior.

The MMO Gamer: I was always a big fan of The Stand, myself. Have those worked their way into the game anywhere?

Lee Hammock: I would say overall it is very kind of Road Warrior-esque in general. We have a lot of the faction gear, especially the CHOTA faction gear is very, you know, Mohawks and football pads kind of stuff.

The highest level vehicle in the game is called the Interceptor.

The MMO Gamer: The V8 Interceptor?

Lee Hammock: No, it’s just the Interceptor. So, we fit it in to different places.

We actually had a pretty big Postman homage in one in the future sections of the game. But there haven’t been that many direct homages to that stuff.

We have a pretty direct Planet of the Apes homage. But that’s because I really like monkeys.

The MMO Gamer: As long as there isn’t aren’t any Waterworld references you should be fine.

Lee Hammock: No. Not in the desert, not in the desert. [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: That would be a little hard to pull off. But I guess you could get like the Smokers on dirt bikes, and maybe have the Mariner riding around on a horse drawn pontoon boat or something.

Lee Hammock: Yeah, that one and the movie Postman, not so much. Pretty much the whole Kevin Costner post-apocalyptic film library is not really a preferred source material.

The MMO Gamer: In post-apocalyptic fiction, there are generally two sub-sets. There’s either the lone wanderer going out and battling raider bands, and finding canned food in abandoned Safeways.

And then there’s the group of lone wanderers, battling the raiders and finding food in lone Safeways together.

I take it Fallen Earth is leaning more toward the second option.

But, if you wanted to be the crazy hermit who just wanders out into the desert and kills everybody for no apparent reason, would you have to have contact with one of these factions?

Lee Hammock: You could really do it either way. Basically the way we have structured the game is you can solo for most of the game if you want to, but it’s not very efficient necessarily, and if you are crafting, and you are trying to do it all yourself, you are going to have a problem. Especially when you start making vehicles.

But, there are certain places that a single player will just not be able to go. Because it is just too dangerous. And for situations like that you know you really need a group of friends.

You can play the lone wanderer, the neutral who never joins up with any of the factions. The neutral players have the advantage that they can go anywhere. No factions are going to attack them.

Well, you know, bad people may still attack them, but none of the six main factions will attack them. And because of that… while these six main factions may not attack them, and the six main factions also not giving them any advantages, it’s like you can’t go deal with the faction merchants, or if a faction takes over a town, they are not necessarily going to let you take advantage of that if you are a neutral.

So you can do it either way. The thing I’ve always said was, neutral characters will have a broader but not as deep experience. Meanwhile, faction players will have a deeper but narrower experience.

The MMO Gamer: For you personally, wherein lays the appeal of the post-apocalyptic genre?

Lee Hammock: The lack of a safety net. If you look at most other genres, there is always a status quo, that will save you if your hero messes up in some way.

You know, in modern day stuff there’s always the police, or the army, or somebody, there is always something there. If you need something you can go to the store and get it. You know there is a whole society supporting your character. Or your person.

In sci-fi it is the same sort of thing. I mean sure, there are conflicts and stuff like that, but there’s still this massive society that is supporting you and providing.

In post-apocalyptic there is none of that. It’s just you. You know, you and whatever gear you can slap together and whatever friends you can make. And it’s a much more bare bones kind of experience.

Before I did this I ran a lot of LARPs. Live action role-playing games. And just did a lot of table top and stuff like that. And in all those types of games, even in computer games too, you want players to earn equipment through achievement. Not just going to the store and buying it.

In a modern day role playing game, you know, it’s kind of hard in some ways to have achievement based gear because you can go to the store and buy a really nice gun. I mean sure you might have to get the money for it but there is an ease of equipment and an ease of supply that is just ease.

Compared to a post-apocalyptic game where you just can’t go buy that really cool gun. It doesn’t exist. It’s not there. So it makes things a lot more interesting.

And I always liked the idea of like you know scavenging technology and building crazy machines and tech, stuff like that.

The MMO Gamer: With that lack of a safety net, starvation is always one of the strongest themes of post-apocalyptic fiction.

Have you considered  implementing a system in Fallen Earth where the players would have to deal with locating food and water for their day to day survival?

Lee Hammock: Well, we had actually talked a lot about that. And we looked at some options for doing and stuff like that. But what we came down to was we didn’t want people to have to go to work to play the game, basically.

We didn’t want people to feel like, okay now I have to go and scavenge all this food so I can actually go do what I want to do. Cause, we basically wanted to create a game where like, okay, here are the activities you can do in the game, and you can do any of them you want to. You don’t have to go do this other thing so you can go do the thing you really want to do.

That’s what we are really trying to avoid in our game design.

The MMO Gamer: That kind of sounds like some of the old raids I used to go on. “Man, I gotta find sixty Night Dragon’s breaths before six o’ clock or I am not going to be able to raid tonight!”

Lee Hammock: Yeah, exactly.

The MMO Gamer: I could see that being a problem in Fallen Earth… “Man, I gotta find some moldy MREs or I’m gonna starve to death tonight!”

Lee Hammock: Exactly. It’s just not fun. And to make the starvation punitive enough to mean something it becomes even less fun.

The MMO Gamer: I don’t know, maybe you guys could have found an equation to make starvation fun.

Lee Hammock: Maybe. I am not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying given the resources and the time we had, we decided that, nah, not worth it.

I mean we do have it where if you eat food you are noticeably better in combat, like your healing rate is better, things like that. So eating food is definitely an advantage.

But it’s not, “Oh my God, I’m going to starve to death if I don’t do this every few hours!” Because I mean, I remember that from EQ 1. And oh my God, that sucked.

The MMO Gamer: On the subject of food, cannibalism is always another major recurring theme in post-apocalyptic fiction.

How are you guys treating that in Fallen Earth?

Lee Hammock: We actually have a major storyline about cannibalism. One of the main villain groups in the game is a group of mutant vampires, and let’s just say they turn a bunch of people to their case.

One of the factions has a major conflict later in the game when a significant portion of their people say, “Yeah, we’re going for cannibalism!”

And the rest of them go, “No, dude, that’s a bad idea!” and this whole conflict breaks out.

We’re not really encouraging player cannibalism, but it is something you deal with a lot in the game. There’s no cooking recipes for people burgers, but other people make people burgers, and they’re generally the bad guys.

The MMO Gamer: So there’s no Human Flesh drop in PvP loot or anything?

Lee Hammock: No Human Flesh drop in PvP, although where Tainted Meat comes from is anyone’s guess.

The MMO Gamer: Before we wrap things up, is there anything that you, personally, would like to talk about?

Lee Hammock: Well I think the…..the thing for me, I don’t know, the strength of our system that press people…..we talk about the crafting system a lot. We keep saying, hey, our crafting system is awesome. It’s got a real-time component, and you have all these skills you can use.

But that’s really about the surface level of it. We don’t really get to go in-depth.

Basically we have a whole research tree where people who really get into crafting, instead of spending their time making stuff, can spend their time and resources researching how to make better stuff. And that’s how you get the really good stuff for the game.

And we’ve got this whole system built up where you need to max out your intelligence and perception if you want to get to that kind of stuff. So we’ve got this very crafter focus. If you really get into crafting you’ve got his huge advantage.

You can learn how to make this stuff that other people who don’t max out your skills won’t be able to do. It takes a lot of resources and a lot of time, but there’s a huge payout for it. And you know, it doesn’t get to come out in a lot of our interviews how cool that system is and how much reward there is for being a crafter in our game.

And of course there is this thing where you know, we have all these vehicles in the game. We have like motorbikes and ATVs and dune buggies and stuff, and those are only made by crafting players, you can never buy them from a merchant.

You can buy a basic horse from a merchant, but if you want a really cool horse… they have tons of hit points, you know, can carry lots of stuff, all that kind of stuff, you have to have somebody train it for you. Basically, a good way to describe it is we are sort of half way between WoW and EVE in terms of our crafting system.

It’s not as hugely complex as EVE’s. But it’s a lot more accessible than EVE’s. At the same time it is not as simple as WoW’s but it’s a lot more in-depth than WoW’s. So we are trying to sort of hit that happy medium. Cause I always loved crafting in games. That’s always what I get into. So I really wanted to make sure that we had a system that people could get into but once they got into they’d have all this depth to pursue what they were doing.

The MMO Gamer: I like to round my interviews out on a more philosophical note, as opposed to “What is your game, when is it coming out, and how many exclusives are you going to give me?” So, why do you make games? Why do you wake up every morning, go to work, and do what it is you do?

Lee Hammock: That’s a good question… because I can’t do anything else?

That’s kind of a weird answer, I guess, but I’ve had lots of other jobs and it’s just not really… not so much.

But I guess I like trying to create fun experiences, interactive experiences, and games are where that is right now.

It might be in other places later. I think our society as a whole, our pastimes are getting more interactive as we go, but that’s really where it is right now.

I like trying to figure out what people think is fun and how to really draw that out. I mean, I make jokes about trying to find the mathematical equation for fun. But seriously, I feel like some days that’s what we really are trying to do.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, well thank you very much for joining us, we appreciate it, and we hope we can do it again some time.

Stay tuned to The MMO Gamer for additional Fallen Earth coverage in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, you can also visit the game’s official website at: http://www.fallenearth.com