Features

MassiveFPS had a chance to talk to Fallen Earth's lead designer Lee Hammock, who introduced his project and answered a slew of related questions:

Ahmed: What character movements have you planned to include in the game (crouching, walking, running, swimming, emotions etc...)?

Lee Hammock: Walking, jogging, running, sprinting, crouching, crawling, riding mounts and in cars, swimming, climbing ladders, among others.

Ahmed: Do players have the option to choose between FPS and TPS?

Lee Hammock: Yes. I find that it's much easier to use ranged weapons in FPS mode, but much easier to use melee weapons in TPS mode, so I tend to switch back and forth a lot.

Ahmed: Does the game utilize auto aim in any form?

Lee Hammock: None at all. There is no lock on targeting, no sticky target, nothing of the sort. Folks seem to get confused about this one, so just to be clear, there is no type of aiming assistance at all in Fallen Earth.

Read the full interview on MassiveFPS.

Gamezombie.tv visited the recent AGDC exhibition and interviewed Icarus Studios' EVP David Gardner, who talked about Icarus Platform, it's abilities and more!

Click the picture below for the video:

POGD.com site posted today a preview of Fallen Earth from the recent AGDC'07. Here's what they've learned from the Lead Designer Lee Hammock:

Crafting is essential to success in this harsh world, as Lee illustrates, "If you're a 75th level guy a mob may drop a weapon that is in the mid 50's, so if you rely on creature drops, you will be at a sub-optimal level of equipment. A crafter can make gear up to ten levels higher than themselves if they max out their skills. All gear has skill requirements involved as opposed to levels. Players can use gear at up to ten levels higher than themselves if they have maxed out the applicable skills."

You will not need to go through a high level encounter twenty times in hopes of a 5% chance of a good drop. Instead, you go through it once and obtain a component that can be made into a good item by a crafter.

Crafting skills do not take advancement points in order to progress. They are dependent on use to increase skill. All of crafting has a real-time component with it. "If you are making a gun, for instance, it might take three or four hours, but you can log off and sleep while it finishes. You can queue up more items to be processed in sequence when the first one finishes." Most items take 1-5 hours to make. Bandages, for instance, take 5 minutes. Guns take 3-5 hours depending on the subcomponents and quality of the gun. A car on the other hand, being large and complex, might take 2 weeks.

Read the full preview on POGD.com

Our own Robert Cox took some time at the Austin Game Developer Conference to speak to Lee Hammock, the Lead Designer of Fallen Earth, a post-apocalyptic MMORPG in development over at Icarus Studios.

"Every sector has something new," Hammock said. "The Road Warrior movies were one of our primary influences and we've tried to incorporate all the elements we can of all the post-apocalyptic movies."

During the demo, Hammock took his avatar through a few combat sequences in a zombie-filled factory, where stealth was just as important as firepower. Make too much noise, and the zombies swarm... slowly, true, but they still get the job done.

Read more after the jump.

TenTonHammer interviewed Fallen Earth lead designer Lee Hammock during AGDC'07 and posted the following writeup:

While at the Austin Game Developers Conference, I had scheduled an interview with Lee for the second day of the show at the Icarus Studios booth. However, upon walking onto the show floor I was stunned to see that the Icarus Studios booth was by far the largest booth at the show. A two story spectable, the booth had an upper section reachable by stairs along with a lower section showing-off the games that are being created on the Icarus Studios platform. I met Lee at the lower section, where he sat in front of a Fallen Earth demonstration area. After a few minutes of chit-chat, we dove into the game.

Read full article here.

MMORPG.com featured an interview with Lee Hammock in AGDC introducing the world of Fallen Earth:

While at this year's Austin Game Developer's Conference, News Manager Keith Cross spoke to Lee Hammock, Lead Game Designer of Fallen Earth, where he went into detail about what set's this post-apocalyptic MMORPG apart from the crowd.

Check the video here.

The Game Musketeers featured an interview with Fallen Earth Lead Game Designer Lee Hammock today. The interview touched upon the game concept and development in general:

GM: For those not familiar with your MMOG please give a brief history about Fallen Earth LLC and your current project: Fallen Earth.

Lee: Fallen Earth LLC was founded to bring the MMORPG Fallen Earth to market and to use it as a showcase for the Icarus RAD Tool Suite created by Icarus Studios. The Icarus RAD Tool Suite is a set of tools for creating massively multiplayer environments, everything from social virtual worlds to online worlds for hardcore gamers. It really needed a proof of concept online world to demonstrate how good these tools are. Hence the creation of Fallen Earth.

Development on Fallen Earth began under the auspices of Icarus Studios, but to better organize the development of the game and of the Icarus RAD Tool Suite, Fallen Earth LLC was created in 2005 to handle everything relating to Fallen Earth. Since then Icarus Studios has continued working on the tools used to make Fallen Earth, while Fallen Earth LLC has concentrated on adding content to Fallen Earth. We had our official public unveiling this past GDC and are now working toward beginning Beta testing.

Read the full interview here.

Stratics interviewed Icarus Studios' EVP David Gardner, who talked about their flagship Icarus Platform Tools. Here's a snippet:

Stratics: In reading your Network Architecture on the Icarus Platform, it is stated that this middleware has essentially eliminated single points of failure and makes hardware outages no longer a factor, as a result of the "chemeric" architecture and "self-healing" concept. Can you expand more on this idea and give us a bit more insight into how this will impact online worlds, especially MMOs, who experience server downtimes as a regular nuisance?

David: That's a great question. A lot of middleware providers have focused almost exclusively on production tools with very little R&D focused on post-production needs. Everything about the Icarus platform is next generation, especially the network architecture. Our server architecture is unique in that each server has the ability to morph into any type of server the virtual world needs at a given time. For example, if there is a particular event starting with thousands of users trying to log in all at once, lesser utilized servers will automatically re-task themselves to become login servers. This also means that if a server fails, other servers will re-task as needed to re-balance the network. Added to this, our bandwidth usage has been so optimized that, after the initial download, users can utilize the world just as well using only a dial-up connection. We see platforms today that are only getting twenty users per server and requiring over 15KB per user on average. Our architecture is able to support literally hundreds of users per server typically with less than 4KB needed per user. The net result of this is that our customers will be saving dramatic amounts of money on post production hosting as they scale.

Read full article HERE.

MMO Gamer posted today their interview with Fallen Earth Lead Game Designer Lee Hammock, which covered the game mechanics and more:

The MMO Gamer: Finally, is there anything else you'd like to tell us about Fallen Earth which hasn't been addressed in this interview?

Lee Hammock: This is really an astounding game from a technical standpoint. I can say that objectively because I had nothing to do with it. As a content creator, my job is to create a world that really emulates where I can see our world heading (on a bad day, anyway). From a content standpoint, I think people will go nuts over the social and political system we've created. The amount of choices players will have when they're deciding how to develop their characters is immense. RPGers will be in heaven with the interplay between the factions. FPS fans will love the skill-based advancement and twitch combat. Crafters will love that they're not limited to a small handful of trade-skills, and that they gain experience for crafting. And what would a post-apoc world be without exploration? 7,000 square kilometers of space is a huge playground to explore!

The Icarus Platform was developed both to power the upcoming post-apocalyptic MMORPG Fallen Earth and as a technology solution for other developers. We got a chance to get a look under the hood from Icarus Studios EVP David Gardner. This interview focuses solely on the platform and not the game itself.

WarCry: Icarus Studios recently relaunched it's website with a major announcement: "launching a next generation platform and RAD tool suite for 3D virtual worlds". Can you give us a quick overview of the engine and tools offered for developers?

David Gardner: We have a complete system for building, hosting, and managing virtual worlds. Our platform includes many integrated development tools, asset management systems, network monitoring and data mining modules, as well as customer support tools.

We have also integrated the best of breed middleware products right into the platform. In short, it is everything a studio needs to build an MMO or virtual world application in less than half the time and expense traditionally associated with these projects.

Read more after you click.