The MMO Gamer had a lengthy interview with Fallen Earth lead designer Lee Hammock, and here's a snippet of what he had to say:

The MMO Gamer: I was wondering if you would be averse to talking about storytelling in this interview.
And storytelling in the post-apocalyptic genre, in particular.

Lee Hammock: No, not at all. I would be all about that. Most people haven't asked much about that before.

The MMO Gamer: I should warn you, this is a very big fetish I have, storytelling in MMOs.
And I am a bitter, bitter man, because I don't think anybody is really putting any serious focus on it [Disclaimer for TOR fans: This interview was conducted before E3. Please do not send me angry emails].

A number of people I talk to claim they do. But then their games come out, and it's the same old "Go kill fifteen rats" stuff.

So now, my strategy every time I do an interview is kind of like that old saying, "The beatings will continue until morale improves!"

If I just keep harping on people about it, maybe, eventually, somebody will actually do something about it just to shut people like me up.

Lee Hammock: Well, I think for us it's been something of a learning process. When we first started up, we were looking at the games that were out there like WoW, stuff like that, and saying, "What works in WoW?"

And looking at them, pretty much most games these days, they have the same basic mission setup of "Go kill fifteen of these, go bring me ten of these..."

And there are times where those can be done well... okay, the kill one is hard to do. But, you know, collecting items, if worked into a story, that can actually be kind of cool depending on what you are collecting.

But, we've basically really developed as we've gone along.
One of the big things we're working on going forward is we don't want to have go kill ten guy missions anymore, just because that's really lame.

We'd rather say okay, go kill one dude who is in the middle of a camp or a cave who you might have to kill a whole bunch of dudes to get to but you know, hey, deal with that however you want.

It adds a lot more variety to what the player can do, so if they want to try and sneak in or do whatever, they can try it.

Read the rest at MMOGamer.com