October 2010 State of the Game

Greetings Wastelanders,

In this month’s State of the Game I wanted to share some very exciting updates coming to the PTS and give you an idea of upcoming content that the Fallen Earth team is working on.

First up is the PTS. Life on the PTS is about to become very interesting. We are excited to bring you the first iteration of combat improvements. We will be looking for all of you to head over to the PTS and join us as we work to continuously improve the combat system. As I mentioned this is the FIRST iteration—we will use your feedback to make further adjustments and improvements to the system until we feel the system is ready to go live.

Faction Control Points have also hit the PTS. This is a feature we are very much looking forward to bringing to all of you, so we ask for your help in testing this new system out as well.
There have been several questions raised surrounding the PTS and for those of you who are unfamiliar with the system or who may be new to the Fallen Earth family, we have NPCs in place on the PTS that will help in testing. These NPCs can give you resources such as money, high-end armor, AP and even raise your level to help you with testing. The one thing I urge you to remember on PTS is to test at ALL levels, not just the top end. It is critical that we ensure testing at all levels, as we need to see the flow of the changes at various levels and find bugs that might not crop up across all levels. Your help is always needed and appreciated in the development of the game.

So what’s next? Currently, the Fallen Earth team is hard at work on the next patch, which will encompass two main themes. First are additional improvements to combat! As mentioned earlier, the combat changes that you will see on the PTS this week are the first round. The next phase of the combat improvements will be more along the faction lines with the start of the faction revamp. This will focus on the factions and mutations systems. As we get further down the development cycle, we will share more info on what exactly that entails.

Secondly, we are continuing visual improvements to Fallen Earth. This involves a lot more than just adding new “shiny” to the game. These enhancements will be sweeping changes that will improve the look and feel of the world as a whole. These improvements will coincide with our next live event. While I don’t want to spoil the upcoming event, I’ll tell you that another one of our towns will be forever changed (think Quarantine area). As always, we will be improving upon some key systems, such as the recipe system and Blood Sports, as well as continuing to work on bug fixes.

We are also going to be adding several requested items to the Rewards Store. To give you a taste of what’s to come, we are excited to tell you that more space will soon be available for all your wasteland scraps! We are taking great care in what we decide to offer as rewards items that can be redeemed with points.

We are very excited about the new content and enhancements that are going to the PTS and we look forward to hearing your comments and feedback. The information that you all provide is CRITICAL to the team, so please bring your friends and test the hell out of the new stuff on PTS!

I look forward to sharing more with you next month as we begin to talk more specifically about what is coming in the next patch.

See you all in the Wastelands!
__________________
Dave Haydysch
Producer
Fallen Earth

"Victory at all costs and in spite of all terrors; victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival." - Sir Winston Churchill