Sunsets

Fallen Earth has incredible sunsets, made all the more so by the wide open landscapes and the endless sky. These vistas are among the reasons why this is the best Wild West MMO ever made.

But this post isn't really about that kind of sunset.

"It's undeniably a niche title, and there have been a couple of times over the years when I've feared that it would shut down, but I think it's in safe hands now."

I wrote those words less than a week ago. Last night Mathew Scott of Little Orbit announced that at the start of October the servers would be shutting down "until the new version is done."

I understand the decision. The game currently has few active players, and while my impression is that it has been running better since the recent server move of course I don't know how it's running behind the scenes, or how it would cope with a higher number of players.

Realistically I do know the game can't possibly be paying for itself at the moment, and likely hasn't been for quite some time. The server structure is such that it can't currently be scaled down. Right now Little Orbit is running a server setup designed for thousands of active players, for a game hosting less than a hundred.

Will it return? I don't doubt Little Orbit's sincerity when they say they intend to reboot the game, but MMO development is upredictable. This could end up being the final sunset of Fallen Earth.

I understand the decision, but it still stings.

Sunsets are a phase of the life cycle of games that MMOs share with other online-only titles. I doubt there are many, if any single player titles in the entire history of digital gaming that can't still be played somehow, even if it's only by emulator or obsolete hardware.

MMOs are different. They can end, and when they do they are gone forever.

Thinking about this today a particular quote from Sir Ian McKellen came to mind. He was talking about stage productions, which seems appropriate for a genre that puts its players in a single shared space where they interact directly with one another. MMOs are not films. They are theatre.

"When the run ends, a theatre production survives only in the fadiing memories of those who were there in person."

My memories of Fallen Earth will take a long time to fade, and for the time it has left I intend to add to those memories.