You're dying

"You're dying, and I don't know how long you have. Once you die you stay dead, just like the rest of us."

At the end of the tutorial the main storyline of Fallen Earth is set up. Lifenet has been damaged during the fall of the Hoover Dam, compromising the integrity of the cloning process and so the clones will only revive a finite number of times before they die for good.

In-game, as with any MMO, there's no limit on the number of times a character can die and be revived, but the You're Dying questline acts as one of the major story threads that continues throughout the game, leading you from place to place as you level up.

Of course now there actually is a ticking clock.

As I said the other day I don't doubt Little Orbit's sincerity when they say that Fallen Earth will return, but as I also said MMO development is unpredictable, and right now there's no guarantee of when/if that will happen. Realistically, this may be the end of the game. Once it dies it may stay dead.

So what do I do now? I didn't return to City of Heroes for the last month before the shutdown, and at times I did regret that. With Fallen Earth things are different.

Unlike CoH I've never hit the level cap in FE. Unlike CoH I've never seen several of the high level zones. Unlike CoH I don't know how the main story ends. Unlike CoH I only have one character in FE, so when I play I'm not conscious of the other characters I'm not playing.

I'd also like to say that I'm in a better place to focus on a game now than I was then, and that's mostly true, even if there's a few things going on right now that quite uncannily parallel where I was seven years ago.

For now my intention is to continue playing Fallen Earth until the lights go out. I'm not a fast leveller, and this isn't a fast paced levelling game to begin with, so how far I make it remains to be seen. I don't intend to power level, or take shortcuts, or really play in any way different from how I normally would, except perhaps for meandering less, and focusing more on the main storylines.

It's been 24 hours. I've died 6 times (less than I expected to actually) and reached level 12, and there's still a long road ahead of me.