After the end

45 levels. 129 deaths. 192 /played hours over 46 days. It's been quite a run, and all the more memorable for being entirely unplanned. I didn't know when I started that this would be the final days of Fallen Earth.

The final days of this version of the game.  Little Orbit have said they intend to relaunch it one day, but maybe I'll write about that another time.

I was only level 8 when it was announced that the game would be going offline. I often – too often – reroll in MMOs, and doing so came easily in Fallen Earth because the game is front loaded with some of its best content.

Sector One, Plateau, is the best Wild West MMO ever made, with the player often cast in the role of the drifter who rides into a small town beset by dangers and solves those problems with their guns before riding off into the sunset. Dusters and cowboy hats are commonplace, revolvers and manual action rifles are the weapons of choice, and just about everyone rides a horse.

You explore mines and underground labs. You fight gangs of bandits and swarms of mutated creatures. It's a western and it's Westworld.  Plateau is one of my all-time favourite MMO zones.

After the announcement It took me a couple of days to think about what I wanted to do, but eventually I decided to keep playing, and this became perhaps the closest I'll ever come to a speed run of any MMO. It's not a style of play that comes naturally to me, nor is it a style of play for which Fallen Earth is particularly suited.

It's a very deliberately paced game. Things take time - whether it's travelling from one town to another of crafting a new piece of gear. Running out of bullets at exactly the wrong time killed me several times in S1, since I was using up ammo far quicker than I was able to make it.

In a normal run this rarely happened. I'd often step away from levelling in Fallen Earth, and just go and explore some distant location, or make a supply run to load up on crafting materials at a favourite location. If I accrued xp while doing so that was just a bonus, and while I was doing whatever I was doing my crafting queues would be running in the background, filling up with new gear and ammunition for when I did get back to the business of actively levelling.

That kind of taking time off from the game while in the game is something I've rarely experienced in any other MMO.

I also wasn't sure that I would actually keep going until the end. Fallen Earth is often a very funny game, but any MMO in its final days can be a gloomy experience, and that hit me quite hard as I entered Sector Two. I made a few changes to my playstyle around that time, respec'ing out of melee and making some use of fast travel.

Fallen Earth has always been fairly balanced in its implementation of QoL features. When the game launched there was no fast travel at all, and when it did come it was limited, and relatively expensive to use, so the sense of scale of the world was not diminished.

Similarly, respecs were introduced post-launch. The partial-respecs are a system other games could adopt, since it avoids the drudge work of redoing an entire build when all you really wanted was to shift a few points around. It's also a very efficient money sink, and respec'ing out of melee, and later out of pistols, kept me low on chips to the very end.

Not impossibly low though. Quite aside from income from mission rewards and vendor trash I could easily have made up any deficiency by selling a stack or two of the crafting materials that fllled my vaults by halfway through S1. Of course to do so meant working out what I wouldn't need for crafting, and that was tricky.

If City of Heroes is the ultimate MMO for altoholics then Fallen Earth is the ultimate for inventory hoarders. Almost every piece of loot and junk you pick up in the game includes these five words in the tooltip:

This is a tradeskill component

So hold onto it. Store it. Stack up 100 of it. It might come in useful later. It probably will. The crafting in Fallen Earth is deep and involving, and even travelling light as I was – having passed on levelling construction and mutagenics from the start, [melee] weaponry later and cooking later still – I had a lot of accrued materials to manage. I never did find a use for any of that ragged silk...

Mistakes were made. I didn't realise until very late on just how much xp I could make solely from crafting. Even so I'd guess about 1.5 of my final 5 levels came from crafting xp. It's a viable way to level up.

In the end did I achieve what I set out to do? Yes and no. I did make it to the very end of Sector 3 and I did take a look – however briefly – at Deadfall, Terminal Woods and Alpha County. Epsilon, on the other hand, echoes my experience of racing to Monkeytown only to lose it at the last minute due to a change in the schedule.

It was never about the levelling though – not really. In this game, more than in any other MMO, levelling was rarely the objective, it was just something that happened while I was enjoying the game, and I'm glad I went back to that playstyle before the end. I made it to 45, not 55, but in doing so I was reminded of all the reasons why this game remains one of the best MMOs I've ever played, and if it does return one day I'll be there, ready to continue exploring the world of Fallen Earth.