I mentioned a few days ago that I never had the chance to fully explore the original Monkeytown, a small settlement in the far north of Sector Three. It was destroyed in an update in 2010, and though I'd rushed on into S3 to see it before it went the update went live early, the morning after I entered the zone, and Monkeytown was gone.
I'd rode up to take a look around the night before, with the intent of starting it the following day, so I did see it, albeit briefly.
I've always thought of that as the No Fun Update, since it destroyed the town of peaceful, talking gorillas and changed the creeper model from the distinctive original to the far less interesting generic nasty insect thing it is now.
The area where Monkeytown lay is now called Quarantine, and it's an acrid, wasted land, even by the standards of Fallen Earth. The sky is overcast, the air is filled with choking smoke and drifting clouds of poisonous fumes, and the corpses of the former inhabitants litter the shattered roads.
It reminds me of Silithus, in World of Warcraft, in that it's an extremely atmospheric location that I dislike spending time in because it's so well realised. Silithus is a nasty, arid hole full of mindlessly hostile bugs, and I've never spent more than an hour questing in that zone without feeling the need to go somewhere, anywhere, that's less demoralising. It's a zone that gets under your skin and makes you itch, and while I'd never call it one of my favourite zones I do consider it one of the most well made, purely because of the visceral reaction it never fails to provoke in me.
Monkeytown is like that, only with the added meta-feeling of something lost that it will always have for me because I came to it too late. My decision to keep going with Fallen Earth after the announcement it would be going offline was informed by my experience with City of Heroes, but thinking about it now also by my experience of missing out on Monkeytown, by a day.
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