It's been a while.
My last post was back in March, and in the intervening months I've played very little of anything, and no MMOs at all. I've thought about returning several times, but nothing quite grabbed me and I had a lot else going on.
(I still do, so who knows if I'll resume a regular schedule now. Time, as they say, will tell.)
I wasn't even following the gaming news, so it was a complete surprise to me when I looked in on Massively Overpowered a couple of days ago and discovered that Fallen Earth was back online, and has been for about ten days.
That got my attention.
I've got a lot of history with Fallen Earth, dating all the way back to when it originally launched back in 2009. As I've probably written elsewhere in this blog I had some trouble running the game back then - the incredible lighting demands the eternal bane of graphics cards, shadows, and my PC at the time just wasn't up to it. I got as far as Embry, the notoriously laggy capitol of Sector One, and which I could only move around in by pointing the camera straight down at the ground and navigating by mini-map. That was when I reluctantly called it quits. I could have continued, with drastically lowered graphics settings, but I'd have lost out on a lot of the atmosphere which is one of the best things about Fallen Earth. I'd return later, with newer and better hardware, and I did, a number of times over the ensuing years.
(Since I play mostly older games - especially MMOs - it's been a long time now since I've had this problem. At least it was a long time until recently. I won't be adding New World into my rotation any time soon because I've finally fallen behind the hardware curve again. I'm not too fussed about that. I wish it well, because the genre desperately needs a big success story, but I wasn't personally aching to play New World.)
When I started this blog in 2019 Fallen Earth was the fourth title I added into the rotation. That didn't go quite as planned.
I started my run at the end of August 2019, but only a few days into September it was announced that the game would be shutting down at the end of that month. After a few days of debating whether or not I wanted to dedicate that much time to a soon to be dead game I decided to stick with it and started a race to the end - to max level and the later zones - which I'd never seen.
I didn't quite make it, but it was a good experience. It's all in the archives.
Now it's back. Little Orbit have activated a new server and now that I know about it I've dived straight back in. Things will be different this time - since I'm not (I hope) running against the clock I won't be doing either a sprint or a marathon. Fallen Earth will take its spot in my rotation and I'll do what I couldn't do the last time. I'll take my time.
Because this isn't really a game that's designed for speed levelling. Things do take time, and I have every intention of taking this at a more natural and leisurely pace this time around.
It's a new server, and characters have not transferred over from the last incarnation of the game. I'm okay with that, because I know I'd have been sorely tempted to reroll anyway, even if my old character had been available. So now I can restart with a clear conscience, for once, and relive all that early game goodness. The desert wasteland of Sector One is the achetypal post-apocalyptic setting, and it remains one of my favourite zones in any MMO.
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