Into The Wasteland

Well, hi.

This is my first post here, so I guess I’d better introduce myself, mmm?

I’m Bekka Jai. If you’ve played Eve in the past and read some of the player blogs about the game, you might recognize the name (even though I spelled the last name “Jae” in that game because I screwed up my original toon with the “Jai” spelling so badly she became unusable). For about 8 months in 2007, I wrote a blog called “Just A Girl And Her Thorax”, which chronicled my adventures in Eve.

I started this post talking about Eve not just to give you an idea about who I am, where I’ve been, and what I’ve done, but also because in large part it’s my experiences in Eve that have led me to Fallen Earth. Many of you right now are probably asking yourselves what a game about a hyper-militarized faraway star cluster has to do with a game about post-apocalyptic earth. The answer, quite frankly, is nothing and at the same time everything.

Both games benefit from well-thought-out and realized concepts and gameplay, but there are some very significant differences. These differences aren’t as much about gameplay, though certainly there are plenty of those, but rather about other aspects of the games that may or may not show up in a comparison based on gameplay and other in-game factors.

Let’s start with something that for a lot of us can seem minor or completely inconsequential at first, but can become a real issue for many adult MMO gamers down the road: Location.

I don’t mean the fictional location of where gameplay takes place of course, I mean the actual physical location of the servers and GM staff. It’s important because it determines the “home” time zone of the game. This can affect in-game event scheduling, when servers are scheduled to be taken offline, and a lot more. It seems like a relatively minor thing on it’s face…until the first time you realize that a critical in-game event is scheduled to begin or take place while you’re at work or asleep.

So for me,  a Jersey girl, knowing that Icarus is based in North Carolina, in my native Eastern US time zone, is a very good thing indeed. I doubt I’d have allowed myself to get into a game like FE as much as I have if they were based, say, in LA or in the UK. That’s not really why I’m playing though.

Just as the UK-centricity of Eve didn’t prevent me from playing it for almost a solid year and co-founding a corporation within it before I felt I had to move on, the fact that FE’s schedule will be based on East Coast time wouldn’t be enough in and of itself to motivate me to play FE during beta or once it’s live.

I could probably write something now that makes you think I’m this incredibly-well-informed super-intuitive analyst of MMO gaming (or tries to, anyway), but the truth is that I stumbled across Fallen Earth quite by accident.  I wanted to try the Champions beta, so I subscribed to Fileplanet. Sure, it kinda irked me to shell out a subscription fee just to get access to a free beta, but I figured what the hell, at least I’d be getting something more significant than I did when I subscribed to IGN Insider (word of advice: If you’re like me, a PC gamer who doesn’t play on consoles, don’t bother with IGN Insider. A Fileplanet subscription will prove infinitely more useful to you.).

Champions was an entertaining enough diversion for a while, but it failed to impress me enough to consider investing actual money in it. Maybe it’s that I’m currently making my way through Prototype and compared to the combat in that one, Champions is kinda tame. Aim, charge, blast, zap, zap, zap…aim, charge, blast, zap, zap, zap. It just starts getting a little old after a while. I still have it on my machine and maybe I’ll take another look while FE is offline just before launch, but right now I just can’t see myself blowing fifty bucks and subscription fees on it.

I found FE on the Fileplanet site. I’d just recently finished Fallout 3, the entire game plus all the expansions, and the post-apocalyptic theme got me interested enough to take a closer look. I checked out the website, liked what I saw there, and downloaded the client from FP.

So, that’s how I got to Fallen Earth. Next time, I’ll talk about logging into FE for the first time, my very first time as part of a closed beta. And after that, well by then you’ll be caught up with where I am now in-game (not that it’ll matter much after the pre-launch server wipe), and we’ll see where it goes from there.

I’ll probably cover a lot of ground here, with topics relevant to issues both in and out of game. The only rule I tend to adhere to in that regard is that if you read it here, it’ll have something to do with FE. Beyond that, it’s pretty much open season.

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