NDA-lifted-Open Beta begins

Lork · August 2009

''To coincide with the beginning of the Fallen Earth Open Beta today, we are lifting the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) enacted with testers from the Alpha and earlier Beta stages of the Fallen Earth Testing Program. Feel free to discuss the game with others, post your thoughts about it on our or other forums and invite others to join you in playing.

We hope you enjoy your Open Beta experience. Please provide feedback or thoughts to us on the forums so that we may continue improving Fallen Earth for our players. Thanks to all of the testers in our program that have provided such helpful feedback to date.To coincide with the beginning of the Fallen Earth Open Beta today, we are lifting the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) enacted with testers from the Alpha and earlier Beta stages of the Fallen Earth Testing Program. Feel free to discuss the game with others, post your thoughts about it on our or other forums and invite others to join you in playing.

We hope you enjoy your Open Beta experience. Please provide feedback or thoughts to us on the forums so that we may continue improving Fallen Earth for our players. Thanks to all of the testers in our program that have provided such helpful feedback to date.''

forums.fallenearth.com/fallenearth/showthread.php

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This is the only game on the horizon that I look forward to.

ninjajucer · August 2009

Thank god they lifted the nda, can finally speak my mind on it.

Was a cbt for the game for 6 months or so, have seen the bugs galore with the memory leak and the settings not affecting the game. The game itself takes place in and around the hudson dam area, so yes, its mostly desert. Canyons, roads and tons of desert. Easier to graphically draw desert than waterfalls and forest I guess.

The game is 90% crafting and the crafting takes real world physics into it as most items start out taking 5 to 10 minutes to craft a shirt or a gun. Standing inside a shop for that production will shave a few minutes off the time, or you can go wander around while its being crafted. You could buy the ammo and weapons and armor, but that gets really expensive, and most mobs in the starting levels don't drop money, rather they drop materials, thus the game almost forces you to craft.

The game world is vast, different factions, beliefs, and tons of ruins. Boss battles, and underground garages and old schools and junkyards serve as dungeons, even old mine shafts. Real world dungeons.

The vehicles in the game take about 2 weeks or so to actually craft, thats real world time not game time. All of the vehicles cannot go offroad as they get damaged easily. The horse is the best option for most of these things. Although someof the vehicles do come with weapons, yer stuck to roads and not much else.

Graphically the game is poor, even at highest settings. Many people will have issues I'm sure. The game also crashes a lot as well. Play if you must, but there are better choices out there IMO.

CruelHand · August 2009

Originally posted by ninjajucer

Thank god they lifted the nda, can finally speak my mind on it.
Was a cbt for the game for 6 months or so, have seen the bugs galore with the memory leak and the settings not affecting the game. The game itself takes place in and around the hudson dam area, so yes, its mostly desert. Canyons, roads and tons of desert. Easier to graphically draw desert than waterfalls and forest I guess.
The game is 90% crafting and the crafting takes real world physics into it as most items start out taking 5 to 10 minutes to craft a shirt or a gun. Standing inside a shop for that production will shave a few minutes off the time, or you can go wander around while its being crafted. You could buy the ammo and weapons and armor, but that gets really expensive, and most mobs in the starting levels don't drop money, rather they drop materials, thus the game almost forces you to craft.
The game world is vast, different factions, beliefs, and tons of ruins. Boss battles, and underground garages and old schools and junkyards serve as dungeons, even old mine shafts. Real world dungeons.
The vehicles in the game take about 2 weeks or so to actually craft, thats real world time not game time. All of the vehicles cannot go offroad as they get damaged easily. The horse is the best option for most of these things. Although someof the vehicles do come with weapons, yer stuck to roads and not much else.
Graphically the game is poor, even at highest settings. Many people will have issues I'm sure. The game also crashes a lot as well. Play if you must, but there are better choices out there IMO.

I had high hopes for this game as well because it was going to be a shooter MMO

but sadly it fell flat on it's face

Dalmont · August 2009

Its a hybrid mmo/fps...not 100% fps.

treefitty · August 2009

The lack of open world pvp is what turned me off from the game. Oh well, hopefully the other mmos coming out will have more pvp options.

Volgore · August 2009

Thanks for the info so far.

I would really appreciate some more input. Maybe someone else can be bothered to post a more detailed write-up?

Gabby-air · August 2009

Originally posted by VoIgore

Thanks for the info so far.
I would really appreciate some more input. Maybe someone else can be bothered to post a more detailed write-up?

Go to the official forums...alot of reviews there.

Cognoman · August 2009

Originally posted by ninjajucer

Thank god they lifted the nda, can finally speak my mind on it.
Was a cbt for the game for 6 months or so, have seen the bugs galore with the memory leak and the settings not affecting the game. The game itself takes place in and around the hudson dam area, so yes, its mostly desert. Canyons, roads and tons of desert. Easier to graphically draw desert than waterfalls and forest I guess.
The game is 90% crafting and the crafting takes real world physics into it as most items start out taking 5 to 10 minutes to craft a shirt or a gun. Standing inside a shop for that production will shave a few minutes off the time, or you can go wander around while its being crafted. You could buy the ammo and weapons and armor, but that gets really expensive, and most mobs in the starting levels don't drop money, rather they drop materials, thus the game almost forces you to craft.
The game world is vast, different factions, beliefs, and tons of ruins. Boss battles, and underground garages and old schools and junkyards serve as dungeons, even old mine shafts. Real world dungeons.
The vehicles in the game take about 2 weeks or so to actually craft, thats real world time not game time. All of the vehicles cannot go offroad as they get damaged easily. The horse is the best option for most of these things. Although someof the vehicles do come with weapons, yer stuck to roads and not much else.
Graphically the game is poor, even at highest settings. Many people will have issues I'm sure. The game also crashes a lot as well. Play if you must, but there are better choices out there IMO.

QFT.

Also cbt since June. I would also add the controls takes some getting use to. It's more a sandbox type game. You can take your time and learn a crafting skill and get ingredients. Missions are same as other MMO's, i.e., fetch stuff and kill stuff.

I havent played for a month since I got motion sickness looking at my horse running around the dessert. I hope all the bugs I've encountered are now fix or this game is not going to last too long.

Wharg0ul · August 2009

Good. Now that the NDA is down, I can actually speak about the game, instead of pretending that I'm not in beta.

First off.....I like the game. I see it's potential.

The graphics aren't bad.....they're acceptable, IMO. The crafting system is realistic, and entertaining enough.

What drives me fucking NUTS about the game is that it runs like SHIT.

Seriously, look at the system requirements for the game. Far and above any other MMORPG to date, and above almost all single player games. And in fact, those were changed very recently from much lower specs.

This is because the game runs like ass, the coding sucks, and their solution was to throw hardware at it.

Brute force, instead of clean code. People with quad cores and the latest hardware have been reporting dips in FPS to the single fucking digits in this game. And this isn't during huge battles, mind you...it's just riding into town...and in beta, with only a fraction of the population that we'll see in live.

Ok, so low FPS might not be the killer in a standard MMO...but don't forget, this is a MMOFPS. How much fun do you think having 10 fps is going to be in PVP, with only a few others in the area?

I, and several other beta testers tried really hard to get the DEVs to clean up the code, and work on performance. We offered theories, did testing, all but butchered our systems to help troubleshoot the problems and try to get decent performance.

Nothing...the game still runs like ass. And so I have this terrible feeling that all the potential of this game is going to be wasted....due to the fact that only the highest end machines can get even "decent" performance.

Time will tell, I guess. Open beta is here, release is not far off. And the more people that enter the game, the more the performance issues are going to become GLARINGLY obvious.

Kyleran · August 2009

I have a friend who was in the cb and his opinion is a mirror of Wharg0ul....... is that you Frug?

He's a single guy and makes sure his game playing PC's are always state of the art and new (never older than a year) and he felt that performance was going to be the single issue that should prevent this game from going live any time soon.

Otherwise he enjoyed the concept and gameplay, just hated the performance.

HoldMe · August 2009

I'd have to type something up later on when I have more time. I started testing last November and I can tell you right now the engine/performance issues have been killing the game. This is going to be Tabula Rasa levels of bad word of mouth soon.

In my time testing easily one of the biggest hurdles Icarus has faced is keeping testers. New testers would show up and seem to vanish within a week or so. Most of them stating the same thing in global before uninstalling. Soon as they enter a town like Oilville or God forbid Embry and watch as their pretty decent gaming rigs explode into a mass of 5 frames a second....they're out.

It's just more than the general public will tolerate when they feel they were already getting pretty crappy performance after leaving the tutorial to begin with.

Of course you have the dorks who swear they get 600 frames a second in a place like Embry on high and that everything is fine...if only lies could fix the problem this game would be rocking.

I have a higher end system for gaming and used to run the game on high settings. My frames were usually acceptable but trying to do something that involves a decent amount of people like our last (and only that I remember) pvp focus test last Jan/Feb my frames just went to total crap before the server left the building to go die in a traffic accident.

Gabby-air · August 2009

I might write a big review later on but for now ima get to the the point

-The gameplay is very unique and i suggest people that are sick of wow should give it a try.

-Combat right now needs some work but overall its alot more fun that button smashing.

-The game sticks to the setting, there's no magical fairy to teleport you or res you, you want something you go out and get it.

-The world is HUGE, alot of exploration available.

-Graphics in my opinion are decent, textures are fairly good and the overall feel is nice.

-Crafting is the most important part in the game and it is quite fun and in depth.

-Mission wise i think there's some pretty fun quests like having to go up on top of a trailer and sniping a guy because he's hiding behind boxes and wont come out.

-In my opinion the game needs a bit more polish.

-Like stated above performance is going to be a killer for this game, they have improved it by alot but it still needs work.

ninjajucer · August 2009

The gameplay, to add more on my initial write up:

The crafting is very detailed, can't make a sandwich w/o learning to grill food, make the salad, etc. Can't just go in and expect to make a car, or a machine gun. Takes a lot of learning to figure it all out. The crafting system alone can occupy your time trying to learn as much as possible. Can level on crafting alone, and scavenge a lot w/o ever fighting anything.

Fighting. Well the first area is made up of melee enemies. So yes you can go toe to toe with a melee weapon, and do pretty good. Unfortunately putting all your points into melee leaves you at a disadvantage later in the game when you face ranged opponents who will just kill you before you get in melee range. Also of note is putting your points into ranged since you get an armor penalty of -60 against melee opponents, which means you end up dead alot. No real death penalty other than having to walk back to wherever you were before you died (a pain). The weapons also are not the most accurate things, and the only rifle type weapon your gonna use for a while is a crossbow. The handgun is a "zip gun", basically an over-powered paint ball gun. So no sniping for a while (as you need to make yer own scope or get a faction reward).

The controls are very blah, take some getting used to, and of course the performance suffers when a lot of people are around, so its a good thing that the world is vast, so you can avoid a lot of people all the time.

To touch on crafting again, you can make anything you want, bombs, shirts, grilled chicken, bullets, mallets, pretty much anything. Of course it all takes a while to craft, so much of your days will be spent gathering piles of junk, crafting it, gathering more junk, rinse and repeat. You can also gather from plants as well as animals, insects, etc.

The game idea has promise, the direction they took with the game setting kinda ruins it as the engine looks painfully sucky. The PvP is mostly done in arenas, which is a change from when it first stated where it was open PvP. The PvE is difficult with some things, but not others. Insects move real fast and are hard to kill, human types move slow. Wierd.

There are no races or classes, your a clone, so its very sandboxy in terms of what to do. Choose a faction or starting area and go from there, some places are easier to start at than others. Storyline is limited although there is a central quest line, just not much else.

Ruins galore, of course most are just there to change the desert landscape up a bit. Although there are structures that do seem to serve no real purpose as well as more useful buildings (dungeons).

The game is very buggy still. Lots of things to go wrong, when I last played someone was actually going around poisoning horses, because you could. They did not catch the guy, he just admitted it on the forums and was anned that way, and they supposedly fixed the code, but I'm sure theres another way around it. Suffice to say anything you use as a vehicle can be damaged by someone else, damaged by the environment, starve to death (horse), be lost in a system glitch, the list goes on.

The game, while being touted as a 1st/3rd person game, is hardly playable in either style. There is just something that feels off by it all.

There are better post-apoc games out there, that do the fps and pvp thing much better, suggest you waste your time elsewhere unless your a crafting nut.

krieblood · August 2009

Originally posted by ninjajucer

The gameplay, to add more on my initial write up:
The crafting is very detailed, can't make a sandwich w/o learning to grill food, make the salad, etc. Can't just go in and expect to make a car, or a machine gun. Takes a lot of learning to figure it all out. The crafting system alone can occupy your time trying to learn as much as possible. Can level on crafting alone, and scavenge a lot w/o ever fighting anything.
Fighting. Well the first area is made up of melee enemies. So yes you can go toe to toe with a melee weapon, and do pretty good. Unfortunately putting all your points into melee leaves you at a disadvantage later in the game when you face ranged opponents who will just kill you before you get in melee range. Also of note is putting your points into ranged since you get an armor penalty of -60 against melee opponents, which means you end up dead alot. No real death penalty other than having to walk back to wherever you were before you died (a pain). The weapons also are not the most accurate things, and the only rifle type weapon your gonna use for a while is a crossbow. The handgun is a "zip gun", basically an over-powered paint ball gun. So no sniping for a while (as you need to make yer own scope or get a faction reward).
The controls are very blah, take some getting used to, and of course the performance suffers when a lot of people are around, so its a good thing that the world is vast, so you can avoid a lot of people all the time.
To touch on crafting again, you can make anything you want, bombs, shirts, grilled chicken, bullets, mallets, pretty much anything. Of course it all takes a while to craft, so much of your days will be spent gathering piles of junk, crafting it, gathering more junk, rinse and repeat. You can also gather from plants as well as animals, insects, etc.
The game idea has promise, the direction they took with the game setting kinda ruins it as the engine looks painfully sucky. The PvP is mostly done in arenas, which is a change from when it first stated where it was open PvP. The PvE is difficult with some things, but not others. Insects move real fast and are hard to kill, human types move slow. Wierd.
There are no races or classes, your a clone, so its very sandboxy in terms of what to do. Choose a faction or starting area and go from there, some places are easier to start at than others. Storyline is limited although there is a central quest line, just not much else.
Ruins galore, of course most are just there to change the desert landscape up a bit. Although there are structures that do seem to serve no real purpose as well as more useful buildings (dungeons).
The game is very buggy still. Lots of things to go wrong, when I last played someone was actually going around poisoning horses, because you could. They did not catch the guy, he just admitted it on the forums and was anned that way, and they supposedly fixed the code, but I'm sure theres another way around it. Suffice to say anything you use as a vehicle can be damaged by someone else, damaged by the environment, starve to death (horse), be lost in a system glitch, the list goes on.
The game, while being touted as a 1st/3rd person game, is hardly playable in either style. There is just something that feels off by it all.
There are better post-apoc games out there, that do the fps and pvp thing much better, suggest you waste your time elsewhere unless your a crafting nut.

/Agree

Wait for Project V13.

Don't waste your money for real its poorly done.

2/10

iamspamicus · August 2009

Ya i had major problems running the game.

It would chug along until it would finally freeze for a minute to catch up and then I could walk again for a few more minutes, and then freeze to catch up.

This is from the same pc that ran AoC fine in medium settings with 20-30 fps. (core duo, 4 gigs of ram and 7600gt)

Don't even think about running the game unless you have a nice graphics card and fast processor. They really need to optimize it since nothing I saw in game should have choked my performance like it did. Graphics and textures looked last gen imo.

I'm sure it will do well though since it felt a lot different than most mmos out now. Very swg (before they changed it). - I guess people call that sandbox.

krieblood · August 2009

Originally posted by iamspamicus

Ya i had major problems running the game.
It would chug along until it would finally freeze for a minute to catch up and then I could walk again for a few more minutes, and then freeze to catch up.
This is from the same pc that ran AoC fine in medium settings with 20-30 fps. (core duo, 4 gigs of ram and 7600gt)
Don't even think about running the game unless you have a nice graphics card and fast processor. They really need to optimize it since nothing I saw in game should have choked my performance like it did. Graphics and textures looked last gen imo.
I'm sure it will do well though since it felt a lot different than most mmos out now. Very swg (before they changed it). - I guess people call that sandbox.

Combat is piss poor if u shoot somehting from a distance and dont basically stand on top of them then your wasting ammo they wont even take damage or aggro.

Its just crappy.

Gabby-air · August 2009

Originally posted by krieblood

Originally posted by iamspamicus

Ya i had major problems running the game.
It would chug along until it would finally freeze for a minute to catch up and then I could walk again for a few more minutes, and then freeze to catch up.
This is from the same pc that ran AoC fine in medium settings with 20-30 fps. (core duo, 4 gigs of ram and 7600gt)
Don't even think about running the game unless you have a nice graphics card and fast processor. They really need to optimize it since nothing I saw in game should have choked my performance like it did. Graphics and textures looked last gen imo.
I'm sure it will do well though since it felt a lot different than most mmos out now. Very swg (before they changed it). - I guess people call that sandbox.

Combat is piss poor if u shoot somehting from a distance and dont basically stand on top of them then your wasting ammo they wont even take damage or aggro.

Its just crappy.

Using a scope that never happened to me but on the early lvls when oyu only have a crossbow it can be hard but once oyu figure out how to do it you'll hit about 90% of the time.

@Iam

Your video card is way under the minimum require for the game.

veritas_X · August 2009

Lol, I have to say that many of the negatives people are listing are actually positives for me (i.e. I am a crafting nut, I don't want to run into a lot of people as it's a frickin' end of the world apocalypse, duh).

I have also been in closed beta for over six months, and the only thing I will agree on is the performance issues. The game does run like ass, and my rig is hefty.

The graphics aren't as dookified as people are claiming. Yes the production design is drab and the environments are occasionally sparse, but again: end of the world / desert / duh. Graphical detail is far superior to the cartoon crap-fest that is WoW or Champions Online for example. Also, graphics can be improved over time, whereas your base gameplay cannot (excepting an ill-advised NGE of course).

I see this game going the way of Vanguard: buggy as hell launch and very deep/involved gameplay that scares off people with short attention spans, and finds a very small niche audience that falls in love and never leaves. That's actually fine with me too, provided they fix the performance issues.

My only concern is that being a first-time developer, they may be short of cash and bad word of mouth on launch will then kill them. I hope the game can survive long enough for them to iron out performance issues, because as a crafter/roleplayer/sandbox enthusiast, it's got almost everything I want in an mmo.

Khalathwyr · August 2009

Originally posted by veritas_X

Lol, I have to say that many of the negatives people are listing are actually positives for me (i.e. I am a crafting nut, I don't want to run into a lot of people as it's a frickin' end of the world apocalypse, duh).
I have also been in closed beta for over six months, and the only thing I will agree on is the performance issues. The game does run like ass, and my rig is hefty.
The graphics aren't as dookified as people are claiming. Yes the production design is drab and the environments are occasionally sparse, but again: end of the world / desert / duh. Graphical detail is far superior to the cartoon crap-fest that is WoW or Champions Online for example. Also, graphics can be improved over time, whereas your base gameplay cannot (excepting an ill-advised NGE of course).
I see this game going the way of Vanguard: buggy as hell launch and very deep/involved gameplay that scares off people with short attention spans, and finds a very small niche audience that falls in love and never leaves. That's actually fine with me too, provided they fix the performance issues.
My only concern is that being a first-time developer, they may be short of cash and bad word of mouth on launch will then kill them. I hope the game can survive long enough for them to iron out performance issues, because as a crafter/roleplayer/sandbox enthusiast, it's got almost everything I want in an mmo.

I pretty much agree with what veritas says here. I'm not so sure about the vanguard part, though, as I was in Vanguard beta into the late stages and it seemed alot more buggy than FE does to me. In fact, I haven't experienced the crasshes and issues that you see a few people talking about on this forum and other. My rig is about 3 years old, as well, with the exception of the vid card which is about 2 I think.

Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4GHz

4GB OCZ RAM

WD 150GB Raptor HD

EVGA nVidia Geforce 9600 GT 512mb

Vista 32-bit

My wife's machine is rockin an

nVidia Geforce 7950 GT KO 512mb

Windows XP

AMD Athlon 64 Core Duo 4400 2.31GHz

2GB RAM

and she and I have been successfully grouping together for a while.

On that I don't find the game "unplayable" as some people state here. Yes, I've seen the FPS dip to single digits in the middle of town for like a second or two however most of the time I get 20-40 FPS with all sliders at 90% and shadows off. It's not like sitting around and having it run like that for minutes at a time. That said, performance can certainly be improved and I'm fairly confident will be improved moving forward with each patch.

So, yeah, performance is the area I'm "least happy" with yet it doesn't make the game unplayable (at least on my 3 y/o machine). This being so, I'm certainly buying the game based on the direction Icarus is taking with it. If you want something different than the standard WoW/LOTRO/AION type games, you gotta take some bad with the good. And FE's bad is certainly bearable all things considered.

veritas_X · August 2009

Yeah, I'm supporting them because I find it fun as is. If they iron out the bugs and add expansions/content over time, that's just a bonus since I'm having fun now.

My Vanguard comparison was meant to be favorable, in that it got a lot of horrible word-of-mouth at launch but recovered to be a sustainable (if not successful) game. I liked Vanguard, would still be playing it if not for Fallen Earth, so that wasn't meant as a slam.

In any event, people should try the open beta for themselves regardless of what anyone says here (good or bad). I suspect 'unplayable' is not the norm, and perhaps even an exaggeration borne of being spoiled by simpler, higher-budget games.

cukimunga · August 2009

Originally posted by Khalathwyr

Originally posted by veritas_X

Lol, I have to say that many of the negatives people are listing are actually positives for me (i.e. I am a crafting nut, I don't want to run into a lot of people as it's a frickin' end of the world apocalypse, duh).
I have also been in closed beta for over six months, and the only thing I will agree on is the performance issues. The game does run like ass, and my rig is hefty.
The graphics aren't as dookified as people are claiming. Yes the production design is drab and the environments are occasionally sparse, but again: end of the world / desert / duh. Graphical detail is far superior to the cartoon crap-fest that is WoW or Champions Online for example. Also, graphics can be improved over time, whereas your base gameplay cannot (excepting an ill-advised NGE of course).
I see this game going the way of Vanguard: buggy as hell launch and very deep/involved gameplay that scares off people with short attention spans, and finds a very small niche audience that falls in love and never leaves. That's actually fine with me too, provided they fix the performance issues.
My only concern is that being a first-time developer, they may be short of cash and bad word of mouth on launch will then kill them. I hope the game can survive long enough for them to iron out performance issues, because as a crafter/roleplayer/sandbox enthusiast, it's got almost everything I want in an mmo.

I pretty much agree with what veritas says here. I'm not so sure about the vanguard part, though, as I was in Vanguard beta into the late stages and it seemed alot more buggy than FE does to me. In fact, I haven't experienced the crasshes and issues that you see a few people talking about on this forum and other. My rig is about 3 years old, as well, with the exception of the vid card which is about 2 I think.

Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4GHz

4GB OCZ RAM

WD 150GB Raptor HD

EVGA nVidia Geforce 9600 GT 512mb

Vista 32-bit

My wife's machine is rockin an

nVidia Geforce 7950 GT KO 512mb

Windows XP

AMD Athlon 64 Core Duo 4400 2.31GHz

2GB RAM

and she and I have been successfully grouping together for a while.

On that I don't find the game "unplayable" as some people state here. Yes, I've seen the FPS dip to single digits in the middle of town for like a second or two however most of the time I get 20-40 FPS with all sliders at 90% and shadows off. It's not like sitting around and having it run like that for minutes at a time. That said, performance can certainly be improved and I'm fairly confident will be improved moving forward with each patch.

So, yeah, performance is the area I'm "least happy" with yet it doesn't make the game unplayable (at least on my 3 y/o machine). This being so, I'm certainly buying the game based on the direction Icarus is taking with it. If you want something different than the standard WoW/LOTRO/AION type games, you gotta take some bad with the good. And FE's bad is certainly bearable all things considered.

I have everything maxed @ 1440x 900, I think AA is on cuz I clicked it on the options but its still a bit jaggy. But I get teens to 25 fps in towns and 60 to 70 fps out in the open most of the time. So I don't know what people are talking about the game being a slideshow. They must be playing max on a crappy computer or something. My specs are:

E8400 clocked @ 3.25ghz

ATI 4850

4 gigs of ram but running XP

80 gig Raptor.

Swanea · August 2009

I really did not enjoy the game what so ever. Seemed a lot like SWG in the openness of the game, but I don't know. I had no interest to log in after the first four or five times.

Khalathwyr · August 2009

Originally posted by cukimunga

Originally posted by Khalathwyr

Originally posted by veritas_X

Lol, I have to say that many of the negatives people are listing are actually positives for me (i.e. I am a crafting nut, I don't want to run into a lot of people as it's a frickin' end of the world apocalypse, duh).
I have also been in closed beta for over six months, and the only thing I will agree on is the performance issues. The game does run like ass, and my rig is hefty.
The graphics aren't as dookified as people are claiming. Yes the production design is drab and the environments are occasionally sparse, but again: end of the world / desert / duh. Graphical detail is far superior to the cartoon crap-fest that is WoW or Champions Online for example. Also, graphics can be improved over time, whereas your base gameplay cannot (excepting an ill-advised NGE of course).
I see this game going the way of Vanguard: buggy as hell launch and very deep/involved gameplay that scares off people with short attention spans, and finds a very small niche audience that falls in love and never leaves. That's actually fine with me too, provided they fix the performance issues.
My only concern is that being a first-time developer, they may be short of cash and bad word of mouth on launch will then kill them. I hope the game can survive long enough for them to iron out performance issues, because as a crafter/roleplayer/sandbox enthusiast, it's got almost everything I want in an mmo.

I pretty much agree with what veritas says here. I'm not so sure about the vanguard part, though, as I was in Vanguard beta into the late stages and it seemed alot more buggy than FE does to me. In fact, I haven't experienced the crasshes and issues that you see a few people talking about on this forum and other. My rig is about 3 years old, as well, with the exception of the vid card which is about 2 I think.

Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4GHz

4GB OCZ RAM

WD 150GB Raptor HD

EVGA nVidia Geforce 9600 GT 512mb

Vista 32-bit

My wife's machine is rockin an

nVidia Geforce 7950 GT KO 512mb

Windows XP

AMD Athlon 64 Core Duo 4400 2.31GHz

2GB RAM

and she and I have been successfully grouping together for a while.

On that I don't find the game "unplayable" as some people state here. Yes, I've seen the FPS dip to single digits in the middle of town for like a second or two however most of the time I get 20-40 FPS with all sliders at 90% and shadows off. It's not like sitting around and having it run like that for minutes at a time. That said, performance can certainly be improved and I'm fairly confident will be improved moving forward with each patch.

So, yeah, performance is the area I'm "least happy" with yet it doesn't make the game unplayable (at least on my 3 y/o machine). This being so, I'm certainly buying the game based on the direction Icarus is taking with it. If you want something different than the standard WoW/LOTRO/AION type games, you gotta take some bad with the good. And FE's bad is certainly bearable all things considered.

I have everything maxed @ 1440x 900, I think AA is on cuz I clicked it on the options but its still a bit jaggy. But I get teens to 25 fps in towns and 60 to 70 fps out in the open most of the time. So I don't know what people are talking about the game being a slideshow. They must be playing max on a crappy computer or something. My specs are:

E8400 clocked @ 3.25ghz

ATI 4850

4 gigs of ram but running XP

80 gig Raptor.

I know, right? I play at 1680 X 1050 (22" lcd) and the wife plays at 1024 X 768 (15"lcd). People with "better" computers either must have other applications or something running or on dial-up lines of the worst kind. I know having a Fios connection doesn't give us that much better "playability" as that fiber cable doesn't go all the way to FE's server. Just out a hop or two or three.

uohaloran · August 2009

Game is totally not ready. I hate to see them try and push it out in this state.

JGMIII · August 2009

Well thanks for the info guys.

I will put this on the "let it cook for another year before trying list" along with Darkfall.

Seems like this one will be nice once they get stability issues and bugs out of the way

I hope the core fans stick with it like the fans for darkfall have so it's around in a year for me to mess with

Vynt · August 2009

I actually liked the graphics. I enjoyed the atmosphere of the game, and the story that began with the tutorial. Overall though, I just didn't really like the game as a MMO.

I think the game would have made an excellent single player game, focusing on the story to extend your life (you're a dying clone), sort of laid out like Mass Effect. As a MMO, it just lacked that "something" that wanted me to keep playing, to advance to compete with other people.

I didn't really have any expectations of the game, but still a bit down that I couldn't enjoy the game more. I tried on several occaisions over the last month, to no avail.

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV