Fallen Earth team is on it again, with a fresh QotW entry, full of progress updates and a run down on the Scavenging skill, prosthetic implants, Lee's PC specs and, yes, underwear choices:
We're moving the question of the week to Thursday as part of a new overall communication revamp that will see a lot more information getting to y'all in the near future. The Question of the Week will continue on much the same, but other regular features on the webpage will also be introduced.
This week we're working on Oilville (the Tech town in the Plateau), North Burb (the Lightbearer town in the Plateau), Clinton F.A.R.M. (which some of you may have seen from the old old videos, but it's getting a major makeover), and Linewood (which is one of the mid-level towns in the Plateau).
Scavenging Skill
Some folks were worried about Scavenging not being on any faction's skill list. This is because Scavenging is a tradeskill, thus gets better with use, and it doesn't have any knowledges or special abilities associated with it. All it does it allow you to access better scavenging nodes and to get better things out of nodes if your skill is high enough. So there's no point for a faction to specialize in it; there's nothing to teach.
Q. Are you planning any prosthetics in the game such as prosthetic arms/legs, peg legs, hook hands...CHAINSAW ARMS!!!!1, or other more futuristic robotic arms/legs?
A. We are doing some stuff with minor cyber implants, but no huge prosthetics in the launch material. It is definitely something we are looking at for expansions, though. Maybe not chainsaw arms specifically, but something cool.
Q. Could you give us a map or something of the game world or SOMETHING to give us some reference for what the hell you guys are working on? It's all well and good to know what specific towns are being worked on and stuff, but without any frame of reference, for all I know, you've only gotten, like, 10% of them done, despite the fact that it sounds really impressive.
Outside of the existing maps of the Plateau (which actually aren't accurate anymore due to town revamps and such) we don't have good maps for public consumption currently. To give you an idea of where we are, every town for initial release (which is around 80 or so) is laid out and at least mostly functional (NPCs are in, missions are in place, conflict towns change sides, etc., but not all the missions may work right all the time, mission rewards and merchants aren't balanced correctly, etc). About 25% are in a finished state, having been polished, received a more rigorous QA process, etc.
Q. Any chance we can customize our characters' underwear?
No. We actually did have an earlier version of the item system where we had something like that, but it just never seemed very interesting. Do people really want to worry about boxers vs. briefs in an MMO?
Q. Maybe a way of telling what faction is dominant in each area too (colour-coded map mayhaps?)
Most areas don't have clear faction boundaries. Since there are vast tracts of wilderness that no one patrols, faction territory is really more based on what towns they control at the moment.
Q. While reviewing some crafting info, I ran across the researching info. IE you know Axes 1, you can research Improved Axes 1 which makes an item "only you can use." Does that mean if I buy Axes 1 I can then take the resulting item and sell it on the open market? If this is so, wouldn't that dampen the whole system of each faction being better at certain things than others? I mean a Chota finds out he has to be lvl 35 to get a certain skill, but couldn't he buy it on the market if he otherwise qualified? Or is there another angle to this I am missing?
The item that only you can use is a book that teaches you Improved Axes 1, the idea being that the time you spent making it represents research and teaching yourself how to make better axes, during which you expend some resources on making test axes, etc. The item cannot be traded, sold, dropped, made into paper air planes, or used to line kitty litter, but it may be destroyed if you wanted to clear out some inventory space really badly. So the only way to learn Improved Axes 1 is to learn Axes 1, and then spend the time and resources to do the research.
Players can circumvent the faction specialties by teaching each other knowledges across faction lines, but they can't do that with advanced knowledges.
Q. What are the specs of your 2.5-year-old computer?
3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 processor (single core), 2 Gb RAM, GeForce 6800 video card (256 Mb) or something like that. I run the game on medium textures, draw distance, etc with shadow turned off and it runs fine. For a guy who works at a game company my personal computer is pretty crappy.
