The Reckon Crew speaks with Dave Haydysch, producer for Fallen Earth

In one of the noisiest corners of PAX Prime, we met with one of Icarus Studios’ representatives and were ushered over to meet Fallen Earth Producer Dave Haydysch who was kind enough, and patient enough in his talking throughout the blare of the music game across the way, to give us a tour of the MMO Fallen Earth. It was easy to see the enthusiasm Dave had for this game and it was hard not to get caught up in it as he told us about this post-apocalyptic RPG. Below is a small excerpt from the almost 30 minutes Dave was generous enough to spend with us talking about the game.

“The game is set in the year 2154 and there’s been a virus called Shiva released on the planet. Amid the confusion that set in after the virus was released, all the countries of the world blamed one another for the outbreak and ended up launching their nuclear weapons. The character you play is a clone, and along with the remaining 1% of the world’s population, you’re trying to rebuild the world.???

“There are seven different factions in the world now and each faction is attempting to rebuild the world based on their ideals creating conflict among the factions. For example, there is a faction called the ‘Enforcers’ who are very militant, very martial law, and very police state and that is the means by which they intend to rebuild society. Their opposing faction is the ‘CHOTA’ which stands for ‘Children of the Apocalypse’ who are all about chaos. They say, ‘Screw your rules, they didn’t work the first time around and chaos is the way we’re going to rebuild this,’ so they’re obviously at odds.???

“Now you don’t have to align with a faction in the game but you miss out on so much of the depth of the game that we really encourage players to get involved. Our game is very free flowing so it adds a lot of different aspects to the game when a player along some cells with one of the various factions. If you do choose to align with a faction, it changes the story that you’re playing through, it adds depth and a different twist on the game than someone who chooses a different faction might experience.???

“There are three sectors to the game right now, sectors one, two, and three, very basic names. Sector One is what you might expect from a setting that we’ve placed the game in. The game is set in the United States and what we’ve done is take a real map of the Grand Canyon, set it down, and put our game on top of it. In theory, you can pick a spot on the map, look around, and then go there in real life. Of course the spot you visit in real life isn’t going to look anything like our post apocalyptic version but the fact is you’d be looking at the exact location that we’ve put in the game.???

Dave then showed us how immense the game world actually is from the point of view of the character we were “test driving???. At this time, they’ve only used 2/3 of the map and the game still covers over 1000 square kilometers. Even from the viewpoint of a hardcore MMO player, it’s easy to see how big this world already is.

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