First Signs of Hope [ Face Of Mankind biweekly DevBlog ]
Written by Ahmed Ghanem
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Here it goes , two days ago the FOM developers team released the first version of their biweekly blog to track down the game changes before its new release, codenamed "Rebirth".
Lee Hammock, the Lead Game Designer for Fallen Earth answers a slew of questions from our own, Ahmed Ghanem, in a MassiveFPS.com exclusive Q&A.
Questions :
Ahmed: What can you tell us about the engine that Fallen Earth uses?
Lee Hammock: Icarus Studios developed the engine in-house along with the Icarus Studios Tools Suite. It can handle a wide variety of virtual environments, from cartoon-style cell shading to the more realistic graphics used in Fallen Earth. It can also handle numerous environments, from the desert scrub that has been seen in most of the Fallen Earth screenshots to forests, grasslands, and others which are also being used in Fallen Earth. The Icarus Studios Tools Suite makes implementing content in the game much easier since we can create large amounts of content with minimal need for actual coding.
Ahmed: What can we expect to see from the GUI ? Will it be crowded with buttons or just a simple MMO interface with drag and drop inventories?
Lee Hammock: The UI is pretty simple. It has a level/xp/hit point bar, a minimap, a quick slot bar, and chat window. Most of those can be closed, and they can all be dragged around. Players can also open and use other windows, like inventory or gear windows. The windows' transparency is also adjustable, so players can have a lot of viewable space even with windows open.
Ahmed: What will be “macro-able”?
Lee Hammock: Very little so far. We don't want a game that people can play on auto-pilot.
Ahmed: What can you tell us about future expansions? Will you introduce new factions or species ?
Lee Hammock: Future expansions will include free additions to existing content, including new towns, encounter areas, and even new sectors of game play. Future purchasable expansions will offer entirely new sectors of play in different regions outside the original setting. These purchasable expansions will be the largest sectors available and will take the players to new areas of the American Southwest, such as Hoover Dam or Las Vegas. New factions and sub-factions, skills, gear, mutations, vehicles, etc will be introduced in expansions, but new species are less likely.
Ahmed: You've mentioned PvP will be centered in conflict towns and special high level maps. Although your FAQ states there is no player cap, will there be one in these specific areas?
Lee Hammock: All PvP areas will have level limits placed on them so only players within a certain fair range will be able to attack other players in that area. This range can be quite large, but we still want to keep advanced players from making a bad time of it for newer players.
Ahmed: The game is skill based, but you gain APs from leveling up. Do you feel combining twitch with RPG elements will cause balance issues?
Lee Hammock: There undoubtedly will be balance issues; anyone who expects to produce a perfectly balanced RPG before release is fooling themselves. We hope that players who like both FPS and RPG games will find enough of their preferred game style in Fallen Earth to stick with the game, though players need a bit of both skill sets to survive. Fallen Earth plays very differently from most other MMOs (FPS combat, classless system, etc) so we're covering a lot of uncharted ground in terms of balance.
Ahmed: What options do you have for player groups (clans/guilds etc)? Can we expect to see guild centers or a place that a player can call home?
Lee Hammock: Our guild functionality is still being worked out. Players will be able to form guilds/clans/gangs, but everything that entails has not been finalized yet, and as a rule, we'd rather be called tight-lipped because we say nothing rather than be called liars for promising something we don't deliver.
Ahmed: How do you plan to include group hunting? Will there be any benefits from group hunting? Can a player go solo all the time?
Lee Hammock: A solo player will always have something to do at his level that he can accomplish alone. That said, such a player will miss out on a lot of content in our levels and instances, which are very group-oriented. There are simply places in Fallen Earth one should not go alone because you will be horribly outnumbered. Players who never group up will be able to play, but they'll miss out on a lot of story, items, recipes, etc.
Ahmed: How does death work? Can the player get back into battle quickly? Does death differ in PvP and PvE environments?
Lee Hammock: A player reduced to 0 hit points is incapacitated. Another player may revive him with certain mutant abilities or a special item, such as a Resuscitation Kit. Alternately, he may activate a clone of himself at the closest LifeNet pod, which also destroys his old body. LifeNet pods are located away from PvP areas, so players can't be corpse camped. If the player is involved in PvP, he will have to run back to the fight from the LifeNet pod, which can take a minute or so. Also if a player dies several times in rapid succession, he will begin suffering XP and stat debuffs to encourage the player to go do something else instead for awhile. We hope that this system will allow players to get involved in PvP without fear of terrible repercussions, but encourage them to eventually leave the field instead of continuing in never-ending battles where everyone just keeps resurrecting and jumping back into the fray without consequence.
Ahmed: You confirmed "hit boxes" a while ago- does it affect the amount of damage only, or will we see head shots?
Lee Hammock: If by “seeing head shots” you mean actually seeing a critter's head explode or some such, then no. The hit location system is primarily used as a damage adjustment.
Ahmed: What character movements have you planned to include in the game (crouching, walking, running, swimming, emotions etc…)?
Lee Hammock: Walking, jogging, running, sprinting, crouching, crawling, riding mounts and in cars, swimming, climbing ladders, among others.
Ahmed: Do players have the option to choose between FPS and TPS?
Lee Hammock: Yes. I find that it's much easier to use ranged weapons in FPS mode, but much easier to use melee weapons in TPS mode, so I tend to switch back and forth a lot.
Ahmed: Does the game utilize auto aim in any form?
Lee Hammock: None at all. There is no lock on targeting, no sticky target, nothing of the sort. Folks seem to get confused about this one, so just to be clear, there is no type of aiming assistance at all in Fallen Earth.
Well, that about wraps it up. Although we won't be seeing heads exploding we're defenitely looking at a quality action MMO, and we're psyched for the release. Big thanks to Lee Hammock for taking time out of his busy day to let the MMOFPS community know about his game. It will definetely be one to keep our eye on.
After the shocking news we've heard about Face of mankind the past weeks , it all occured to us that it might and probably will go down or turn completely to a free2play game , but as for the FOM developers , they announced that the spent a lot on this project and they're not willing to stop it now .
Developers' team official word :
Dear FoM Community,
many of you are waiting to hear word from us about the future of Face of Mankind. Since we have been informed about the cease of service by Ojom at the end of november, we had to do a lot of thinking and planning. The main questions were whether we would be able to continue hosting the game by ourselves and if we would be willing to take the financial risks involved. We have spent a lot of efforts, diligence, money and even health into the project, and we are not willing to give it up that easily. So we decided to go on, with a few changes, but at least go on.
In order to be able to host the game on our own, we need to simplify everything a lot. During the last weeks we've come up with a concept for this, which I'd like to present to you roughly. By simplification I mean the game, the server structure and the portal.
1. The Portal The portal will be reduced to the minimum necessary to present the game to the public. We will no longer host an official forum or irc channel. We want to give that into the hands of you, the community. As the developer we will present all necessary information through the portal or the game. Also, we are going to implement a biweekly development blog with all kinds of information that would be interesting to you, both official and internal. That is to give you an insight view of how hard it is to create and manage an MMORPG.
2. The Server Structure The server structure has to be simplified in order to allow for an easy administration, setup and expansion of the cluster. There will be a master server to which all available world servers will connect. Clients who are registered on the master server, will receive a list of world servers they can connect to. The importance of the world server will be increased compared to before. You will find out what that means when you are able to test it for yourself.
3. The Game The changes to the game will be rather dramatic. But rest assured, these are necessary changes for FoM to survive and hopefully grow later on.
First of, the accounts. There will be two kinds of accounts, a free one and a premium account. Free accounts have no time limitation (so they can be used forever) but limited features. With such account your character can't evolve beyond a certain point. With premium accounts all limitations are lifted. They will cost a yet to be defined monthly fee. We are also considering the option to purchase premium game time to remove the necessity of having to "subscribe".
Next, there's the game mechanics. During the last years with FoM we could gather a lot of experience and let's say "maturity". We've tested a few very revolutionary features, if we remember the first versions of the mission system. After a few more iterations, we have to admit that some things just won't work, at least not yet. Some have worked out, others rather not. We took a very honest view at all of the features in FoM and decided to do the following changes. I'm going to list them here as notes only.
- Introduction of Clans - Factions: each faction will be turned into some sort of profession and the old professions will be removed, each faction will give the character a speciality - Planetary Overview when logging into the game, no more travelling between worlds through vortex gates - There are worlds for combat and worlds for socializing - Local economy only, "what is generated on the world, stays on the world", this includes everything from mining, production, market sales and removes transporting - Storages work like safes - Introduction of Bio Updates: Character stats, features and options can be enhanced - Introduction of Bases: On each world, there will be a certain number of bases that can be conquered by clans. Bases consist of a number of linked energy plants that have to be taken out for the force shield to come down. A lot of the PvP oriented gameplay will be about bases - Turrets are linked to bases - The mission system as we know it will be no more, instead there are going to be tasks with waypoints that can be defined by clans on a world - Permanent death will be removed - Re-Implementation of aliens - Other world AI (birds, rats, civilian NPC's, server controlled vehicles etc) has to be simplified, the chat AI will be removed and NPC responses will be streamlined
4. Timeline What we cannot do is giving you an exact timeline. What we will do is trying to keep posting regular (weekly or biweekly) development updates on the portal, so that you can get a picture of the progress yourself. Before the relaunch, we are going to set up another closed beta test to make both the client and the server as stable as possible.
5. The Future This first relaunch will be called "Face of Mankind: Rebirth". If things are going well and the customer base grows, additional world servers will be added step by step. When we reach a state where we are able to generate a stable income, further development steps are planned. The next stage will be called "Face of Mankind: Evolution". We are not going to give out any details about that yet. They are still too undecided to publically announce them.
At the end, we would like to thank everyone involved in the creation of Face of Mankind again and each customer for their loyalty. We will try our best to bring the game back to life, since (and you will most likely agree on this) the concept deserves it.
The Face of Mankind Staff
The brief on this that the team decided to decrease some services introduced by them as the community site and irc channel and the developing team will afford running the servers , they'll also add a free account in order to increase population in the game ... so just we need to wait for the launch of : Face of mankind rebirth .
For further news check : www.fomportal.com
Sign a new account : http://fomportal.com/index.php?page=newaccount
Download the client : http://fomportal.com/index.php?page=dl_client
Lee Hammock, the Lead Game Designer for 
Ahmed: What character movements have you planned to include in the game (crouching, walking, running, swimming, emotions etc…)?