With Fallen Earth poised on the edge of a new life as a free to play MMO, Managing Editor Bill Murphy had the opportunity to speak with Associate Game Director Joseph Willmon about "The Free Apocalypse". The discussion meanders from why the F2P decision was made to the awesomeness of the Commander's Aura. Check it out!

Will there be many “item shop” type purchases for players to delve into? Say they want to give you guys some cash, but don’t necessarily want a subscription. They just want to buy a little more crafting speed or better XP rates or something along those lines.

I love the idea of your altruistic player! Right now there’s the standard stable of cosmetic stuff—shirts, goggles, and whatnot—some mounts (more unique than powerful), and convenience upgrades like increased vault space, faction resets, respecs, and pets. To this we’ll be breaking out all the benefits of Premium and selling them a la carte as well. The one thing you WON’T be able to do it buy a fully-crafted item; for that, you have to play the game!

Read more of Bill Murphy's Fallen Earth: The Free Apocalypse Interview.

This game never really came accross my radar prior to the announcement it was going F2P, but I have now downloaded the client and look forward to trying it out on F2P launch day  =)

I was in the alfa and the beta,  I had a years sub before I gave up on this game.  I am looking forward to it being free,  It will be something I tinker with now and then.

between this being free and the changes to AP accumulation & the removal of the need for faction wheel grinding I cannot wait to get back to the wastelands and re-activate my clones.

Great game, anyone who hasn't played it should give it a go.  Even just playing it as a single player style game you can have a few months of good fun and the crafting/gathering rocks :)

S1 feels like home to me too, haha.

FE is really a unique and fabulous game that i've been subbed to for a long time now. i haven't played much the last six months because i've been involved with testing SWTOR, yet i still spend a week or two at a time crafting, questing and such, because it is something i will play no matter what else is released in the near future. i'll continue to pay for it, and enjoy the influx of new players, and hopefully some more active faction PvP down the line. 

Glad to see they are atleast talking about making it more of a sandbox. I was turned off by the game at launch because it felt too much like a themepark, being led by the nose from one quest hub to the next.

Now that it is free I will definitely give it another try. Anyone know if the PvP has improved at all? I have bad memories of spending hours running around the S1 PvP area hoping to fight someone and eventually getting steamrolled by lvl the 20+s coming back to farm newbies. I asked about PvP a few months ago on the official forums and most of the replies were that PvP was still horrible at that time. I really hope they can do something to make it fun.

Great game!

Already subbed, but i'm glad that there isn't game breaking restrictions, when it goes F2P...

The real news in this interview is that aspects of the premium benefits will be sold ala carte instead of being only accessible with a premium subsciption. My main concern is the 8-hour crafting limit for free players, which I believe can and will prove game-breaking once free players advance far enough into the game to where they must craft a lot in order to stay competitive with paid players. Given how intrinsic crafting is to advancement in this game, those who are limited to a mere 1/3 of the crafting time paid players enjoy will quickly find themselves without the ability to stay competitve and be effective at the higher levels or in PvP.

If the ability to negate the ridiculously short crafting limit for free players is sold at a reasonable price in the premium store that may well go a long way toward keeping the game fair and balanced, but I strongly suspect that Fallen Earth will lose a lot of free players and the potential income they represent once they begin bumping up against this ill-considered and quite possibly game-breaking limitation to find themselves playing a very different game from those who choose to pay.

For my full take on this issue, check out my latest posts at Fallen Earth Bloggers.

Originally posted by Radiogirl

The real news in this interview is that aspects of the premium benefits will be sold ala carte instead of being only accessible with a premium subsciption. My main concern is the 8-hour crafting limit for free players, which I believe can and will prove game-breaking once free players advance far enough into the game to where they must craft a lot in order to stay competitive with paid players. Given how intrinsic crafting is to advancement in this game, those who are limited to a mere 1/3 of the crafting time paid players enjoy will quickly find themselves without the ability to stay competitve and be effective at the higher levels or in PvP.

If the ability to negate the ridiculously short crafting limit for free players is sold at a reasonable price in the premium store that may well go a long way toward keeping the game fair and balanced, but I strongly suspect that Fallen Earth will lose a lot of free players and the potential income they represent once they begin bumping up against this ill-considered and quite possibly game-breaking limitation to find themselves playing a very different game from those who choose to pay.

For my full take on this issue, check out my latest posts at Fallen Earth Bloggers.

a thoughtful post and blog, but a bit too "apocalyps-y", i think. many players forgo crafting altogether, instead investing AP in things other than those that enable crafting skills. for those F2P players that do want to craft, 8 hours may not be long enough to get your biodiesel motorcycle or interceptor built in a few days, but it's certainly enough time to craft ammo, weapons, and armor. there are plenty of vehicles (and everything else) available in auction, and anyone who wants to spend a little more time accumulating chips can just buy what they need there instead of worrying about availability from merchants.

the 1.9.3 is supposed to address the player economy, and while it may be some time before the dust settles, it seems clear that anyone who wants to play for free can do so without having to craft in a 24-hour clock. only the playes who are so committed to crafting that it affects their enjoyment will find this time limit too much to bear. even then, for most of the new players, this limit will not affect them until the latest levels of the game when they realize it's going to take 2 weeks to craft an interceptor when they could buy one from auction if they'd managed to save up a few red chips along the way. even so, they game is fully playable with cheaper vehicles (i still mostly use a motorcycle, anyway).

in the end, i do not disagree entirely with your post, and i realize there will be players that are "annoyed" by the restrictions, but in the end this transition will bring in many new players who simply don't care very much that they can't sit in a workshop and craft all day, and will instead use that time (hopefully, and eventually) engaged in meaningful gameplay in progress towns, faction PvP, and discovering what we already know...that this is a fabulous game that just needed a bit more exposure. 

 

in case you want to try it, alienwarearena has a 30 day free trial +  free gun if you want to check out the game. http://www.alienwarearena.com/giveaway/fallen-earth/

I would argue that  now that many craftable items have been removed from merchants, avoiding crafting will no longer be as feasable as it used to be, thus making the 8-hour crafting limit a far more significant factor in advancement for free players. In addition, even before the recent patches the merchant price of higher levels of ammo, particularly heavy ammo, was already pretty steep, making the ability to be able to craft it oneself pretty much an essential skill in order to stay competitive in the game.

As I said above and on FEB, I believe that being able to buy a 24-hour crafting buff as a premium store item will go a long way toward helping to balance things out for many, but for those who choose not to pay at all Fallen Earth is going to be a very different game than for those who play, and I don't think it's going to be someting that inspires free players to spend money but rather something that encourages many of these players to give up on FE and move on to other games.