At the Game Developer’s Conference, we ran into the guys from Fallen Earth who gave us kind of a whirlwind tour of their game. In this part of our guided tour through the game, we learn about the game's combat system

It doesn’t take long for players in Fallen Earth to get a sense of just how dark and dangerous the game world actually is when their first weapon is found lodged in the head of some hapless soul who didn’t know when to duck. The corpse works a lot like any harvesting node… You walk up to it, click and you get the item. This just happens in this case to represent dislodging an axe from someone’s skull.

Once you’ve got your weapon, it’s all about learning to wield that sucker. In order to attack, you need to go into “aim mode”, basically you go from a panned out view of your character to a zoomed in view, either first person or third, with an aiming reticule.

In order to hit whatever it is you’re swinging at, you have to a) make sure your reticule is lined up and b) make sure your target is within range. The physical combat, it turns out, is actually FPS style meaning that you actually have to hit in order to… hit. No dice rolls to determine success or failure. The RPG elements come in when the game determines damage. Damage is most affected by elements like your attack skill, their armor modifiers and other typical RPG trappings.

Combat Video In part two of our look at Fallen Earth with Lead Game Designer Lee Hammock we learn about the starting tutorial, combat, skills, weapons, equipment, and looting corpses.

Check out Combat.