Day One: 10-Day trial

I played Fallen Earth a bit more last night and did the new player experience tutorial quests. Prior to that I had a chance to choose a career path with sub-categories on what I'd like to pursue. So I chose the crafting with pistols/rifle subcategory. The zone is called South Burbs. Once I got to the South Burbs a woman had me run around to meet other players who instructed me how to use my abilities and mutations. Afterward I retrieved a horse and was told to ride around to surrounding camps to get crafting training. So it was interesting.

The fighting is different. You equip your weapons whether that's a 2x4 board for melee, pistols or crossbow (starter "rifle"). Of these weapons you hit CTRL-# to equip the proper weapon that you want. As you go out to fight mobs you select your target and then hit the TAB key to switch over to combat mode. Your pointer then changes to target mode. While fighting you activate your skills and click on your target with your mouse to execute your attacks. After they've been defeated you hit TAB to get out of combat mode and then you can right-click on your dead mob to collect loot. You can then right-click on them a second time to harvest crafting items from them.

As you defeat more mobs and complete quests you earn action points (I'm assuming that's what AP stands for). With those points you raise the level of your skills. Since I want to focus on being a rifleman for sniping from a distance, in my points distribution there are pre-set builds that you can select for your career. After choosing rifleman the interface highlighted for me desired points in specific skills to make me more efficient at becoming that sniper.

Because the career that I chose is crafting oriented I'd like to focus on ballistics so that I can manufacture my own weapons. There's a lot of different crafting available. You can even craft vehicles (which I'm sure is high level for your Mad Max interceptor) and I believe that depending on your faction there are different types of vehicles. One thing that I'm uncertain of is if you're able to branch out into other crafting specialization. I have to imagine that we can. It would suck if all that I can focus on is ballistics when I can simply cook food. Since one of my tutorial new player experience missions was to cook some food that seems to imply that you can diversify your crafting ability.

When you choose quests it's pretty easy. After they are in your journal there's a red X appearing on your map and mini-map. You then go there and you find your waypoint or mob for your quest. These days that's a nice feature. Speaking of quests, so far I've liked reading through them to understand what's going on. This is different from WoW where I click on the quest giver and accept the quest without really reading the quest notes.

Now that I've put in about two hours into the game my initial impressions haven't changed. This is a nice little game to play. The graphics does appear outdated and the landscape is sparse, so this does make it good for framerate. So far I haven't experienced anything negative like a crashed client. From what I've read in the game forums the population initially was huge on the one server that the game is hosted on. However after the first month the subscribers dropped off dramatically. That's no surprise as the WoW tourists came, saw and left. This game is not designed like WoW in that there are no huge end game raids or anything like that. I get the impression most end game is mostly comprised of pvp.