Day Two: Slowly Moving Outward

As of last night I'm in South Burb and slowly branching out from the starter town. Since my play time was limited I wanted to spend that availability to grind out a few missions.

Unlike World of Warcraft (WoW) finding a mission giver is not immediately obvious. In WoW the big exclamation point that’s highlighted yellow can easily be seen from a distance. In Fallen Earth (FE) the quest icon is blends in with the drab environment. What I discovered was that it was quicker to spot those icons on the mini-map as they were green and stood out better. As long as I kept that mini-map zoomed out it was easy to run around to the mission givers. After accepting a mission they are immediately tracked with objective summaries available on the right-side of the screen. Perhaps there’s a UI setting that’ll allow me to track more than one at a time. If not then this needs to be addressed. Another gripe that I found is that I was unable to pan the regular map. However this might be an available feature as someone in the Help chat channel did explain how to pan your map around. Ugh, I wish that I had caught what that was.

So far I’m still becoming familiar with the environment. This weekend it would be in my best interest to do more exploration of my immediate area and its NPC residents.

FE is still getting a few lingering bugs worked out. In a way it's like the early days of WoW, which is understandable when FE is still among the new kids on the MMO block. What I find is that I sometimes get stuck and when that occurred I happened to be riding my horse. You do have an unstuck button, but the caveat is that you must be standing and not riding a horse (in these stuck situations I had to log out and then back on to resolve it; it is rare). There are other little things that make the game less fluid than WoW. However after numerous MMO beta participation and game release playing I'm used to that and am willing to tolerate it as long as it's an issue that's addressed through a patch.

One of the highlights about the game is the crafting and I haven't done a whole lot in that regard. This weekend I'll take a break from mission grinding and try my hand at crafting. One of the MMO blogs that I follow the writer said that's his goal for the weekend in FE is some crafting with a goal to manufacture a motorcycle. I should look into that too.

After playing somewhere between 3-4 hours I'm only level 2. That's not a knock on the game though. So far I'm not too concerned with leveling and feel that it's not emphasized as what you must do to enjoy the game. However, I do notice my low level being a hindrance when going up against some mobs that are three or more levels above me. They wipe the floor with me.

Anyway, I'll keep playing and will keep you in the loop. Hopefully a week from now I'll have a clearer picture of what the game offers and will be able to provide a more informed opinion. In closing the game still has me intrigued and I'm compelled to explore it further.