Worst MMO Ever? - Fallen Earth Classic 

The man, the myth, the legend.

The one and only !

The chosen one

Hello fellow Thanatos

lol loved being confused by this comment till it was mentioned in the video

Are you involved in the reboot?

@@MichaelDeGarArt I am not. Still in the industry, just not involved.

@@MasonHavok if im allowed to ask what is your current company/game youre qorking for/on?

@@doncato9021 I work at Tripwire Interactive but can’t say what I’m working on.

@@MasonHavok Glad to see you are still at it. Im sure you still have many great games ahead of you. :)

Your game was my childhood. Im am grateful.

I still remember the CHOTA starter zone with lots and lots of players everywhere. I found this game through Thottbot sidebanner commercials back in 2009.

As a player that bought the original game, in the box, on release, you missed a lot in "testing" XD

Amazing job 👍

@@JohnDoe-ml8ru Hahaha I was there too, they really did

Maybe if he didn't have such a clickbaity name for this series people would react less negatively... it's literally called "Worst MMO Ever" (the "?" only adds extra clickbait) and unless you've watched a number of episodes you won't know it's actually a balanced take.

@@tarnetskygge Is it clickbait-ey? Yes, but if those same people would watch even the first 5 minutes of the video they'd realize how balanced the review is.

@@tarnetskygge for sure, I myself was confused by the title when I first got into this series

deep down, in their souls, like completely honest, all those people know they are playing a fucking JANKY ass game. Sure it has some charm but this thing looks like crap. it looks better than a lot of MMO's he's played, but when you look at games out in 2023, and you look at this, I would be afraid of what the opinion was going to be as well. Reminds me of the cult, bunch of wierdos huddled together defending their sacred text in a rundown shack.

I wouldn't have clicked on the series without the click bait title and would have never heard about this game at all

I get why people say that, he skipped allmost of the crafting wich is probably the best part of the game, he did not evrn make a simple piece of gear, scavenging and crafting your makeshift equipment is my favourite part, but yeah i get it he will just talk about what he experienced, but its just a partial review

its a trap!

@@MrRafagigapr if you go out to eat and the meal is great can you say it was a great meal without first inspecting the kitchen and meeting the chef?

The latter is especially annoying when it comes to live service games (of which MMOs were basically the first), where the dozens of hours you played were likely for a version you _did_ enjoy that the devs subsequently changed in ways that you _didn't_ enjoy as much. This gets even worse when they try to say, "Well it's not like they took that enjoyment away from you," except that in changing it they _sort of have_ as it's slightly (or sometimes dramatically) not the game you used to enjoy. That's something I've grown to really dislike in games that I play alone but are run with the live service model (and aren't necessarily always online), and the forced updates across many platforms.

@@andrewbrock3675 no , but you cant say a restaurant has a great menu if you only tasted 1 dish

most of us are actually really grateful for such a review by him i guess, ngl. the more attention this game gets, the better imo.

just wish he played a couple more hours and explained how good crafting

@@Ralexand1988 i use to play the game a few years ago, and i personally did also enjoy it, but then i had to move and never really got back into it.

@@MrRafagigapr Whilst you surely enjoyed crafting if he himself did not enjoy it or just did not go into it in the review it does not make his opinion on all the other parts good, or bad worse. Crafting on its own no matter how glorious is simply one mechanic and doesn't make up for flaws in other mechanics. I get why you are saying it since it is your favorite part of the game but relatively speaking most people are not that much into crafting regardless of how good or bad said mechanic is.

@@MrRafagigapr So the crafting's okay? Well, add that to the voice acting, and that it's a shooty fps/mmo... and then remove the massive amounts of janky broken crap, and are we still left with a +?

RIO, or Raised In Oblivion had the same sad end... Then they are forced to release a unfinished game to get cash and when, if they, manage to finish they work, no one is interested anymore...

I call that New Vegas Syndrome. Great team of people, great ideas, and great execution, but not enough money or time to do it.

No

its still worth a play.

It's not a "lack of budget" problem but more like an "not aged well" problem. This game is from 2009. It was released 3 years after Playstation 3 and 4 years before Playstation 4

When I started ESO I was immediately hooked, played for 2300 hours but have since quit, damn game has gone downhill.

@@steffithemad8327 Same. I enjoyed the most questing. Best sidequest stories ever! Main quest is lacking. I got to endgame, made tons of alt, lev crafts, made tons of sets, did dungeons, bought houses, 1k champion lev, aaaand done. Took like 2k hours. PvP was horrendous with all the lag and ani cancels to win fights.

If the game is designed with the first 100 hours a totally not immersive slog fest, and not helping to boil the story down to "the world is deteriorating, send help" with encouragement to discover it yourself, the writer's aren't doing their job, are they?

Right? Why waste a hundred hours to get to good gameplay when you can just play a different game that doesn't waste your time.

@@joshanonlineall 2k hrs of mine were in cyro yea the lag is so terrible but animation cancel is a part of skill lmao

I just wish Icarus would have had a AAA budget for the game, because you could tell as developers they loved what they were doing.

@@L3M0N4NDCH3RRYZZ The voice acting is really well done, feels like a well done passion project.

@@L3M0N4NDCH3RRYZZ That would of been a fun game to see what it was like, but at the same time I don't think the talk would be much different to what it is now.

Honestly, I was a bit shocked. I didn't think it was possible for Josh to give such high praise to a game in this video series.

i'm just starting to see the video and i like what i see, ohh damm i'm 1 year later hahaha

Mee too, makes me feel all fuzzy

@Sir Eebral How does that happen if there's no box price, no sub, and no shop?

I think it's a standard problem with MMO. Due to the nature of the genre, these "hardcore" players invested a lot of times into the game. That, plus the whole open-world-do-whatever-you-want style, make it easy for some people to be overly invested and confuse their identity with the game itself. So, to them, any criticism of the game is also a criticism of them.

@@elsonlam I know where you got that from nice

@QueeN Sadly, you're mistaken. My college friend flunked out because he played too much game. I failed 1 class (out of 3), withdrew from another, and barely passed the last class because I skipped classes to play games. That quarter was my wakeup call. It took my friend almost 2 extra years to get back to college.

note, that this voice acting is prevalent in the beginning area of the game. The further you go into it, the less and less you will have until you get absolutely none anymore by the time you reach Kaibab Forest (map 3). It shows how this game was designed by the original devs (Icarus Studios), the further they went in development, the more sacrifices were clearly made until they abandoned development and gave the game to GamersFirst (who only care about nickle & diming their customers instead of fixing the game), THEN much later it was passed to Little Orbit.

@@mystman7722 Thats dissapointing to hear. That voice acting was phenomenal.

@@Kronosfobi the issue is that voice acting is very very expensive so it's hard to keep adding more of it as you keep building more game. And given how many talk about the game when it came out, VAs can't save a game with issues. People don't go 'the are problems that make the game hard to enjoy but the voices make me want to keep coming back.' So it might've been better to not go all out on voices if it meant more resources to make the game itself better polished.

Tell that to all the Gothic fans

@@iandakariann I agree, its just damn shame to see such good VA to fizzle out so early.

Is the game still alive? It scratched my mmo itch, also I specifically was looking for a shooter one, and this looks so damn good

Yeah I'm actually downloading this and gonna try it after watching this video :p

It honestly is a fun game. I played it when it first came out, 13 years ago, and it was pretty great, just stupidly unstable. That's why the game died, from what I understand, just too laggy and buggy. As long as this "classic" Steam version has fixed that, it should be a great time. I'll be downloading it for sure.

Absolutely! I played it many years ago and it was really fun. I'm happy to see that it's still doing quite fine. Think I'll jump in again, soon.

This game has a lot of really weird people in the community and their chat is filled with spam about the people there being racist. Not sure if it was just a troll or not but it went on for like 15-20 minutes before the dude finally stopped. So I guess be wary

@@MichaelDeGarArt Yeah I noticed an influx of twitch chat like spam in the game recently.

So much the same. Sitting at my desk by myself, the sound that came out of me scared myself for a second.

LOL yeah same here... love his humor

Hey! they disagreed with me first. I'm just paying the favor back in kind.🤣🤣😜😜

Pop ph true

@@ibarzabal 9and of

It seems like it, but Enforcer was the most popular before and it remains so now. All the zones seem to be captured by them.

I agree sadly new technology is way more expensive not as many companies can get a foothold in the mmorpg world like they use to be able to :(

Yeah, this game could have been amazing, if it was capable of living up to it's potential. I enjoyed it for quite a while.

I wonder if it would be possible to remake or create a new one based on those ideas.

well didn't need mmo of it, we already got this experience with Fallout

@@kyotheman69 That's a really dumb take mate.

I feel like that's basically what FDev has been doing with Elite Dangerous; Elite is too niche of a product to get made and supported, but FDev has that sweet Roller Coaster Tycoon money and they used the Kickstarter to trick the suits

@@mitchellhorton9382 yeah, but FDev is missing the love and interest. They wanna milk the last few ARX from old man truckers.

So, like the anti-Gamigo?

This game literally just looks like a SWG mod though, who were the original devs?

Wow, someone hook them up with Defiance's license, or City of Heroes, or Tabula Rasa, or Auto-Assault, or Earth & Beyond, or any of the other janky-but-full-of-heart MMO's I loved and are now dead.

Sounds pretty awesome

holy shit what, were you with icarus or after? FE always has a special place to my heart as well, played beta 2009 already :) great reading your comment!

Also curious if you were with Icarus....alpha tester here.

Icarus and a bit of Gamers First.

Thanks to you and your former colleagues! This and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. shaped my expectations when it comes to post-apocalyptic atmosphere.

Just want to add my respects. Thanks for responding, and thanks for the time and effort and passion you put into these games. Developers who had that much love for their games and design seem to be fading from the larger scale "corporate" mindset these days. My son recent started getting into rebuilding old consoles and collecting older games, and He was amazed at just how much better quality the design of these game from that era really are. FEC is a gem, and I for one will be playing it now due to this review. So for any serious fans who were concerned about the review, it's a seller. There's only a few games on this series that I honestly think Josh gave this much praise to, and that's saying something.

yep

Yes today you can find the same problems on mobile game development

@@TheHypnotistDK True that

Also, turning off the light closest to and right in front of you is a really poor choice. Good tech artistry is to get away with the trickery without the player noticing. But you know... Good work takes time takes money. And there never is enough of that. (And if there is enough we usually get unimaginative AAA trash.)

yes but good coding would turn off the one you are not looking at :)

Ps2 is fun

@@chandude3 the console? i agree :P

@@chandude3 It WAS fun on PC when it was launched, barring performance issues. Now it's just MTX fest

@@thecompanioncube4211 idk what an mtx fest is, but its still the same old planetside. Plenty of fun

@uNnHkP8mza ive been playing since planetside 1, ps2 is arguably better with the new content

You are confusing gameforge with gamersfirst. Gamersfirst bought FE and little orbit bought gamersfirst. Before G1 it was Icarus studios.

Pratchett's quotes are some of the best bits of wisdom I know

damn, that's a powerful line.

A fellow Pratchettian in the wild! What I delightful find! 😊

Well..... We do live in vain, if you arent famous you will be forgotten in 1 or 2 generation. Some of us are forgotten as soon as we die, because well because they were alone and had no friends nor family. I do not believe we have hope as humans any more, we never learn from anything. As long as there have been humans there have been suffering and wars. We know war and violence is bad, we know suffering and starvation is bad yet it happens, over and over and over again. Why? We are a selfish race, as long as me, myself have it good fuck everyone else. Well enough rambling. Good video Josh! :D

@@gandy84 but hope. it’s what keeps humanity going. that and the kindness of others. we all make an impact on peoples lives. we just dont always, if ever, know it. you may not always be remembered. but your actions and choices and how you treat others will be felt long after your gone.

Nice reply ❤️

I've only played one mmorpg my entire life (GW2, exclusively because i am a furry and i liked the design of the charr) but i also watch these bc i love the commentary. the snark is fantastic

Definitely agree. I have a hard time enjoying/ finding the right MMO, but I stumbled across the channel, and it's because of his wit and well written thesis that I keep coming back to his channel!

Thanks to Josh, he has made me pick up an MMO! A genre I haven't touched. It is finally nice to find a gaming RU-vidr that doesn't use hyperbole and is able to analyse games beyond a surface level from a player's perspective.

Conceptually this wasn’t a bad game in 2009, I remember being excited for it.

It was fucking amazing in 2009 but paying per month more than in WOW made the game have low player numbers

@@MrRafagigapr Yep, I paid my sub for quite a while. But I couldn't justify it for the long term. Going back when it went ftp and seeing what they did for a cash shop broke my heart. Glad to see it revived in a proper form.

I played this when it first came out. The server lag and the greedy cash job just crippled the game for me. Also, the combat was really unbalanced; melee was terrible and guns were amazing. I hope the new dev team addressed these issues.

Retro mmo seems like a popular thing now.

Oh boy just wait till you make the trip to sector 2 and 3. It just gets better

Yeah, Little Orbit really did a lot of people a favor with this. They came in and saved all the games GamersFirst was fucking up.

I didn't even know this shit came out after it shut down

@@joshholmes1372 That's the thing most people don't know, that's why I'm glad josh made this video to shine some light on this old mmo

I thought it was still dead tbh but now if I'm bored and broke I'll probably check it out

@@KUPSMusic his video made the server pop explode lol

Sounds like a fun time

same lol, Still have it in Steam as just Fallen Earth, it was full of hackers when i played, as well as the game breaking debuff i found in second area..

Same

This is what it was like playing any complex RPG at that time period. That's why I'm such a wiki warrior now as an adult haha. Look at The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind for example. That thing is my benchmark, and fallen earth classic is about half of that in complexity. I went back to this game as an adult and its all easy to understand with a bit of research. I've been really enjoying it with a group of friends.

what do you mean bought? this has always been ftp

I mean, you'd still get your immortality back that the other guy ruined. Seems only fair she gets the same immortality for helping out.

Just providing a little (too much) extra info for anyone happening across this comment. In really super old games (DirectX 7 and earlier) there was a hard limit due to the fact that everything went through the fixed function pipeline (shaders didn't exist until DirectX 8) and there were a limited number of lights available in the hardware. In anything more modern (DirectX 8 and later) it's limited by the number of lights you can shove into your shader parameters (partly a function of the DirectX version, partly a function of the video card, and entirely a function of how complex your shader code is.) Looks like this game came out in 2009 originally (if Wikipedia can be believed), so it probably uses DirectX 9 or 10 (more likely 9; 10 took awhile for people to adopt). There are ways of fudging limitations, of course. One way would be to do multiple render passes on the scene, rendering objects in groups depending on which lights they need (a little slower, depending on the number of lights used and therefore the number of render passes required). Another thing that can be done is to ignore lights that are offscreen (or rather, only affect objects which are offscreen); this should just be done by any game engine, really. Modern game engines tend to use a combination of these tactics (and probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of right now) to render arbitrary numbers of lights. We still have these limitations today, we just have techniques to get around them and hardware which supports much more complexity.

This game has a lot of really weird people in the community and their chat is filled with spam about the people there being racist. Not sure if it was just a troll or not but it went on for like 15-20 minutes before the dude finally stopped. So I guess be wary

What is Star trek nostalgia?

Do it. It's one of my favorite MMOs ever. Flawed gem as Josh said. Don't play it for the combat. It gets better, good enough to not detract from what makes the game awesome, but never great. The atmosphere, crafting, and exploration are top notch though. There is always a goal I actually want to work toward.

my issue game is way to rough, i rather just go back play fallout instead

Same I'll try on my free time

@@kyotheman69 I would, but I love seeing things for the first time. I've played through every fallout game a ridiculous amount of times, and have worn out my welcome with the games I've always loved. I try to play them, and I start staring past the screen or just getting uncomfortable trying to focus on something that just cant hold my interest after so many years and playthrough. So finding something like this is always fun to do for a few days, maybe a few weeks, who knows.

Just a warning: Josh's comments about crafting only apply to the early game. Later game stuff can take days or even weeks to craft. Back in the day we would often joke that if they added vehicles more complex than cars we'd be able to craft them one part a month and maybe finish the whole thing before the heat death of the universe.

Man, I miss CoH

Early days of mmos? This came out in 2009, more than a decade after the early mmos lol

@@Nollis There a private servers around, but idk if they capture the same feeling to be honest. Probably the lack of players

@@ViktorTheMusician Yeah, I tried one a few years back but then it didn't have the same magic as the original

@@Nollis i still log on to Homecoming every few weeks to make new characters for fun but I remember progression feeling better, like it meant a lot to gain a new power and now it just feels super lacking.

For a lot of MMO that's not unfair. A bunch of them get really shitty at the endgame lmao.

I crafted my first dune buggy like a week ago, great moment, took a break long enough to see the population of the game jump up to 400 thanks to this vid , cool gaming moment :^)

More of a horse guy when I played. Though I still a chuckle that the horse had to be "towed" back to town if you left it somewhere instead of it being able to follow along behind you while you gathered/hunted.

@@silverjohn6037 You can get a combat mount that's a blight wolf later in the game, its a mutated wolf with 1500 hp and armor and like 20 slots of inventory, you can heal both horses and the wolf with mutations or first aid skills too since they're biologic entities.

Cute cat! :3

That sounds awesome, I played back in the beta, never had an experience like that maybe I will now though!

@@MichaelDeGarArt It still stands out as one of my fondest MMO memories and this was 13 years or so ago and I've been playing MMO's on and off for 20 years.

I remember at one point riding the atv and triggering the explosion in the tutorial just hard crashed the game

That is exactly my way of playing MMOs. I like the progress and stories of many leveling parts, but have yet to find any that can keep me interested in the endgame.

Same for me and that is why it always annoys me whe games "streamline" the early game to the point you get through content in 2 days that used to take weeks.

Same, the best part of a MMO is the journey, experiencing things for the first time. Endgame is just replaying the same few pieces of content over and over, its very boring.

The thing about end game content is that when the game go forward again in a few months it becomes ex-endgame content which has all the grind of current end game content but rewards are worse then something you picked out a rats teeth in the newer area and area and its almost impossible to find someone to do it with. Since new endgame content comes with each major update in an old game you'll find dozens of wastelands of former endgame content each off which stole resources from the mid game content it came with.

You may very well like this one then. The endgame is actually quite lacking because there's a lot of effort put towards making the experience getting there more fun and rewarding.

I played this a while ago after it was "dead" but I think I'll have to play it again

@@RiggedBananaGaming I've never had the chance to play it before, i've only seen some fallout channels mentioning it. So i"ll definitely give it a chance now

@@sparkingbolt9602 I want to clarify I only played a bit over 10 hours but my takeaway was "oh shit this could be really good with a community/friends"

I played it a long time ago and revisited it a few years later and it was dead. Then io revisited again and the servers were down. Glad to see it limping along. I might make a character on classic server.

On the other hand, people will play this game for 0.3 seconds then call it the worst piece of shit known to mankind. I don't really blame the community, though I agree they can be a little stubborn. I think it boils down to them having fought past the jankiness to the point that they don't notice it anymore.

It truly is unfortunate that Josh's positive opinion about the game is entirely discredited because he did not play 100 hours of it already! :D Of course, not a single person has ever made that argument. You are only ever told "you can't review the game before playing it entirely" if you are saying even the smallest negative thing.

I played and it's good. The community also is receiving well the newcomers

Have you even tried play f76 later? I'll answer. No

I always feel that GURPS never really get's the recognition it deserves

True.

@@0DanteMayCry0 Considering how much of a disaster the game was and how much drama surrounds it (and still does) and the antics Bethesda had done to try to save their terrible system on a bad multi-player framework slapped onto a singleplayer engine, the game does not deserve the time of day because of all that and I hate that people give it a pass because it got "better" In my mind you could make it the best game ever now and people still won't play it because of what the game stands for, especially if you prefer the older Fallout games, and want something without a cash shop or something more simple like retconning and redoing very established story elements because "we don't wanna be held down by the past" in a franchise that's lauded for its lore.

You do have to restart from scratch but they give you the commander tier sub from the previous monetisation to keep forever as well as some other features, all for free !