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Farming in Fallen Earth: An exclusive interview with the devs
Late last week, Reloaded Games and GamersFirst announced that farming was coming to the post-apocalyptic sandbox Fallen Earth. The initial dev blog gave us some information on how farming will be implemented, but not much more beyond that. We took that as an invitation to pick the dev team's collective brain, and pick we did. Read on after the cut to learn more on how farming will work in Fallen Earth and how close it will be to FarmVille -- plus you can point your eyes at two exclusive screenshots of the farms themselves.
Daily iPhone App: Gizmonauts is DragonVale, but with robots
Backflip Studios' biggest hit is still Paper Toss, an early app that has you throwing a paper ball into a wastebasket, and has been downloaded over 24 million times. But the company has grown a lot since that initial game was released, and these days works almost more like a major gaming studio than a smaller development house. Founder Julian Farrior hired some big-league art talent (from Insomniac Games) to create the company's first freemium hit DragonVale, and Backflip is back at the cute farming-style genre with its latest release, Gizmonauts. As you can see in the video below, there's not a lot of new action in this one -- it's DragonVale, except instead of raising dragons, you're raising robots. But these games are pretty clear as it is: You build habitats (here called zones), buy robots to live in them, collect money from the robots, use that money to build more, buy "snax" for your robots to eat and level up. If, like me, you played a lot of DragonVale, you'll probably play just as much of Gizmonauts. The game is free, and of course there are in-app purchases available, though Backflip does a great job of making them really unnecessary for all but the most impatient of players. Next time, it'd be nice to see a little more innovation on a game like this -- maybe a little more gameplay, or just something besides the standard build/profit/build cycle. But Gizmonauts is well worth the price, so grab it if you're into farming up pets for fun and profit.
Fallen Earth to introduce farming
Fallen Earth's upcoming content includes new stage 3 coresuits, skill and mutation adjustments, and farming. Yes, farming is coming to Fallen Earth! According to the most recent dev blog, post-apocalyptic farming will be a crafting skill that will allow a player to build a three-, six-, or nine-plot farm where organic resources can be grown through seed planting, and animals can be raised. Additionally, harvesting will give a player the chance to get a common, uncommon, or rare component. Farming in PvP zones will increase the resource yield. Be sure to read the entire dev blog for more information on what's coming to the PTS with the next content patch.
Reputation in review: The Tillers
I may have taken leave of my sanity. I'm currently in the midst of a massive reputation grind in an effort to get everything to exalted. Part of this is because I like seeing green bars fill up on my screen, but part of it was intense curiosity towards the new daily system. Despite a somewhat compelling story, the daily quests in the Firelands just didn't quite work for me. Partially because the story just didn't seem all that compelling, but mostly due to the fact that the majority of the quests took place in a zone that was red on red. I hate red zones. Regardless, as a result of the experience I've seen what these rep grinds look like, and surprisingly, they're all different. You're not going to get the same experience doing each, and the quests aren't really very similar between each, either. Some of the reputation grinds are fantastic, and some ... well let's just say they could use some work. But let's take a look at what was hands-down my favorite rep grind and exactly what made it so fantastic to grind out.
MMO Blender: A real-time Farmville MMO minus the Zynga
Let's talk about FarmVille for a minute. Yes, I mean the Zynga-produced FarmVille, the one that helped social gaming become what it is today. There are a lot of things that have been said about the game, like "it's not even a game" or "it preys on gamer's addictive natures" and all sorts of sufficiently evil-sounding things. Say what you want about the evil monster that is Zynga and make all the jokes that you can about FarmVille and other social titles, but I want to tackle it from a different view. Let's look at it as the sandbox game that it is and use that example to invent a brand-new MMO, although I'm sure ours would not meet with even a fraction of the success that FarmVille has. FarmVille is arguably the most popular sandbox title in the world. We've defined "sandbox" a million times on this site, but it's easy to see just how open and flexible FarmVille is. Is it limited to the confines of its unique set of tools and designs? Of course, but so is every sandbox. FarmVille has successfully introduced the wonders of sandbox gaming to people who might never give a similarly described game a chance.
Get your alts' farms started right at 85
Farming isn't just for maximum level characters. In fact, you can start a 4-plot farm up with your 85 toons fairly quickly, which can accelerate the time it takes your main to level cooking with all those vegetables! I'm able to cook 5 batches of feasts -- that's 25 skill points! -- in just 2 harvests with 5 alts working alongside my main. Your alt will need to run past 85-86 level mobs to get started farming. I'm not sure if you can summon a lower level toon to Pandaria, but Farmer Yoon's quests to start up your farm are level 85 and above, so your toon will need to be at least 85. First, your alt will have to get to Pandaria through your faction's quest. You'll need to complete the vehicle quest, whether that's shooting Alliance troops from a turret or shooting Horde troops from a helicopter. Then, you should be able to drop to the ground via a rope and continue the rest of the way to Halfhill on mounted foot.
Breakfast Topic: What do you like about farming?
Farming was literally the farthest thing from my mind when I wondered in a recent Breakfast Topic where you've been choosing to set your hearthstone, but boy did all the replies of "Halfhill! Halfhill!" set me straight. My daughter, a confirmed Glitch-aholic, hasn't been active in World of Warcraft for quite some time -- even playing a panda can't tear her away from milking butterflies -- but I know that one glimpse at the temptations of the Tillers, and we'll be renegotiating the list of games she has time to play. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree; I'm a fan of farming, too. What I find so striking, though, is the number of WoW players who are discovering the attractions of this sort of gameplay for the first time via the Tillers. I suppose it's still early enough that many players are simply grinding through the content to grow veggies for cooking or harvest other materials for your professions. And obviously, the minipet and mount fanatics among us are all slaving away for a Terrible Turnip or a Riding Goat. But I suspect there are plenty of players out there like me who are tickled by the whole farming concept. We're one step closer to having our own little WoW homesteads! Is there something you especially enjoy about farming? Or are you only buckling down in order to grab certain rewards?
Lost and lonely dog seeks warm and loving home (on your farm)
Some may call my desire to reach exalted with the Tillers nonsensical, but I would happily argue that the goat mounts are more than worth it. Regardless, I've been happily tilling away on my farm and doing dailies for Halfhill's assorted residents. There's a pretty cool cycle with the Tiller dailies, a storyline that plays out as you continue helping out poor hapless Yoon. He's trying to become a member of the Tillers, but he'll need five votes to get in. Somewhere in the middle of revered, I got vote number four -- and I resigned myself to nothing particularly interesting until I hit exalted. But imagine my surprise flying over Halfhill when I stumbled across the little guy pictured above. The poor thing was stranded and alone in the midst of all the verdant fields, hungry and scared. Obviously dogs don't care for vegetables, even if they are monstrously huge. So I took the quest he offered, Lost and Lonely, and fetched some steak for the starving pup. Once fed, he hightailed it for my farm, and now lives there quite happily. He even responds to emotes!
Making best friends with the Tillers
The Tillers are one of several new factions in Pandaria, but they come with a couple of unique twists. First, you get to have your own farm for growing cooking ingredients through some unique phasing and a quest chain with a pandaren who is new to farming. In order to upgrade your farm and get more plots for planting, you have to get the approval of the other farmers around the area, which you can complete by increasing your reputation with the Tillers and completing a series of dailies. Second, you can improve your farm itself, through befriending the various people you'll meet around the area. You'll start out as strangers to these characters, but over time you can earn reputation and make friends. Once you've reached best friend status, each character will mail you some items, and send an improvement or two for your farm. So what's the best way to a Tillers' heart? Some would say through the stomach, but I'd have to say through the judicious use of gifts. And those gifts are surprisingly easy to find ... if you know where to look.
The Daily Grind: Is farming ruined forever?
One of my favorite things to do in games is farm. No, not the kind of farming that involves killing zillions of mobs for mats and money -- real (virtual) farming. Like when you buy seeds and plant them in the ground and wait for them to grow and then collect the literal fruits of your labor. Think I'm talking about FarmVille? Nope. Lord of the Rings Online, actually. And Ultima Online and Glitch and hopefully, someday, ArcheAge. MMOs actually implement farming so much better than the social game that seems to have redefined it. In UO, I can grow decorative plants and buff petals; in LotRO, I can mass-produce crops that are used by cooks to make food; and in Glitch, I grow flowers and herbs used by tincturers. I suppose even in Star Wars Galaxies, I was farming up corn and tubers in my oversized industrial extractors. But I have to wonder whether the FarmVille-induced stigma attached to farming as a gameplay concept has ruined it for MMO fans forever. Even when we discuss ArcheAge's amazing farming system, we can't help but crack jokes about tractors, jokes we wouldn't make about big, burly, angry Orcs practicing their fine tailoring skills in World of Warcraft. What do you think -- is farming in MMOs ruined forever? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Chasing chickens for the Tillers
I'm a solitary person outside of raid nights, so I do end up loving all the archaeology, fishing, and cooking. I like providing feast materials for my guild, and I wrote a blog post before I joined WoW Insider about the pools one could fish for the guild achievement while still being buff-food productive. So it's no wonder I'm really psyched about farming. My own personal farm, where no one can reap from the same planting as I can? Yes, please! The farming faction is the Tillers, who are based at both Halfhill Market and the Heartland in Valley of the Four Winds. But farming isn't all they do. The Tillers are involved in the expanded cooking, and they offer dailies that reward valor points as well as the Pandaria-based cooking tokens. One of the many NPCs you can gain personal reputation with, Old Hillpaw, has a chicken farm. So naturally, one of the dailies he offers is Chasing the Chicken. This isn't your ordinary daily of kill X hozen and steal back Y vegetables. Old Hillpaw has tasked you with finding his prize chicken.
Reminder: Scholomance and Scarlet Monastery prepped to change for good
Everything is about to change -- again. Mists is nowhere near as world-changing as Cataclysm, but there are still going to be a couple of significant changes to the old world. Both Scholomance and Scarlet Monastery are being revamped into far more streamlined, efficient versions in preparation for their heroic iteration. Because of this, some bosses will be removed for good or changed in a significant way. Although it has not been noted in the official patch notes for 5.0.4, players can access the lower-level version of the new Scholomance and Scarlet Monastery currently on the PTR. We don't know if this means this content will be included in the 5.0.4 patch on Aug. 28, because it's not specifically mentioned in the official patch notes, but both are playable on the PTR realms. In cases like this, it's better to be safe than sorry. Before any world changes happen, you may want to farm for any items you've been craving. So what does that entail exactly? Here are a few suggestions.
FarmVille in World of Warcraft? WoW Insider's first look at The Tillers
When Mists of Pandaria was first announced at BlizzCon 2011, the developers stated that players would be able to grow cooking mats and herbs on their very own farm in the next expansion. Immediately, players began to speculate on what exactly the words "your own farm" meant in World of Warcraft. Would we be getting our own version of FarmVille in WoW? Or maybe something more like Harvest Moon? Could this mean player housing? No one knew, and the general shortage of information over the months led some of us to wonder whether we'd be seeing the new feature at launch or have to wait for it in a future patch. Now, almost a year after the original announcement for Mists of Pandaria, we can finally put a lot of our questions to rest. Over the weekend, Blizzard implemented The Tillers quests on beta servers, and with them, the new farm feature. So is it FarmVille? Let's take a look. Your adventure in farming begins in Valley of the Four Winds, where you'll be able to start a line of daily quests to gain reputation with a pandaren faction known as The Tillers. Quests revolve around an NPC named Farmer Yoon, a young pandaren who recently traveled to the valley to inherit his late grandfather's farm, Sunsong Ranch. As it turns out, though, Yoon isn't cut out for all the hard work a farm requires, so he enlists you to help him run the farm and win favor with the valley's farming guild, The Tillers.
Breakfast Topic: What will you absolutely not do in Mists?
I am not farming. I don't even mean the typical WoW sense of farming. I specifically mean I am not going to do daily quests for the express purpose of getting my own farm to toil away at. There are certain things from my childhood I hated doing, fishing being one and working on the farm being another. I loathed both. And I have not fished a single cast in World of Warcraft, not in the eight years of playing it. I am certainly not going to go and farm. I got enough digging up weeds, plowing, pulling rocks out of the ground, pulling disturbingly warm chicken eggs out of a coop, and a whole host of other chores in my real life. I am absolutely disinterested in doing so in a game. As I've said before, I have no problem with content not intended for me. I'm cool with it. By all means, put it pet battles, farms, what have you. But there is no way on Azeroth or Earth that you will get me to farm. It is absolutely not happening. No way, no how, not going to do it. So what about you? What are you absolutely not going to do? It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
Drama Mamas: Guildie vs. guildie at the Auction House
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. I don't think we've had Auction House drama before. How delicious interesting. Hello ladies I have played WoW on and off since vanilla, but I always seem to return at the tail end of an expansion. I came back this time 3 months ago and decided to start fresh- new server, new faction, new toons. I have alot to prepare for the release of MoP like this but I thought I was doing pretty well. I joined a really great guild who has an unwritten rule that we don't undercut others on the AH, and alot of the members go as far as waiting until others have sold their items before listing the same thing. As such we're all pretty open with our gold making 'secrets' with each other. I have a friend who, like me, has two gathering professions on his main, which are also the same as mine. He was complaining that nothing was selling well anymore this late in Cata, so I shared with him a few of the things I gather and sell, my main money maker was something I specifically told him sells a little slow but does sell, so don't get carried away putting too much on the AH at once. Very quickly I found he was flooding the AH with what I suggested to him, undercutting me by 10-20g each time and soon enough things were selling for less than half of what they were before. I pointed out to him, again, he does not need to flood and undercut so much, but he did not listen.
Breakfast Topic: What's the most difficult thing in the game to farm?
My warrior recently found herself farming a lot of Khorium in order to build her Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, and while flying a seemingly endless number of circuits in Nagrand in order to get the metal (which is a rare spawn on other Outland ore nodes), I started to wonder where this farm fell in relation to other grinds. Khorium sometimes cooperates by spawning regularly, but this time, it was its usual, awful self. I'm sure the Burning Crusade-era players can relate. And yet, somehow I still don't think that khorium is the worst thing in the game to farm. Off the top of my head, I can think of others that are or have been equally bad or worse: Non-combat pets A lot of farmable non-combat pets (e.g., the dragon whelps, the firefly, the Fox Kit) have a 1-in-1,000 drop rate and a limited number of mobs up at a given time. Combat pets Waiting for a particular pet to spawn somewhere and then finding and taming it before someone else does can be maddening if you're consistently unlucky. Fishing Accomplished Angler is justifiably famous for being stuffed with requirements full of RNG. Let's talk about the year it took me to get Mr. Pinchy's Magical Crawdad Box! On second thought, let's not. The Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest This disappeared in Cataclysm, and with it went all the work that went into farming up bug parts and Elementium Ingots, which is where I got stuck in the chain. (So close, and yet so far.) The Insane This almost goes without saying, although it's easier these days than it used to be. Your thoughts, readers? What's the toughest thing in the game to farm?
Breakfast Topic: Been waiting an excrutiatingly long time for this
It's finally over. I have been farming Karazhan on and off for years, hoping to get my hands on the Fiery Warhorse's Reins. They are an exceedingly rare drop off of Attumen, the first boss in the zone -- and when I say exceedingly, I mean it. Ever since Karazhan was first introduced in The Burning Crusade, I've wanted that amazing flaming vampire horse for my very own. And every week after Tuesday night raids, I've ventured into Karazhan, making quick work of the trash in the stables, killing Attumen, and then collecting yet another pair of gloves to sell to the vendor. This week, I wandered into Karazhan and fought my way through the trash, marveling at the sheer number of green items that dropped -- even a Ritssyn's Lost Pendant for my troubles. I started to get my hopes up, thinking that this could totally be the run that I'd see the silly pony drop. Unfortunately, I messed up -- I killed Midnight before Attumen could hop on his back and start phase 2. I vanished, hoping that would reset things, but I was left with a dead horse and no loot. However, I still wasn't saved to the boss, so I ducked out of the instance, did a quick reset, and dove back in again with fully respawned trash. This time, I waited for Attumen to hop up on Midnight, but I was kicking myself because I was certain that if I hadn't messed up the green-filled run, I'd be riding around on a horse. That was totally the winning run that I screwed up. Except, apparently, it wasn't. All it took was a reset, and approximately four years after I started randomly farming this stupid pony, he dropped. Now he's mount #143 in my collection. At first, I was filled with a huge sense of relief, and then it was replaced by a sort of empty feeling. After all, the solo trip to Karazhan was a weekly routine that I could count on. I got used to doing it. So ... what now? I have absolutely no idea. What's the longest you've spent farming a single item? Is there one elusive pet, mount, or other goodie in WoW that still escapes your grasp? What do you do when that long sought-after goal is finally attained? And while we're at it ... what the heck should I farm now?
ArcheAge explores the possibilities of an open world in a new video
Who would have thought that something as mundane as tractors could get us so excited? And yet ArcheAge does exactly that, as a new video from the closed beta shows off the latest model of drivable tractors, useful in both field irrigation and cargo hauling. Players are shown spraying down fields with a forward-facing nozzle, resulting in the quick growth of plants. In addition to the zen and art of tractor pulling, this video briefly highlights several other aspects of this gorgeous game. It illuminates the creation and use of a trebuchet in castle sieges, underwater exploration, housing decorations, and painstakingly animated dragon-lion mounts. While the video may not be in English, it's still a drop of cool water in the mouths of fans thirsty for this upcoming MMO. You can check out all of the lush goodness after the break. [Thanks to Dengar for the tip!]
The Road to Mordor: Resolutions, Baggins and Took-style
Mmm... smell that? It's the smell of a fresh new year, that is! Rolled right off the factory floor with no dings, the warranty still intact, and a tank full of gas and dreams. Makes one want to abandon the routine and head out onto the open road, does it not? I'm one of those old fuddy-duddys who actually does New Year's resolutions, whether or not I'm actually capable of keeping them. I think it's important to try to better oneself and keep reaching for higher goals and standards, and if a new year is a convenient excuse to get my butt in gear, then I'm not complaining. So right now I'm staring at a field of endless potential for Lord of the Rings Online in 2012. I've actually been giving it a lot of thought -- what do I want out of this year? As LotRO heads toward its fifth anniversary, is there really anything new left that I haven't experienced? And what the heck am I going to write about for 52 more weeks? Never fear because the more I pondered, the more I realized that there's plenty of content yet to plunder (plus, of course, whatever Turbine has up its sleeves for the year). So for today's column, I sat down and drew up a list of resolutions in two parts: "Bagginsish" resolutions that are all about fluff and creature comforts and "Tookish" resolutions that are more concerned with high adventure.
Gold Capped: The fastest way to make 10,000 gold
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Every so often, I get asked something to the effect of "What's the fastest way to get 10,000 gold?" It's usually asked by someone who is perpetually poor in game and is looking to get a BoE or some other sort of reward that costs gold. The fastest way for me to get 10,000 gold is to log in and check my mail. My daily haul is many times that and scales based on how much time I have to craft, list, and relist. This isn't a useful answer to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, though. So what advice would be helpful? First off, if you're below level 85, get to level 85. This nets you quite a bit of gold simply from quest rewards and vendoring gear you acquire. If you're already level 85, the first thing you need to do is identify how much money you can make per hour running 5-mans for valor points that you can use to sell BoEs. On my realm, I could sell a BoE costing 1,650 VPs for about 10,000 gold. That means every valor point I earn could be worth 6 gold, which makes the 150 points I get from a 5-man worth 900g. I can do seven per week per character with the requisite gear. Also, every trash kill and boss kill has a chance of awarding you with valuables, including enchanting mats (if someone can DE) and BoEs.
