GDC09: Massively's Fallen Earth interview part 2

What are the total types of vehicles in Fallen Earth?

I believe we've got five mechanical vehicles for launch. Such as ATV, motorcycle, dune buggy, interceptor [types] like the muscle car, I think we've got the truck in and then there's horses. And for each one of those there's multiple variations; ones with more armor and better fuel mileage, so there's lot's of customization.

Right now we're in closed beta. We've been testing privately for awhile through friends and family. Then in the past month or so we've really ramped up the testing. We've got great feedback and have been fleshing out areas more based on that. There hasn't been any, "Burn it down and start over again" so that's really reassuring to us. And the community's just been great, we've got Tiggs from Star Wars Galaxies as our community director. She's done a very good job by building up community teams. Y'know it's funny, when people lose their stuff [in-game] everybody else will come around and just give them things they've been crafting to help get them back on their feet.

We're gonna try to launch reasonably. We're a small start-up company so we can launch with reasonable numbers and we don't have to launch with 500,000 in the first month in order to stay afloat. Then [our plan is to] just build content over time, because we've got a great time and an aggressive patch schedule.

What's that schedule look like?

We're gonna have probably monthly fixes and then quarterly content patches. Sometimes that'll just be some new towns get uncovered and sometimes it'll be a whole sector comes out -- that'll probably be longer than quarterly, though.

Then we have a complete team devoted to the live server and they want to do holiday events and live events to keep people engaged.

Will Fallen Earth be a subscription game?

It's not locked down yet, but our target is a typical 50 dollars for a box -- with a month free -- and 15 a month for the subscription. We're still tweaking it, but that's probably where we'll end up.

Anything else you'd like to mention?

Fallen Earth is a deep world. I like it because it's pretty easy to start out with -- you don't have to understand the statistics system. You just go out there and beat something with a lead pipe, and then as you wanna tweak stuff it just gets deeper and deeper and just never stops.

And I mean, you look at the radar and there's little harvest nodes around the side. There's always something that leads you onto something new. It's actually very difficult to just straight line follow missions.

Also, you don't have to concentrate on, or be a specific role like DPS, tank or healer -- you could be all three of those at once if you wanted. Your crafter could be able to mow somebody down, no problem, and you could still craft. You don't need to have multiple toons to just do certain things. You can have 'em if you want 'em, and could certainly make just a crafting based toon if you wanted to.

So you could potentially level your character through just crafting?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a little bit slower than straight killing because you can do both [combat and crafting] at the same time, but it's definitely a viable option. And you don't even have to align yourself with a faction. Your experience won't be as deep as if you were to start dealing with the factions. You're gonna run into them and have to be affected by them at some point, but you could try to avoid them.

Thanks, guys!