It’s been a very long and quiet stretch of time since we heard Little Orbit talk anything about Fallen Earth. But the studio suddenly broke its silence recently to spend 90 minutes answering players questions about this post-apocalyptic MMO.
Little Orbit CEO Matt Smith admits that this AMA is “long overdue” since the studio’s last engagement with the community around the 2021 resurrection of Fallen Earth. The big takeaway is that the long-promised remake — a port, really — of Fallen Earth is finally underway as of last June and is progressing in stages as it’s rebuilt piece by piece. This is necessary because the old version that exists is built on Linux-based code that is no longer supported or accessible.
The goal is to bring the MMO into a Unity engine that will be a lot easier to develop. Smith said that the good news is that the backend’s code is almost completely rewritten (99%) by “a full team” at this point. The next steps are finishing the new database code (50% done) and getting the game service stable so that the studio doesn’t have to reboot Fallen Earth Classic several times a day. A public test server of some of the new backend services is being planned for the future.
Smith said that he’s seen players “starving” for a good open-world MMO game, alluding to the crash-and-burn of The Day Before as an example of why it’s tough to get it right.
“There are some amazing bones in Fallen Earth,” he said. “We are excavating and fixing those bones.”
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