The Fall Preview
Brian 'Dhruin' Turner, 2003-11-21

Silver Style Entertainment has been in business for a decade but gamers will only know them for their last two projects: Gorasul and Soldiers of Anarchy. While Gorasul had limited success, Soldiers of Anarchy was well received for it's brand of tactical-strategy combat in a post-apocalyptic world with excellent 3D graphics. This experience will position them well for The Fall: Last Days of Gaia, which has been in development for nearly two years.

The Fall is a story-based party CRPG in a post-apocalyptic setting. The developers cite obvious influences like Fallout but are also aiming to have a living world like Gothic and the tactical combat Jagged Alliance 2. With ambitious goals like these, let's see what this title has to offer.

Terraformers and Terrorists

The pre-game story starts in 2062 with NASA constructing six Terraformers to assist the colonisation of Mars. These massive machines are designed to pump huge quantities of CO2 into Mars' atmosphere. Just days before the Terraformers leave on their journey to Mars, an extremist cult seizes control of them. A nightmare scenario unfolds with the Terraformers pumping CO2 into Earth's atmosphere, causing powerful hurricanes, melting the polar ice caps and changing the climate of Earth forever.

Fast-forward 21 years to our protagonist who lives in a small village in the US south. It's a harsh, barren world filled with dry storms. After losing his family to gang violence, he sets off for New Mexico where rumour has it a new government is being formed.

It's not SPECIAL, but it's got character…

Character creation aficionados should find The Fall's process fairly satisfying. Players will start by creating the main character, which can be male of female. There are 6 fairly standard Attributes (strength, agility, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, charisma) with values from 1 - 20. Next there's 14 Skills: close combat, light weapons, heavy weapons, sniper weapons, special weapons, throwing weapons, explosives, survival, stealth, pick pocketing, lock picking, engineering, driving and medicine. Skill values will range from 1 - 99.

In addition, players can choose the name, last residence, profession and the "main body feature". No information has been released yet about the influence the last residence or even professions will have on the game but the main body feature (such as large, small, pretty) will have an impact on Attributes. Finally, clothing can be freely changed and there will be a wide range of faces and skin colours for both sexes.

Character progression will be through a fairly standard system of experience points and levels. Players will be able to distribute Skill points on each level gained and Perks can be chosen by reaching a suitable Skill level. Lead Designer Carsten Strehse gives the example of the Light Weapons skill: when it exceeds 75, players may choose between "fighting kneeing", "fighting lying", "fast reload" or "fast aiming".

Wandering the wastelands…

The Fall will feature a large and unique gameworld that provides players a high degree of freedom. Set somewhere between Texas and Arizona in the US, Carsten Strehse says there are "dozens" of areas on the map and each area is typically a couple of miles large with towns, villages, enclaves and so on. Players are free to travel to any area they know of and depending on the choices that are made, the story will unfold in different directions with the player free to choose the order tasks are solved in. A strong story with interesting dialogues is promised but when the main story-arc is finished, players can to continue playing and developing their characters.

Silver Style aims to create a believable post-apocalyptic environment with realistic character behaviours, plants and animals and surroundings with a tense and edgy atmosphere. There is a full day- and night-cycle and NPCs will have realistic schedules and routines and will react to the reputation of the player to create the illusion of a living world.

Some interesting features like controllable vehicles and elements like hunting and skinning animals or digging for water should provide a high degree of interaction. One of the most exciting features is the use of the Engineering Skill to create and enhance items. Silver Style promises many items found during the player's journey will be usable or able to be combined to build new items.

During the course of the game, a party of six can be assembled by recruiting mercenaries or convincing certain NPCs to join your cause. Party members are under full control of the player but will have their own agendas and will interact with other party members. Carsten Strehse says they may like, love or even hate each other. He also gives the example of a party member commenting on their interests ("Look at that chopper over there, it's great. I could tune it so that it would have more than 110 PS!").

A look at the artwork and screenshots reveals that unlike Fallout with it's stylised '50s look, The Fall will have a more contemporary appearance - albeit in a harsh wasteland environment. All of this will be rendered with a state of the art 3D engine with the viewpoint zoomable from traditional ISO to 3rd person to suit your playing style.

It's a harsh world

Combat will play an important role on The Fall and Silver Style believes they have developed the deepest combat system in a real-time 3D CRPG to date. Several elements have been added to make the real-time combat more tactical and satisfying. Auto Pause allows the player to choose from a large number of stop triggers to pause when certain conditions are met such as "enemy sighted" or "character has less than 10% life left" and so on. Combat can be set to pause after each round which Silver Style calls "Simulated Turn-Based" although there are no action points. In addition to these stop triggers, players will be able to queue multiple commands including waypoints.

Individual party-member Auto Behaviours can be set such as "stay in the background", "use mainly throwing weapons" or " seek cover if enemy sighted" to simplify micro-management. In fact, those that want to experience the story but dislike combat can use all of the AI controls to speed and simplify combat.

Based on some of the Perks and AI controls revealed and looking at screenshots that show characters kneeling or lying prone there should be a reasonable depth of strategic combat options particularly when combined with the 60+ weapons. Hopefully Silver Style will include the damage model from Soldiers of Anarchy, which allowed scenarios like walls being blown down.

The graphics engine and accurate physics should help make combat a visceral experience with debris flying from exploded buildings and bullets bouncing off walls.

Conclusion

With features like 1000 unique NPCs, 300 items and over 60 weapons plus more than 3000 pages of story, quests and dialogue, The Fall has the potential to appeal to more than just Fallout fans looking for something new.

An Add-on is already being planned which will add co-operative multiplayer and include the editor tools. Look for The Fall to be released towards the end of Q1, 2004.