First thing's first, let me summarize the game:
Fallen Earth is set in a post-apocalyptic grand canyon, rife with mutants and violent marauders, as well as six warring factions. In a setup unusual for MMOs, each faction hates one other faction, is allied with one other faction, and is relatively neutral to the others in a big circle. You also don't start off in a faction you join one (or I guess can remain independent if you like grinding endlessly) a while into the game. Characters are also very detailed, and freeform- XP turns into Attribute Points, which like in GURPS can be spent on attributes or skills.
It is what I would call a
proper shooter-MMORPG. There's no auto-help with the gunplay, the camera works well in first person, over the shoulder or distant third person, and the entire game takes place in a persistent world with quests, NPCs, PvP zones, wide aeras to explore and a few bunkers that might be called dungeons (the developers try to avoid the dungeon crawl scenario though). Melee combat is an entirely valid option if you don't like shooting. There's also a deep crafting system, everything except mission items can be made with materials you salvage or harvest, including items you can't get from NPCs. Crafting is mostly based around waiting for items to complete but you can continue to move around and fight or whatever else while you wait for crafting items to complete.
There's also vehicles, I think including cars but mostly just horses and ATV's, which serve the purpose of a typical MMO mount, although you can fire guns with riding.
The game has been bought by GamersFirst, like APB and some other MMOs. Fortunately however, the original developers seem to be in charge of how money is being earned (vanity items and an expansion pack, right now), so there's
no BS about becoming a subscriber for extra backpack space or things that you would expect to have while playing the game normally, and
no pay-to-win (some of the items in the store are useful, mainly mounts, but equivalents can all be acquired through normal gameplay, it's mostly just for the lazy and the game was balanced for no store). In fact it seems like it's only worth getting the expansion pack once you've leveled up a good bit.
I didn't enjoy it much when I played during beta, but it's had massive changes since then. In fact, I'm quite hooked, I think we should get some Bay12'ers in here.
The FE page by default tries to make you use the godawful GamersFirst downloader. However, click the "Direct Download" tab for something you can download without waiting all day. You also
log in with a GamersFirst Account. You can have your old Fallen Earth account converted to a G1 account and keep your characters, but if you did have an FE account you probably already got an email about that.
Who's already playing? Who's played before? Who's interested?