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Last week marked two years since the post-apocalyptic indie MMO Fallen Earth was officially taken offline following an almost-10-year run. But now the game’s new owner says that Fallen Earth will be coming back soon under the new name: Fallen Earth Classic.

According to a new post on the GamersFirst forums, plans are underway to bring the servers back up soon. “[J]ust know that in each case I had to balance getting this back online in a reasonable amount of time versus the laundry list of things I’m sure players would have wanted,” Little Orbit CEO Matt Scott said in the post. “We did our best. My hope is that players will enjoy the challenge of re-conquering the wastelands from scratch while they wait for the next version of the game.”

The original Fallen Earth first launched on September 22, 2009 by indie game developer Icarus Studios out of North Carolina. The game was unique in its size (1000 square kilometers of explorable land), combat (FPS mixed with traditional MMORPG mechanics) and extensive crafting system. It also featured a breakthrough faction system that functioned on a wheel, causing positive reputation with one faction to work negatively on its opposite faction.

The game’s story centered around a deadly virus that spread all over the world, causing convulsions in the infected. But it’s not the virus that caused the end of the world. As nations blame each other for the origination and spread of the virus, political opinions passed the blame back and forth until a nuclear war breaks out, wiping out over 99% of the population.

Fallen Earth was runner-up in the Best New MMO of 2009 category at Beckett Massive Online Gamer magazine and it won the Best Online-Only Game of 2009 at Game Industry News.

As Matt Scott notes, bringing the server back up will be an experimental process, so the team doesn’t plan to monetize “this version” of the game at all. “I’m going to look at turning on the highest level subscription rewards for everyone,” he notes in the forum post. “but there wont be any ability to purchase anything from the online store.”

You can see a breakdown of those subscription tiers in an archived version of a post I wrote about the business model when the game was acquired by GamersFirst back in 2011.

So not only is Fallen Earth coming back in its original form, but it will also be completely free. The bad part here is that none of your previous progression in the game has been saved, but now’s your chance to relive the classic game while starting from scratch once again.

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Shawn

Shawn has been infatuated with the post-apocalyptic genre since he wore out his horribly American-dubbed VHS of the original Mad Max as a child. Shawn is the former Editor-in-Chief at Massively.com, creator of the Aftermath post-apocalyptic immersion event, and author of "AI For All," a guide to navigating this strange new world of artificial intelligence.
He currently resides on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere with his wife and four children.

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