A handful of facts about FO: DE...
- You can level up very fast.
- Map traveling speed is great. You can get where you want very quickly even without a car.
- There's a trait that allows you to start with very high outdoorsman, which is great for new players that want to explore the world.
- There are tons of shops everywhere, and they accept pretty much every single item there is.
- In order to get a safe place to store your gear in, you just need to find a shovel and use it in a random encounter. Quick & painless.
As you can see, the game is very friendly to new players. Let's talk about some other aspects now...
- Acquiring good gear requires approximately ten times the amount of grind that FO: 2238 requires.
- You will die of old age before you get enough stuff to do PvP.
- Farming encounters for gear is pretty much impossible without a large group. If you don't have a faction to back you up, you can forget about farming anything better than radscorpion tails.
- Some encounters are bugged and will cause NPCs from your faction to shoot at you for no reason as soon as you enter (e.g. the NEC veterans and radscorpions encounter in Zone 1:1 does that consistently); there's no way of avoiding these - you are bound to get one at some point.
- Some encounters feature critters that have a 100% chance of achieving a critical hit (e.g. psycho ghouls).
- For all practical purposes, you can only craft shovel-tier items.
In its current state, FO: DE is fun for a day or two, but then it turns into endless grind that's about three times worse than FO: 2238. Unlike FO: 2238, however, the server DOES show a lot of promise, and I will definitely be monitoring the progress that its developers make.
If you're on the fence about giving FO: DE a shot, I'd say go for it, but only if you have a group of people to play with, and a LOT of time on your hands. Otherwise, it's completely pointless.
BTW, let me make a few loose comments:
- The new layout of the FO: DE forum is almost as obnoxious as the layout of the forum I'm posting this comment on. That means it's terrible.
- Offering to give a bonus to new players that the players you already have will not receive is perhaps not the best idea ever. I'm pretty sure more people will quit because of it than join.