Massively interviewed Lead Designer Lee Hammock at the recent E3 and captured a long gameplay video:

What were your post-apocalyptic influences for this game?

Of course, there are the Mad Max movies, because you can't really do that these days without looking at those. But also stuff like The Postman, more the book than the movie. The movie, no good, but the book is awesome. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Alas, Babylon. We have a lot of big readers in our content department. Also, role-playing games like Twilight 2000 and old computer games like Wasteland, and of course, Fallout to some extent. But we try not to draw too many parallels to Fallout.

Now why would you do that?

We get a lot of people who look at our game, see anything post-apocalyptic and go, "Ooh, look a Fallout MMO!" But no! It's not Fallout! Road Warrior existed before Fallout!

Watch the video and read the rest of the interview at Massively