Tag: Silent Future

Whatever Happened To: The Earthrise Reboot


Earthrise was a sandbox MMORPG that some of you might vaguely recall from many, many years ago. It launched in 2011 under Masthead Studios and could best be described as an unmitigated disaster from the get go. The game just wasn’t good, it offered manual aiming but neither the server or client performance to pull it off. Gameplay consisted of a laborious grind, the game seemingly punishing you for deciding to buy into it by tying its combat to one of the most dull systems in the genre while also forcing you to grind thousands of creatures to build your gear to grind thousands of creatures to build better gear.

Needless to say, the game died fast and one year later in 2012 Masthead Studios handed over control of the title to Silent Future who have been, well, mostly silent about the future of this game.

When we last talked about Earthrise, the MMO was gearing up for its closed alpha testing for a reboot under developer Silent Future. That news was over six years ago. Since then, the servers and website have gone up and down but the title has seemingly been abandoned in recent years. The last update on the game’s Twitter and Facebook pages was from 2016, but the website itself has been dead for a couple of years now and the servers themselves have been offline for an indeterminate amount of time.

Interestingly, I happened to get a response from the official Facebook account for Silent Future confirming that the game has not been cancelled. As far as the game being actively developed, that is up in the air. I’m interested to see what Silent Future is going to do with Earthrise, since after seven years you might as well have just used the assets to try and build a new game. Earthrise was dated and functionally a dead end even back in 2011 when it launched, I can’t imagine the MMO gamer base flocking back to the game that they universally rejected after such a long absence.

Source: Facebook

Falling Out #21: Dumpster Diving


reboot21

If there was ever a title for an MMO that deserved a better life, Earthrise is probably a high contender. I’m actually fairly interested in how the reboot turns out, and not just because I had the pleasure of experiencing the first run around and seeing what was a game with amazing potential be squandered by the everlasting joy of indie-developer limitations.

Earthrise Closer To Alpha Launch, Accepting Registration


Earthrise_Logo

Earthrise: The game some of you may not have heard of, is back! Well, not at the moment anyway. If you haven’t been paying attention to this or other MMO news sites, Earthrise is a sci-fi sandbox MMO that launched in February 2011 by Bulgarian developer Masthead Studios. Earthrise was panned rather widely in the reviews, and fizzled out pretty quickly in terms of population. Over time, Masthead Studios attempted to convert the game into a free to play model, only to run out of funds partway through. In a post released in early 2012, Masthead Studios announced that Earthrise would shut down in February.

Long story short, the game was picked up by Silent Future, who are converting it into a free to play game. The first alpha testing stage has started, and players are encouraged to sign up at the link below to test it out.

(Source: Earthrise Website)

Earthrise Posts New HTML5 GUI


Let’s talk about the dead coming back to life. Some of you may recall a long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, that Earthrise shut down due to a lack of funds to fully bring the game over to a free to play platform. If you don’t remember, just re-read that last sentence until it sticks. Got it? Good. While Earthrise had a great PR department selling the game before it launched, the product that shipped barely made a dent in its pre-release hype. In fact, it barely made a dent in anything. After Earthrise released, it virtually vanished off of the face of the MMO press, showing up every now and then to let everyone know that the servers were barren and so were the coffers at Masthead Studios. Major problems from lag, disconnection issues, crashes to desktop, and the actual content of the game kept Earthrise from reaching its potential, and finally the game choked to death on a pretzel with the sound statement that one day, a generous necromancer known as SilentFuture would raise it from the dead.

In the original notice, Earthrise 2.0 was planned for a quarter four 2012 launch. It is probably safe to say that we’ll be looking at a 2013 launch, but just to keep the players satiated for the time being, the above screenshot was posted in an announcement that Earthrise will be using an HTML5 user interface, rather than Flash. Not necessarily the best update possible, but a positive sign that the folks at Silent Future haven’t fallen into the same black void of development that has devoured, say, the guys working on Earth Eternal’s reboot.

Then again, one could say that any news on Earthrise is good news at this point.