Star Vault, an independent game company from Sweden, has announced the development of Mortal Online, a first-person massively multiplayer online game utilizing Unreal Engine 3 that’s scheduled for release in Summer of 2009. Mortal Online is one of the few upcoming sandbox/player-driven MMOGs that’s boldly deviating from the standard conventions of mainstream MMOGs by providing players the freedom of unrestricted environments and open-ended gameplay.
Man, the guys behind Earthrise never seem to decline any interview requests from the media. Every week, they’re being featured in an exclusive interview, podcast or dev chat. It’s not exactly a bad thing, it’s actually admirable how they’re able to juggle between media relations and game development when the game has a release date of sometime in 2009 and it was just announced a few months ago. Stratics put together a recent interview with the CEO of the game’s development company and lead designer of Earthrise, and will be hosting the second House of Commons chat with Masthead Studios on Thursday April 17 at 4pm EST, 9pm GMT, 10pm CET. It’ll taking place in #StraticsHoC of irc.stratics.com port 6668. Simply connect using an IRC client to participate. Here’s the transcript of the last Earthrise HoC chat. The latest QOTW (Question of the Week) was also posted over at their forums discussing storyline missions and faction standings.
To summarize, Associate Producer Tasos explains that Darkfall is feature complete and that professional testers are already beta testing the game. Their general belief on beta testing is that it should be a process to aid the developers in making their product as stable as possible, not to promote some other artificial agenda, like marketing the game. MMO betas these days are like red carpet premiers and sneak peaks, rather than legitimate stages in development. When it comes time for public play testing, that’s when they’ll be looking for players, not testers, to simulate and optimize the experience of the retail version.
Jim Rissignol of Rock, Paper, Shotgun got a chance to interview CCP’s creative director of EVE Online, Reynir Harðarson, who’s currently working on a World of Darkness MMO in Atlanta, GA. The World of Darkness franchise is a set of fictional universes which made its first appearance in Vampire: The Masquerade. The new MMO is already in production and has roughly four to five years left in development.
Divergence Online is a sci-fi MMO being developed by Stainglass Llama, a small software company. Today, they’ve unveiled a brand new character creation video for the first time along with a slew of new work-in-progress screenshots.
The latest fan question has been answered at the Earthrise forums. This week’s topic covers the environments of Enterra Island.
“We’ve seen some pictures of the environment now - how varied will Enterra island be, and do you plan on implementing things like weather? Will the environment be interactive (can we climb and fall from trees, or swim and drown)?”
I finally got around to listening to the entire 56 and a half minute Wife-Aggro.com’s audio interview with Earthrise CEO, Atanas Atanosov and lead designer, Apostol Apostolov from Masthead Studios out of Bulgaria.
They start off by introducing themselves. Atanas is 30 years old, has been a passionate gamer for 20 years and followed the gaming industry since ‘88. He’s a big fan of MMOs and enjoys following the development of new titles.
The write-up essentially confirms how serious Masthead is about making Earthrise as open-ended as possible and a throwback to MMOs with minimal restrictions where player-driven dynamics create most of the game’s contents, elements and appeal. One can even equate Earthrise the science fiction equivalent to Darkfall Online, which is also following the footsteps of Ultima Online’s early days.
Within the next few weeks, just in time for the IMGDC (Indie MMO Game Developers Conference), there will be a slew of new information on Divergence Online, a futuristic PvP-oriented MMOG.
The developers of Apocalypse Online have been working hard to flesh out the upcoming build of the post-apocalyptic indie MMO. More details on the latest update can be found here.
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