We recently got in touch with Atanas Atanasov, director of Masthead Studios and producer of Earthrise, who kindly agreed to answer a few questions for us. Masthead Studios, based in Bulgaria, are behind the post-apocalyptic PC MMORPG Earthrise which launched on February 4th 2011. Hit Read More to see the full interview.
1) Earthrise has been in development for many years now, and is clearly a labour of love for the entire team working on it. Now that the launch has finally come and gone how did the team feel about the state of the game at launch and with the game’s launch itself?
MMO development is a long and hard process. Earthrise is our first product and we needed five years to create everything from scratch including the technology. Developing a MMO engine and MMO game at the same time is probably the hardest thing to do in our industry, but we accepted the challenge and were able to release Earthrise. The current state of the game is the one everyone sees and we feel that given the time, budget and experience of the team, the state of the game is good. Although there are issues that everyone notes and criticizes such as lag and low frame rate, we believe that what is important is the core game mechanics and the game potential. Performance is being improved at the moment and the game will run even better in a few months. Earthrise is our first MMO and we have long term plans for it. Our first task is complete – the game is live and is gaining a strong player base. Our second task is under development – to make Earthrise an enjoyable experience with excellent performance. Our third and long term task is to keep improving the game in the following years with new features. Unlike other MMO products which release with big hype and marketing and usually fail after that, we plan to do the opposite - start with small dedicated player base and grow bigger over the years.
2) Many players will know about the pretty major lag issues during the launch period, however no one really knows exactly what the reasons are behind this issue. With the community speculating different reasons for this such as the server location – is there any chance you could shed more light onto the latency situation, and what you’re doing to resolve it once and for all?
Server location and hardware have nothing to do with lag. One reason was the short time for beta server load testing. The first real stress on the servers was five days before release when thousands of new beta testers came in and only then we were able to observe actual performance with real players. People who stayed with us after beta was over and who are currently playing the game can notice the lag improvements we made in the past three weeks. Right now there is one important task that needs to be done to get rid of the lag once and for all and it is related to the RPG effects that players experience in the game. When we fix this issue our expectations are that the lag issues will be history.
3) Many players have complained about the lack of any direction whatsoever in some of the quest descriptions – is this something you plan on resolving in the near future?
This is a feature which some players like and others don’t like. We are still reading comments and will take action if necessary.
4) Something that gamers are finding fairly regularly in the past few years is a lack of developer communication with their community. However on the Earthrise official forums we regularly see a developer presence actively responding to the community and keeping players in the loop. Was this something you set out from the start to do?
Developer communication started from our early beta and will continue as Earthrise is online and running. Independent studios have their problems with low marketing budget, lack of experience and unpolished products, but there are positive things as well and one of them is direct developer communication with the players. This is our priority and we will keep informing our players what is under development and what the issues that we experience. We will listen and read all player suggestions closely and will be faster in implementation compared to the big companies, where things usually happen with a slow pace or never happen at all.
5) We’ve seen a mention of vehicles coming to the game in the near future. Can we expect these to be solely ground-based or could we even expect to see some air-based vehicles?
The vehicles coming in April will be ground based only. There is nothing that restricts our decision other than the game lore and gameplay mechanics.
6) Are you willing to speak about any exciting additions in the works for the coming months of Earthrise?
The Roadmap that we published before release lays out our plan for upcoming enhancements and additions. Our plans are to open the territory conquest in March, improve the client performance in March, introduce vehicles in April and implement monster mines later in 2011. We are also thinking about faction rewards, better social gameplay and other small, but nice to have, features planned for the coming months.
7) During the games development did you ever consider bringing Earthrise to other platforms such as the consoles?
Yes, but given the time constrains and budget we decided to focus on PC only. Once Earthrise becomes the game of our dreams – polished and full with positive reviews - we may think about other platforms.
8) Can we expect to see Earthrise hit other digital distributions in the future other than Direct2Drive, such as Impulse and Steam?
We don’t have plans to expand the digital distribution at the moment.
9) Enterra is a beautiful world, what were the inspirations for the setting of Earthrise?
Earthrise was inspired by life itself. Have you ever tried to imagine how we would live in a world shaken by a major change? In Earthrise, this is the immortality of humanity and the notion that the people on Enterra are the only human beings alive. As the ideas of our writing team evolve, so will the setting and the life on Enterra in parallel.
10) The island of Enterra is said to be one of the few places left on the planet that survived the cataclysmic events which left the rest of the world uninhabitable. However is there a possibility that we might see other areas of the planet which are found to be habitable in the future, or possibly even other planets?
Yes, there is very high possibility for that, but those areas will be on the planet Earth. Earth is big enough and mutated enough to have new interesting locations, why should we travel to space when we have a whole new planet to discover – our planet after the apocalypse.
Many thanks to Atanas for taking the time out to answer our questions, we really appreciate it. To find out more about Earthrise head on over to the Official Site.