By Jim Rossignol on December 1st, 2010 at 4:00 pm.
Offbeat sci-fi MMO Earthrise sounds pretty intriguing, at least going on the information the devs have put out so far, and the interview we did with them over here. That said, the assets that have been coming out of the ongoing beta are… disappointing. The latest beta footage, which I’ve posted below, doesn’t seem to break that them. And I know this is beta footage and everything, but that landscape seriously needs some vegetation and, well, the video itself needs some serious editing pizazz… Sci-fi dudes standing around, lifelessly shooting each other at a range of ten feet isn’t selling this to me. Hell, it might be honest, but no. Go see for yourself.
I just stopped looking at the video halfway through and decided to just listen to the song. Epic song.
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“can anyone stop the mechanical mayhem”
Where is that from? I know it’s another game.
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@ Dash: The quote is from “Destruction Derby Raw” soundtrack.
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Right.
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Personally I barely see any improvement in combat compared to first gameplay video… Combat oriented game without proper combat is doomed :/
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Don’t we always complain about trailers not showing real representative gameplay? =) Here we have what is very likely representative gameplay, and however Normal it looks — I like it better than the usual wannabe movie trailer.
Agreed about vegetation. Carrots, I should think.
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That’s just it, it doesn’t look “normal”. At least, not “normal” in the sense of “at least average”. It looks shit.
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Attention programmers on this project – for the love of god, build your creatives some tools to help with those trailers.
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Looks pretty weak.
There was another sci-fi mmo shown a while back where you flew around with jetpacks, can anyone tell me what it was called?
Thanks.
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Firefall.
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Yeah, more Firefall. GIve us some of that, I want some more hot jetpack action.
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oh, that’s the game I thought this was going to be
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I nominate this game for the Golden Meh.
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Agreed.
I didnt read your thoughts before the video and the same conclusion was smacking me in the face the whole way through.
The combat could be cool and whatnot, but the environment looks far too large for what little is in it. It looks like there are a few set pieces here and there but they are surrounded by vast nothingness. This game looks like it requires vast amounts of running. And an mmo forcing me to do vast amounts of mindlessly running in order to pad its experience is not an mmo im willing to play. There had better be free quick-travel and/or mounts from the get go.
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It’s not just that the terrain and what vegetation we can see looks so empty, it’s that it looks so Earth-like. Why bother doing a “sci-fi” MMO and then make all the environments look like they could be anywhere on this planet? Okay, the giant mushrooms were knda interesting, but where’s the imagination for really cool alien environments? It looks like they’re re-using terrain and vegetation textures from some existing engine.
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1) Teleports and personal vehicles.
2) Didn’t you get the memo? Sci-fi= post-apocalyptic now. Or at least this is.
Anyway, my hopes are somewhat lowered, but I’ve never been much hyped for it anyway. As the illegitimate lovechild of Eve and AO, two rather popular niche MMOs it’d probably find its audience. I’m too much of a ‘carebear’ for it anyway.
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I like how Space Dude™ shoots a guy so hard (about 1 minute 40 in) he blows their armour off, leaving them ragdolling about in their Space Y-fronts™.
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Otherwise, not looking so great. Alas.
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Being able to shoot people naked is a pretty cool innovation though, I would like to see this in more games. It seems so obvious and yet it hasn’t been done before.
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Ah but then there is
Kabod Online
The relevant page 2 is NSFW.
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thanks for linking us to a furry mmo webpage man.
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Curiously enough, “KA-BOD!” is exactly what I would yell as I smack someone naked.
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Just say No to MMOs
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Video redirects your browser to where ever it is you host your vids at about halfway through the video. Not that it really matters as it’s pretty poor. But it does have some nice giant mushrooms, gotta love giant mushrooms. Other than that I couldn’t care less.
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This reminds me of that other sci-fi space game where you do practically nothing..What’s it called again? Oh yeah Eve.
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I can’t say what I’ve read about it on their website sounds too appealing either.
Too quote from the website “The quest system in Earthrise is designed to fit the concept of a free PvP sandbox world.” So in other words they will chuck in a few random fetch quests and the rest you make up for yourself. I guess they’re thinking it worked for Eve so why not for them.
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20 seconds intro should be a 5 seconds intro.
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It’s like they tried to make it look as unappealing as possible :X
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Looks like a very very watered down version of Tabula Rasa… which I rather enjoyed for a month or so till I essentially finished it and all there was to do was remake new characters.
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Do you hate alt-text Jim? I miss the secret funnies :0(
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I got through phases of including them. Alas, not today.
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Will someone please tell me what’s supposed to be remotely compelling about this style of RPG combat, in which a point-blank gunshot is about as lethal as a limp-wristed slap in the tits from an anemic pensioner?
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Frank Klepaki Rules. (he made the song i think.)=
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I made it to 1:23! Beat that, hotshot!
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Welcome back to the nineties folks.
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Cardboard people let it down – the handblades look cool, as do the shields, but it needs better animations and some vegitation.
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Oh my god, what year it is?
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Silly Jim, that’s an alpha build trailer from Tabula Rasa!
Oh, it’s not?
Well, barf then.
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I played the beta of Tabula Rasa and that was far better than how this looks. I wish someone would pick up Tabula Rasa and make it free to play.
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I had to look up some old videos just to remind me of how much better TR looked. You’re certainly correct.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaHuTTJ7QM0
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Was about to say the same thing.
Also, kind of funny how they put that music over such a lukewarm trailer as if they thought “Surely this track will make it feel a lot more exciting!”
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Uahh, texture tiling! Feels like 1995.
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When has gameplay footage of an MMO not been disappointing?
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I liked the music, but started to browse around in other tabs while the video was still running. Not a good sign.
Combat looked uninteresting.
Check out the last “battle” with the insect-like enemy, you can see his global cooldown activating while the enemy waddles toward him.. I´m so certain that he´s hammering the 1 key every second or so to keep the machine gun fire up.
The landscapes looked okay, if a bit empty… I might try this out if there´s a free demo/trial.
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Man, you have to run forever in this game. It’s like Borderlands DLC without cars…
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That video just gave me a flashback to Star Trek: Online (beta) away missions. In other words, not good.
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Best part of that trailer was 5:00 onwards..looked badass..
A big –> :/
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This looks bad.
Is supposed to look that bad? I don’t know, because I don’t know how advaced is the game, maybe this is a early alpha, before mechs and all the fun things are added.
…before the game is added. What I see here is some boring Tabula Rasa levels, mixed with Darkfall combat, withouth the FPS-y feel of Darkfall. Basically a bad cheapo clone of Tabula Rasa.
I really really hope this is not representative of the final game.
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Well… it looks pretty darned good compared to Anarchy Online.
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I’d rather they liquidated their assets, consolidated the capital and just fund Anarchy Online 2.
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Well hey, at least when they are shooting at each other point blank they are actually moving and not just standing still. *glares at The Old Republic*
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No, but they were walking upright without any cover and jumping-up and down. As someone said above, welcome to the 90s.
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So, Tabula Rasa, but worse, with some PvP?
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I really like the look of it so far, but the combat does seem to be pretty iffy.
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I saw bunny hopping, that’s all i need to see to write it off to bargain binsville. If some idiot spamming his spacebar has any effect on my ability to tear his arms off im not playing it.
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I do miss Tabula Rasa, It would have made a great free MMO, when the game was closing down they were giving out exp boosting items, high level outfits, powerful weapon mods, put this stuff in an item store sprinkle on some hats and boom all ready for sale, Id imagine a company like NCsoft that basically just makes MMO’s could do this super easy.
They could advertise it as the tabula rasa tabula rasa.
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Convention dictates that beta software is feature complete and all that’s left is testing.
I would expect the full game to be remarkably similar to what we see here.
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Two years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60pKZ5Opz0o
New video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nVQGE9qjUA
Other stuff:
Vindictus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnKJpXZxmyU
Planetside
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgNuaT4O_Ow
Lost Planet 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG0XalAYj90
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogHcVb8SKsQ
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That’s how we made trailers in 1997.
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I wonder if a f2p company could bring Tabula Rasa back to life.
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Agreed, there should be more cabbages and carrots scattered around.
What? It’s “vegetation” not “vegetables” you say?
Why would you not eat vegetables?
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This made me laugh so damn hard my belly still hurts,godammnit i still cant stop giggling.
Honestly,the main character should change his diapers,everyone can tell from the way he moves,they are full.
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Wow.
When are they going to hire someone to do the animation?
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FFS. Another combat system where idiot designers just had to pander to tarded kids “educated” on manga instead of books, and who who still don’t know that melee has been phased out of all battlefields on Earth for centuries. And here we go again, another modern or futuristic game with guns, like Fallen Earth, where we have some gits willing to bring a knife to a gunfight in the desert, and suddenly the whole combat system is revolving around them: they need to be able to survive while they are closing in on a ranged guy (they should let natural selection sort things out instead), so we get huge health bars, lots of armor, a shitload of hits to bring someone down while he is leapfrogging around you in the open, stuns, roots and lots of other crap. It’s not that it’s not realistic, it just doesn’t make sense.
In short: I am not completely happy with what I saw in this video.
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Indeed, there was a damn good reason that when you took someone down with the gauntlet in Quake 3 Arena, the announcer bellowed “HUMILIATION!”
Developers, trying to get your game to play out like a war painting by a 19th century romantic never ends well.
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It’s not even an issue of humiliation, I just can’t grasp the concept. All my understanding of melee weapons changed when I was a kid and watched this scene in the first Indiana Jones, where a guy is showing off with his sword trying to scare IJ off, but he takes out his gun and one-shots the ebil swordsman. That was perfect, totally unexpected (in another movie they’d have danced around each other for like 5 minutes), and made perfect sense. Yet game designers keep living in a world where a guy with a sword (or neon party sticks like in the Earthrise video), running from like 200m away towards and enemy with a heavy machinegun, has a chance of not dying within the first meters. Whatever.
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Oh please.
They like melee combat and want it, and they can design the rules of physics and or rationale to make it viable. If you don’t like melee combat fair enough, just say it, you can’t say it doesn’t make sense in any imaginable universe.
In Dune (which I don’t think was written by someone manga “educated” the soldiers have shields that can deflect anything fast moving, proving normal projectile weapons useless.
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“Designing the rules of physics” as you say, around some dumb concept, is exactly what I am against.
Yeah, some books have swords and sorcery in space, which they call ‘laser saber’ and ‘the force’, not to sound totally dumb. Others books have giant… fighting… robots. Sure, they make sense too. They were in some book, weren’t they. So in your Dune example, the only way past these shields would be a slow sword? “Please sir, stand still while I run up to you and gently cut you down”.
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So, neofit.. You’re ranting against sci-fi in general now, as established over the past century, and somehow finding a way of blaming it all on Japan.
You have issues.
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Issues? Like the main thing people seem to remember from my post was the little jab at manga? Why could this be? Oh yes, it’s in the first sentence. You can watch armored bikinis all you want for all I care.
And I don’t know what sci-fi you are reading and watching, but mine doesn’t rewrite the laws of physics or mathematics nor do sword fights nor giant robots. This is not sci-fi, that’s kiddie action stuff, FYI the ‘sci’ is for ‘science’. There is a whole lot of good sci-fi out there that makes one think instead of being all about swords or robots. I’m not the one with issues.
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Realism, sense and aesthetics aside, it’s also a gameplay problem.
Sure you can come up with a suitably opaque sci-fantasy reason for swordsmen to be able to close on machine-gunners without facing the same fate as those who attempted similar during World War I, but whatever solution you come up with is going to make it a far less gratifying experience for the gunners than if they’d just bought a mediocre FPS instead. This is one of those sliding scale situations where you just can’t have the best of both worlds.
The repeating firearm is one of the ugliest, nastiest, most unfair and destabilising inventions that man has ever created. When it’s made to feel less than this, something feels off. Returning to the Quake 3 example above, the humiliation award is given because it’s supposed to be a difficult feat to pull off in all but a few situations, because no matter how impressive your whirling electric sawblade may be, your opponent has a fucking gun.
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What no swords in Sci Fi? No Star Wars or Warhammer 40k? That, Sir, is not a world I care to live in.
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It was pointed out in another thread that light sabers in the original Star Wars trilogy were weapons of conflict resolution rather than general combat. They were used pretty much exclusively for climactic duels. There’s plenty of scope within sci-fi for close combat to exist in such a context, as well as in the context of stealth operations. It only gets silly when the worldbuilders start pretending that gunfighting and swordplay are symmetrical.
As for 40k, the tabletop game deftly camouflages the insanity of the situation by having rules that make it play more like a warped kind of Napoleonic warfare than anything else. Watch that hero character and his retinue successfully charge your heavy bolters across an open field in the Relic RTSes, and you quickly see how ludicrous it really is.
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You’ll be able to close with an opponent easily if you have power armour and a jump pack. Then it’s “eat chainsword!”
“when I was a kid and watched this scene in the first Indiana Jones, where a guy is showing off with his sword trying to scare IJ off, but he takes out his gun and one-shots the evil swordsman.”
That wasn’t how Spielberg and Lucas had planned that scene. Indie was supposed to some fancy fighting stuff, but Harrison Ford had the screaming shits and could barely move without leaking.
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Reply fail!
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very good web.
good
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I love forking shoes. It’s a hobby of mine.
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