Earthrise Closes Down

Masthead Studios has announced that the troubled Earthrise post-apocalyptic MMO and its servers have been officially closed, just days after the game celebrated its one year anniversary.

The game was plagued with issues on all fronts, from game play problems to stability issues.  It was closed and re-opened several times.  Masthead has finally decided to kill the project in favor of others the studio is working on.  The developers hint that the game is not being round filed, however, and may come back in the future.

Earthrise was one of the only fully open sandbox MMOs to be not only talked about, but eventually released as a playable game.  It’s a concept that fascinates players and developers alike, but which has proven much more elusive to build than most had realized.

The future of Masthead is uncertain, as their only other announced game in development is Project V13 (formerly Fallout), which was originally a collaboration with Interplay.  With the legal loss to Bathesda, however, Interplay no longer owns the rights to Fallout (hence the immediate name change for the game in development to Project V13).