Earthrise review, going to be in local gaming mag as well as freelance to some online sites.

Ok folks, this is going to be going in the local gaming magazine for my city, and possibly I might freelance it out to a few online websites. This is the first draft, and what I am looking for from the community is if I got anything blatently inaccurrate. Such as saying a feature didnt exist when it did. I dont need gramar and spelling corrections as the editor will do that for me. Also keep in mind I reviewed this game as objectively as possible, given my other issues here on the forums, so regardless of what you think about the conclusions of my review, try to remeber it is MY review, and while some input is appreciated, ultimately the conclusion i reach will be what gets published.



Oh and its about 5 pages, so long read.



I have played since launch.



Earthrise starts you off in a tutorial which does a few things. First off it shows you how to equip items, accept, and complete quests. It also has a little part that shows you how to move around and jump to get around obstacles. The last part of the tutorial consists of giving you a chance to try out the 5 basic weapon types in the game.



The tutorial does a good job at introducing you to the game, but it doesn’t really teach you anything you wouldn’t have learn by just reading the help page that pops up when you first log in. It doesn’t tell you that to fire you have to push the alt button for example. It doesn’t tell you how to use skills. It doesn’t teach you anything about crafting.



After you finish the tutorial you get to what I like to call Newb Island. This is a small island that you get the chance to start doing quests and really grinding BP. The island is very free form, and essentially your first experience in the unstructured sandbox world that is earthrise. It also introduces you to factions. One thing that I am not sure was intended or not was that the minute you step foot on Newb island, you will be making a choice as to what faction you choose to go with. This isn’t thrown in your face like so many other MMOs however. You may even accidentally end up on the wrong side of things because you were not paying attention to what you were doing. Basically if you happen to head down the right path when you hit the fork in the road, you end up doing Noir quests; hence if you aren’t paying attention you will end up being Noir faction. If you go left, you end up doing Continoma quests.



Now let’s talk about the quests themselves. As far as I have seen you have two types of quests. Go here and kill X mobs X amount of times, Go here and collect X item from killing X mob, and Go here and talk to this guy. The quests are pretty much the major way you will end up making CC (which is Earthrises form of money) so you will find yourself repeating the same quest over and over to collect money. (You could also sell stuff to vendors, but the return is very low). As for quest design, sometimes it is completely clear where you need to go/what you need to kill. Other times, you may spend hours wandering around trying to find Joe. There are no quest markers in this game. No arrows, no shiny lines, no circles on your map. About the only thing you get is a marker over the head of people who can give you quests. This is both good and bad in some ways. I find it nice that people have to actually read and understand the quest instead of just clicking accept and following the shiny arrow to the quest location. But on the other side of the token, most MMO gamers have grown accustom to having the path laid out before them, so you may find yourself being frustrated if you are unable to find the specific location/mob the quest mentions. Earthrises downfall in this regard is while it refuses to hold players hands the whole way, sometimes the quest text is like Tom Hanks trying to find the Holy Grail in Angels and Demons. What I mean by that is sometimes an NPC will say “Go kill John.” And that is literally all you get. No hint to the location, not even a “Head west”.



As for the game play mechanics themselves, you have 3 things. Gear progression, BP (For Buying combat skills) gain, and CP (For buying crafting Skills) gain. (As well as CC gain to a lesser extent). To get higher “Tier” gear, you need to gain BP and spend it on unlocking gear tier levels, so you can equip that tier gear. And no you can’t skip a level. To get BP you need to either kill mobs, or do quests. Other things you have to buy then just Tier levels for gear are skills for your weapons. These include your basic Dots, snares and debuffs/Buffs. To give you a rough estimate of cost, your first skills are between 200-600 BP. Then the next skill will be about 1000-2000 BP and the third will be 4000-7000 BP. This is a generalization to be sure, but basically just double the amount of BP for the next “tier”. As for BP gain, if you kill a Mob about the same level as you, you will gain around 10BP or less per kill. You can of course go after higher level mobs, but the risk is greater. The quest BP reward is actually most of the time, less than the amount of BP you would get if you just went out and killed the mobs themselves. So ultimately the only real reason to do quests is for CC (Money).



Speaking of risk versus reward, for those of you that didn’t know, Earthrise is an open world PVP full loot game. Yes that means players can kill you pretty much anywhere in the world. Yes that means if you die you will lose almost everything you are carrying. But as bad as that sounds there is an upside to that. First off, all of your newbie gear that is given to you, as well as the tier 2 gear, will never be lost upon death. Second, you won’t lose any money you are carrying, nor will you lose collected quest items. And finally if you can afford it you can buy insurance for slots in your inventory. So you could for example insure you gear slots, and your “belt” slots. This will be very expensive for a new player, but I could see this being not as bad once you were bringing in more money.



Now for the final kind of progression in Earthrise, we have CP gain. CP points are used to purchase crafting skills. Along with spending CP points for each crafting skill, the game requires you to spend CC (Money) for each skill as well. As for the skills after 1 week I have barely scratched the surface, but you have to sets, processing, which focuses on breaking stuff down/refining stuff, and Production which focuses on building stuff. The costs for all the skills vary, but they seem to be on a much steeper curve then the combat skills. For example to craft mid grade gear you can expect to spend ~17000 CC and 13000 CP. And that’s just for that item, not including all the sub components and processing skills. CP gain is also much slower then BP gain. Working about equally with CC and BP gain, I would say the average player will gain about 4x the BP compare to their CP. Ultimately this leads to the conclusion that unlike most MMOs out there, where crafting is an afterthought in Earthrise you really need to be truly dedicated to crafting to get anywhere fast. In theory you could eventually gain every crafting skill in the game, but in practicality it would take you literally years of game time. So essentially what Masthead Studios has produced is a game where crafters actually have to rely on each other to specialize in specific areas of crafting. IE a rifle producer will buy his sub components from a components maker who will buy his raw materials from a harvester/processor.



The last thing you will be doing in Earthrise is exploring. While not really a “skill” in game, there are a few things you need to do. Exploring the world will lead you to all sorts of interesting places. You need to explore to unlock respawn locations. You need to find all the teleporters, cities and little camps. Also there are places in Earthrises world where things like hidden super crafting stations are located, so you never know what you might find. In the future the Developers plan to add harvesting nodes for resource gathering, because as of right now the only place you get crafting materials is from killing mobs. (Or other players, technically)



As of this time that is about it when it comes to game play in Earthrise. Kill Mobs for BP, craft for CP, repeating quests for CC, and exploring. In the future we should have harvest nodes, and Territorial warfare included in the mix, along with other features.



Now let’s talk about the controls and user interface. The controls in earthrise are pretty much your standard wasd keys with the number keys and f# keys for using abilities. You shoot with the mouse button, draw your weapon with the alt key, sprint with the shift key and autorun with the NumLock key. The only problem with this is there is no way within the game to change these key bindings. In fact the options menu is actually very sparse compared to most MMOs. And this is where Earthrise really falls short, its user interface and controls. The chat system is something you would expect to see in the old EQ days back in the late 1990s-2000. You can’t change the font size, color or type. You also can’t even filter which channels are open. You will be viewing all channels at all times. To do basics things in chat you will have to familiarize yourself with various forward slash commands, such as /w “Name” and /invite, and well as /y, /s, /p etc to be able to do pretty much anything. (In fairness there is a little GUI popup that lets you pick which channel to talk in but it’s just quicker to type.) Also as of right now there are a lot of issues with the chat system including some players not seeing others whispers, party and guild chat not working, and the whole system going down completely at times.

As for the other GUI parts, you have a compass rose minimap in the top right corner, a status bar for your character (and your party) on the left, and your skill bars along the bottom. Pretty standard UI so far. You also have a map, which is very basic. It shows the location of discovered respawn points and teleporters, but that is about it. For everything else you have the ability to make notations on your map.



That is pretty much where it ends for the UI though. You do not have a friends list, LFG list, or any sort of guild GUI from what I have seen so far. You also are missing some very basic functions such as the ability to ignore users. As for the inventory system, it is pretty much the standard like World of Warcraft or any other MMO, with tabs for types of items, and sorting buttons. Unfortunately though for crafters materials and items do not automatically stack so you have to do that manually. It is unclear at this time if this was intended or a bug. Your character/equip screen is also pretty standard. The crafting interface works well also once you figure it out.



As for the games visual and audio aspects, the game is pretty much standard fare. The character models are well detailed although the animations are sometimes very bad. The special effects when using skills are also pretty much standard fare. The environment graphics can go from stunning to lack luster, depending really on where you are at. The trees and foliage are very well done, as well as the water, but the ground textures look to be very low resolution and don’t appear to have any sort of bump mapping or depth. Sort of like a painted on look. There are also a lot of areas where you get clipping problems and texture tearing/stretching. One thing worth mentioning is the water in streams and rivers actually appears as if it is really “flowing”, which I haven’t seen in a lot of MMOs. Going back to the animations, Mast Head really needs to do some work there. A lot of animations were just plain missing at launch, such as walking backwards at an angle, and at other times the animations are just plain clunky, such as the sprinting animation, or when you are moving up a hill.



The sound goes from great to poor. The game has a great mix of techno music, to some kind of German death metal, but the sound effects themselves sometimes seem out of place. The assault rifle lacks that “punching” sound when firing, the precision rifle sounds like an air rifle, and the shotgun just doesn’t have the BOOM you would think it has.

As for the mobs themselves, I have seen a lot of retextured mobs, or straight up rip offs scattered throughout the world, but there also seems to be a mix of unique mobs. Some areas of the worlds it seems though are actually not populated with anything at all, as though Masthead never got around to finishing specific areas. The mob animations actually appear to be much better done then the character animations. As for the mob AI itself, it is very basic. Mobs use skills sometimes when appropriate, but don’t expect to see humanoids with guns taking cover or doing anything much more then standing there shooting back at you. You will have essentially two kinds of fights, ones where you kite melee mobs around, and ones where you and a mob will stand still and shoot back and forth. They did seem to get the agro range appropriate on the mobs, but like so many other MMOs I can shoot a guys buddy right in front of him, and he will just stand there dumbly. A huge glaring problem with the game as of now however is the server zones. Basically, the entire server is made up of little invisible zones, and if you are standing on one side of the zone, and shoot a mob on the other side, he will try to get to you, be unable to cross the invisible zone line, move back to his spawn area, and heal to full health. This may seem like not such a big issue, except you can’t tell where these lines exist, may almost kill a mob kiting it around for 5 minutes, accidentally go over a zone line, and BAM, all your work is undone. Also some mobs appear to spawn right next to zone lines, so in essence you can shoot them and watch them instantly heal to full health indefinitely.



Now at the end of the article I would like to get into the technically issues. These will hopefully be addressed, but to be honest there are a lot of them to deal with. First let’s start off with performance issues. Earthrise system requirements are as follows; 2 GHz CPU, 1024 MB RAM and 256 MB VRAM video card supporting shader model v3.0. Now keeping in mind this is the minimum requirements, that’s actually not bad until you run into the glaringly severe performance issues. Issue number one is the game was designed to only use a single CPU core. So the game actually has better CPU performance with those of us who have the higher clocked dual or single cores then those of us who have multi core CPU systems. The second issue has to do with the games textures. For whatever reason, every time the game has to load the texture for a model, it has to do it from your hard drive. For some reason the game is not preloading textures into your memory. Those of you with 5400 rpm hard drives beware. These two issues alone pretty much bring performance to a crawl, even if you had a brand new I7 CPU with SLI Graphics and 16 Gigs of memory. One user reported having an i7 Extreme, Dual 500 series Nvidia Cards, and 16 gigs of memory and stated having 20-40FPS on average, with stuttering every couple of seconds into the 9FPS or lower area. And this was with turning all the graphic options down to the minimum.



As for the server lag, at launch it was arguably one of the worst server performances I have personally seen in an MMO. (Note I didn’t say THE worst, just one of the worst). Without a real way to judge ping to their server I can tell you that I could click my mouse button to fire, and at times it would literally be 30 seconds until my character responded. At the best of times this was brought down to about 1-2 seconds. Fortunately Masthead has been working nonstop to bring server performance up to snuff, and things have been improving. Things are still very laggy and almost unplayable in Newb Island, as well as all the starting areas, but once you get away from other players things become a lot more tolerable. But combining this with very poor frame rates and all said, it can lead to a very frustrating user experience.



And bringing to our last portion of this review, we can talk about the community and developer support. At this point in time, the Earthrise community, and especially the forums are incredibly toxic. This could be from users being stressed about game play issues or general dissatisfaction with the game. But overall, with the except of a few individuals, the community will tear the average MMO user apart for asking what they deem to be “stupid” questions, or just tear them apart in general for the fun of it. Masthead themselves just seem to be over worked. I have had mixed results with their support staff. One support email was answered within 6 hours and the issue was resolved. The other support email took almost 24 hours to get a response to, and it seemed that the reply was meant for another user and got mixed up with my support ticket. That issue never was resolved. Other users reported similar problems. Ingame support from GMs went from launch, where you might be lucky to get a GM, to nonexistent, being I haven’t seen a GM ingame anywhere for 4 days.



In conclusion we have a MMO from Masthead that shows the promise of being fun for someone looking to get involved in good sandbox themed PvP full loot days of old MMO, with a mix of Eve, Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, and Tabula Rasa game elements borrowed liberally. And considering the features promised to come this could be the Sci-Fi MMO gamers are looking for, however with all its technical issues, average graphics or outright graphic problems, Spartan user interface, and generally speaking unfriendly community and poor developer support I cannot recommend this game to anyone but the most hardcore of MMO gamers. All in all I rate this game at 5 out of 10.