Masthead presents Earthrise roadmap and lifts NDA

With a bit more than a week until the official release of Earthrise, Masthead Studios have presented a roadmap for things and features that will be added after launch during 2011. At the same time they also lift the NDA, so those that have been in the closed beta are free to talk about the game now. I have not been in the beta, did not even apply for it – so I am curious to see what people think.

Questions and answers are being fired off in the game forums, so far it seems a bit of a mixed bag to me – which does not surprise me at all. The exploration aspects seems good, crafting not as good as I had hoped. The number of active beta testers do not seem to have been that many, which perhaps is not the best sign.

I like that they actually presented some kind of roadmap and thus are to some extent upfront with features that are not in the game yet, before it is released.  This gives at least a bit of hope that they may have thought through the process of running a live game.

I think I will pick up the game during February either way, but might end up being a game I will play for a few weeks and then return to a couple of months later. It would not be the first time and not the last – I think this may even be the pattern for the majority of MMOs I have played in the past few years.