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The Game Archaeologist goes to Earth & Beyond: The highlights
For this month's Game Archaeologist expedition, I deliberately wanted to look at an older MMO that was -- for whatever reason -- no longer with us. After voting on a handful of these titles, Massively readers selected Earth & Beyond for March's focus, and I have to say that I'm intrigued. Personally, I prefer science fiction over fantasy nine times out of ten, even though most of the MMOs that grace my desktop (with the exception of Star Trek Online) are fantasy games. Sci-fi has had an awfully difficult time making headway into the field of MMOs, with plenty of underperforming or canceled titles littering the way. I've heard it explained that the fantasy genre is easier for the common person to grasp because it uses elements of our past -- primarily the medieval period -- to provide a familiar baseline, whereas sci-fi's futuristic setting requires world-building from scratch. Whatever the case may be, Earth & Beyond never really caught on the way that EVE Online did, and its miniscule population (GameSpot reported 20-25K subscribers six months before its shutdown) was not enough for Electronic Arts to keep it running. But between 2002 and 2004, Earth & Beyond reached for the stars and gave its own spin on how a sci-fi MMO could work. Let's take a look today at what made Earth & Beyond unique, what it gave the industry, and how it may help upcoming space MMOs avoid a similar fate.
