One of the games I was looking forward to most this year was Rising Thunder, a simplified but competitive fighting game from Seth Killian and the two Cannon brothers responsible for organising the Evolution fighting game championships.
But that won’t see the light of day any more, because Rising Thunder is shutting down.
The news was announced on the Radiant Entertainment website this morning, with the company’s founders Tom and Tony Cannon revealing that the Los Altos-based studio would continue to develop their survival strategy title in Early Access, Stonehearth.
Development on Rising Thunder, however, would not continue. “As for Rising Thunder, the team will start work on a new game that we’re incredibly excited about. We wish we could say more now, but rest assured you’ll hear more when the time is right. For now, we will be permanently closing Rising Thunder on March 18th,” the Cannon brothers wrote.
They also confirmed the game’s closure on Twitter, to clear up any confusion.
@KING_JohnnyD Yes.
— Rising Thunder (@RisingThunder) March 8, 2016
No information is available yet as to what Radiant’s new project would be, but the Radiant founders — who are also owners of the Shoryuken fighting game website and creators of the GGPO netcode — said they would “continue their mission of building incredible games that speak to us personally as players”.
I’m genuinely gutted by this news. It had a ton of development left to go, but Rising Thunder was an enjoyable twist that made the mental aspect of fighting games accessible without dumbing it down or requiring complex executions. I’m still hopeful that someone else will take up the ideas Radiant introduced with their robot fighter, although there’s always the chance Riot could use their expertise in fighters to good use with a creative League of Legends spin-off.
Comments
7 responses to “Rising Thunder Shutting Down After Riot Games Buys Out Studio”
https://youtu.be/H27rfr59RiE?t=49
that sucks, Rising thunder was great fun and i was looking forward to it being more polished.
However i’m assuming we are going to get a League version of RT then, which is the best for the guys as it pretty much guarantees success.
I really hope you’re right. I’d be bummed if this game just vanished.
it all adds up honestly.
Why hire a bunch of Fighting Game devs and force them to cancel their in production game that already has a following in the FGC to force them to make a game that isn’t another fighting game?
I’m guessing Riot saw the simplicity of the game and its potential and thought “Well if we were to make a league fighting game, we want people who play MOBAS to be able to enjoy the game as well, but also bring in fighting game enthusiasts and have E-Sport potential” and RT’s model works perfectly for that.
Hell now that i think of it more RT is a perfect way to adapt League into a fighting game, since special abilities are activated by one button and have cooldowns, every character only had 3 normal abilities and a super (Like the three regular abilities and ultimate moves from league).
My only gripe is that because riot doesn’t like sharing their games with others that the e-sport side game will have a league structure like LoL has now, which doesn’t work for fighting games and it wont be at Evo or other major FGC tournaments. Also Riot doesn’t like their players playing other games, and in the FGC most players will play most fighters, if they want the game to gather attention they can’t tell pro players that they aren’t allowed to play any other fighters, and to get it off the ground in the FGC they’ll need a lot of pro player support.
The more you think about it, the more RT’s one-button specials makes perfect sense for a MOBA crowd. It’s the perfect target audience, if you were going to try to convert any segment of gaming.
I’d rather have Robots than League champions. Hell, I still want my OMF2097 remake. Or remaster. Or sequel. Or robots beating the snot out of each other anything. 🙁
My love for OMF is what drew me to this game. My Nova kicked ass!
Oh great, so RIOT make them stop developing a good looking game to continue with a super lazy 3d pixel graphic game (BORING)