An ambitious project appeared in the Morrowind modding community in 2005, by the name of “Ashes of Apocalypse”. Though it was a mod, it was essentially a whole new game, which used Morrowind’s engine with most of the assets being completely custom-made.
It was set in a fictional Earth, on an unnamed desert island. There were “barrier cities” which were futuristic cities governed by the United Barrier Alliance (UBA) and “wasteland slums” which were lawless and impoverished. The playable demo released by the original creators only had a small character generation sequence and a world to explore. Features like a bigger world, faction questlines with choice and consequence and survival features were promised.
Instead, the original project had 2 demo releases before being abandoned in favor of an MMORG called “Ashes of Apocalypse: The Ember’s Dawn”. That project was also abandoned for unknown reasons.
In late 2008, a user by the name of “Envy” on Moddb posted “Hey, I’m also working on AOA {Ashes of Apocalypse} as well. I’ve added quite a lot of stuff there but it’s far from finished. You can see current screenshots on my profile.” on the original mod’s page.
This fan-made expansion (named “Desert Region 2: The Final Frontier”) was worked on for 4 years, having had 2 full public releases with good ratings. There was a promised 3rd release, due to come out in late 2013, but it didn’t come out.
When asked about why it didn’t come out, Envy (real name Enver Nigmatouline) said “I seeked out honest feedback from fans and non-fans of the project. The general consensus was that it was best to reboot Desert Region 2 completely but I didn’t want to scrap all my hard work for it. So, I decided to go with a compromise – go halfway. I am talking about Project Unification.”
His planned indie game, dubbed by the working title “Project Unification”, is going to be a spiritual sequel to both “Ashes of Apocalypse” and “Desert Region 2”, which would “keep a good portion of what was already done” while “getting rid of the things which didn’t work so well”.
“It should be called a rebootquel but apparently that word doesn’t exist.” he joked.
Enver needs £151,000 to make “Project Unification” and is currently holding a Kickstarter campaign for the game. To find out more information about the game, the game’s campaign page is:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1684753824/project-unification
About Enver Nigmatouline: Enver Nigmatouline is a popular modder in The Elder Scrolls modding community with several published works, including the previously-abandoned Oblivion mod “Valenwood Islands” and the collaboration mod “Balmora Underworld”. He has recently opened his own indie game development company Udacha Games.