Controversial MMO Chronicles Of Elyria Starts Mid-Alpha Testing This Spring
Soulbound Studios is back with news on their controversial and still-in-development fantasy MMORPG Chronicles of Elyria and the now-standalone game Kingdoms of Elyria. In his Q1 2022 state-of-the-game update, CEO Jeromy Walsh outlines work that’s been done on the game over the past few months which included a two-day Early Alpha test.
“Since February, we've been quietly working on the engineering, design, and art required for our M3 and M4 milestones and the launch of our Mid-Alpha Testing releases. This period of quiet focus has been good for the studio, as we've been able to make huge strides forward in the CoE/KoE engineering space, particularly in our platform development.”
Walsh said that they’ve also made “huge advances” to their core game engine, including porting the game from the old Node.js to the new .NET framework. Ported gameplay systems include everything from characters, aging and death, and movement to consumables and gear. He also touched on their design and development philosophy which he said focuses on breadth and not depth which he calls their Rope Bridge Philosophy.
He also addressed the controversy surrounding the game’s assets which he allegedly tried to off as custom-made even though they were purchased from an asset store. He argues that it’s more practical to purchase ready-made assets rather than make them from scratch, especially when they’re of a high enough quality.
“All assets are purchased assets. It doesn’t matter whether you’re buying assets from an asset marketplace like the Unity Asset store, paying employee-artists to create custom assets for you, or splitting the difference and having outsourcing agencies create custom assets for you from base templates. In all cases, a studio is purchasing assets.”
“CoE has thousands of different items that are used as crafting resources, tools, weapons, armor, furniture, cookware, and more,” added Walsh. “There’s a massive number of things to make. Given the large volume of assets, and the small size of our team, it’s simply impossible for us to deliver the game we want to deliver, in the time we’d like to deliver it in, without resorting to purchasing assets from a marketplace whenever the quality meets our standards, and those assets are unlikely to pull people out of the world we’re trying to create for them.”
Mid-Alpha weekend tests are set to begin sometime in Q2 2022 with an updated launcher, new game systems, new biomes, faster load times, various optimizations, and bug fixes. The mid-Alpha tests will be open to all Alpha 2 backers in addition to the Alpha 1 backers who already got to test out the game.
The next quarterly update is scheduled for July 12th while the game itself is slated for release in late 2024.
Soulbound Studios and third-party payment processor Xsolla are currently in the middle of a still in development when they were slapped with the lawsuit.
