And finally, for some other KoE blog posts that are relevant to today’s update check out: A Closer Look at Gathering & Resources, Taking Stock: KoE Milestone 1 Retrospective, and the State of Elyria '21-'22 from January. For our production roadmap and our development strategy behind KoE, check out The Road Ahead. As its development still serves as a testing platform for the CoE mechanics and server development, it’s being provided for free to all CoE backers.įor more information on KoE and how we use pre-Alpha experiences, check out our Pre-Alpha Experiences design journal from 2017. Since then, KoE has been promoted to a full-fledged, stand-alone, PC game. If the separate callout of CoE and KoE feels surprising or unfamiliar to you, just know that we’re currently working on the land, settlement, and domain management mechanics of CoE, via one of the pre-Alpha experiences previously codenamed Kingdoms of Elyria. But, before we jump into the updates, let’s get the formalities out of the way. “e will be shipping Kingdoms of Elyria: Settlements this year,” he concludes.Welcome to the first Quarterly Update of 2022! We’ve got lots to talk about in this update, as there’s been great progress made on both Chronicles of Elyria and Kingdoms of Elyria. Walsh also promises a roadmap next month, though he’s essentially reducing the scope of Kingdoms (“I will convert some things into stretch goals rather than strict shipping requirements”), and planning a second alpha for Kingdoms. When we say, ‘we’re working on KoE,’ it’s just a short-hand way of saying ‘We’re working on the domain, settlement, and land management mechanics of CoE, which is being made available to an audience that likes colony sims and grand strategy games, before integrating those things into the MMORPG.'” If you are waiting for us to ‘stop development on KoE and return to development on CoE,’ you are missing a subtle, but crucial element of our approach to developing CoE. All the back-end engineering and gameplay mechanics carry over, etc. All the design decisions and data carry over. The development of KoE is the development of CoE. “It’s important to understand that KoE isn’t just world-building. Walsh stresses that work on Kingdoms is work on Chronicles: The larger part of the blog post recaps the development progress Walsh says took place over the course of the year, most of which was focused on Kingdoms of Elyria, which has already seen pre-alpha play. He says the company has been “forced to eat” as much as $50,000 in more legal fees, which has already resulted in the loss of a key developer who according to Walsh left to save the company money, meaning that Soulbound is now a “studio of one” at which the one – Walsh – is “focused 100% on the development of KoE/CoE.” Walsh is back with another dev blog as of yesterday, and perhaps predictably, he doesn’t want to dwell on 2022 too much thanks to “mounting legal fees, shrinking staff, and being pulled away from engineering for 60%+ of the year to focus on funding the studio.” But he does discuss the impact of the lawsuit on the game (and acknowledges that the case is working its way through the appeals process as well). Worse still, Soulbound’s Jeromy Walsh crowed over the court decision in a dev address, calling the lawsuit’s dismissal a “victory to both all those who have, or will use crowdfunding as a source of seed funding for innovative projects, as well as (and most importantly) the backers of Chronicles of Elyria” (presumably excepting those suing him) and deeming the lawsuit one phase in the “the hero’s journey” through which Soulbound is “ascending.” Chronicles of Elyria made our list of the biggest MMO crowdfunding stories of 2022, but unfortunately not for good reasons. The lawsuit that the game’s backers had brought against Soulbound Studio was tossed by the judge, meaning the company – which was apparently already deep in debt – had skated by without accountability.
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