The Chronicles of Elyria team submitted itself to the wilds of an AMA on Reddit earlier this afternoon, allowing players to bombard the developers with questions about the soon-to-be-Kickstarted MMORPG. Here are some of the highlights so far:
- Pre-alpha/alpha 1 testing will begin “as early as possible,” potentially “as early as Q1 2017, with beta beginning in the summer.”
- CEO Jeromy Walsh previously worked at Microsoft developing automated test infrastructure; Elyria’s will be similar.
- How will the studio pull off something so ambitious? Experience, partly, but also middleware. “We’re leveraging as much middleware as we possibly can,” Walsh says. “We don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel, and where others have made progress and have license-able technology available, we’ll be looking to leverage that.”
- Expect more about the engine and server tech next week.
- “We are not using voxen tech currently for building and destruction. We’re using component-based construction with destructible elements. However, we’ve been looking at a few pieces of voxel-based middleware, so that could change this summer.”
- Player kingdoms can blacklist griefers and miscreants. The studio does have a munchkin griefer on staff to playtest the PK system.
- The game is definitely sticking to its buy-to-play Sparks of Life system: “You will continuously get new content from the moment of launch until we end the game. This will come in the form of new story arcs, more and more capable and intelligent NPCs, new technology being introduced in the world such as mechanical things, and things which require a power source.”
There’s plenty more on crafting, bossing around NPCs, housing biomes, diurnal cycles, world maps, land purchasing, and ranks. Go check it out while they’re still answering!
Source: Reddit
