Last fall, we did a “Whatever Happened To” article on Saga of Lucimia, the group-centered hardcore MMORPG that we’ve had an eyeball on since 2015 and was originally targeting 2017 for launch (that was later moved, of course, with the most recent window being Q4 2021). The game has weathered multiple controversies along the way, including its advertisement for an unpaid “photogenic” woman community manager, its unusual plans to combat toxicity, its defense of Shroud of the Avatar and Star Citizen, its stance against gaming staples like LFG and minimaps, and that whole thing when the devs flamed players for having “forgotten” how to properly group in MMOs. It also told players it had turned down two potential publishers to avoid going free-to-play.
In 2019, developer Stormhaven Studios closed the game’s pre-order store ahead of a move into a new alpha stage and outside funding. By 2020, the developers were kicking around a potential new business model and even sat for a pair of detailed if weird interviews. At the time of our Whatever Happened To – in October of last year – developers at the studio insisted that their social media silence was incidental and that work on the game continued.
But now it’s come out that a month before that, the game lost its progenitor. As MMORPG.com noticed, Lucimia Creative Director Tim Anderson and his brother, Lucimia World Builder Joey Anderson, announced at the beginning of 2021 in a Patreon post for a new game they’re building that they had in fact stepped back from Lucimia’s development. While both are apparently still attached to Stormhaven Studios, Tim Anderson says they haven’t been involved in Lucimia’s development since last September.
“[A] lot of folks have been asking for the past few months via YouTube, Twitter, and the Saga of Lucimia Discord, ‘where is Tim, why aren’t you posting anything about the game, why haven’t you streamed the game in months’ and etc. My brother and I have not been involved in the development of the Saga of Lucimia MMORPG since September 2020.
“I know folks have questions, and at some point in time we’ll have answers, but in the meantime the only thing I can say publicly is that the team still working on the game have all of the design documents I created in 2014 and refined for over six years as the Creative Director and founder/CEO of the company, plus they retain the rights to make an MMORPG based on my literary works (which I first created back in 1999), and as far as I know, they are still working on the version of the game that was promoted to everyone during my tenure.”
An addendum to the post says the pair “can’t go into details on the ‘why’ of everything at present” and scolds blindsided fans for “jumping to conclusions.”
Notably, over on the game’s Discord, the remaining dev team says work continues on the game. “We test every Wednesday at 8pm CST,” Stormhaven dev Undone told worried players last night. “Game development has not slowed. We aren’t at liberty to comment about it yet but look forward to more information soon™️.” In other words, it remains unclear what prompted the split, why the leads waited so long to clear the air with backers, and who has replaced the creative director, but it does appear the game is still in production.
