“Having been closely following your feedback via email, as well as across social media, it’s clear there’s plenty of questions still surrounding […] Kingdoms of Elyria and how it directly relates to Chronicles of Elyria,” opens the most recent video from Soulbound Studios CEO Jeromy Walsh. With that said, Walsh answers three of these frequent questions.
To answer how KOE is related to COE, Walsh references an internal wiki that collected features the devs have been working on, including single-player features, multiplayer features, and the Settlement, Domain, and Land Management mechanics. Features for single-player and multiplayer were prototyped in various methods, including a voxel-based game and a single-player game known as Prologue: The Awakening, while early plans for KOE were discussed in design journals in 2015 and 2016 about things like kingdom management, architecture, and player-made dungeons.
In response to questions about whether KOE is a single-player game and why Soulbound is making a different game now, Walsh stresses that KOE is not a single-player game and is an early access release “still very much in development” that will eventually see KOE become the MMO it’s meant to be. “Rather than see KOE as a single-player game, it’s more accurate to see it as a massively multiplayer grand strategy game with an offline mode,” says Walsh. As for KOE looking like a different game, Walsh assures that creating this title isn’t a pivot, referencing the game’s 19th design journal as evidence that Soulbound had always intended to plan different features of COE with different user experiences and clients. “While it wasn’t our plan to ship KOE as a separate product previously, KOE has always been an integral part of the COE development roadmap,” Walsh claims.
Finally, the question about why comments on YouTube are disabled was addressed, with Walsh explaining that the smaller team size makes it harder for the devs to respond to comments across multiple channels while also making KOE. That said, channels of communication are broadening, and when the team is able to manage responses better, YouTube comments will be re-engaged, as well as Q&A videos.
