Ilysia is once again taking an hour’s worth of video roundtable to address player questions and comments as the game continues to move towards an early access release. Readers will remember that the title has had testing issues before, leading developer Team 21 to become much more communicative recently, and that throughline continues in this latest developer video, starting off with a discussion about early access.
Much like last time, the devs are promising that early access isn’t shorthand for making money off of a minimum viable product and disappearing into the ether, instead describing its early access release as a collaboration between the studio and players to make an admittedly unfinished game better together; the vast majority of this portion of the footage is mostly a rant against the management of early access titles in recent months.
The majority of the Q&A drills down on questions about various gameplay mechanics in Ilysia. Revelations here include the promise of interactive crafting built around interdependence among professions, plans for large skill trees in the game’s freeforge system, confirmation of corpse running upon death, details on its magic casting systems, plans for a “hybrid” system of queuing for dungeons and moving to them in the open world, confirmation that dungeons will be designed around short but challenging encounters, and server sizes that aren’t specified but will be built to make the world feel full.
