Jeromy Walsh, the remaining developer on the multiple pieces of Chronicles of Elyria, is continuing to use his Discord server as a place to talk up plans and ideas, this time holding a “fireside chat” conference call with fans. And according to multiple viewers’ accounts and summaries, the nearly two-hour discussion provided little to reassure MMORPG fans.
Throughout the chat, Walsh made several eyebrow-raising statements, like how he’d be willing to take on game dev students to work on the game in return for education credit (in other words unpaid labor), that work on Kingdoms of Elyria is coming out of his own pocket and not original backers’ money (recall Walsh admitted to burning through cash a couple of times), that he’s open-sourced the Soulborn engine and gotten one licensee (which is not how open-source software works), and that he doesn’t like timelines or “having the pressure of people pinging me when it is going to be done.”
In terms of development, Walsh repeats much of what he’s said previously: He claims that most of the backend work is finished, promises that he does have a plan because it’s written out in a wiki, and reiterates his timeline for when his multiple projects will release to ultimately combine into the full COE release – again without giving timelines – though he intends for KOE: Domains to release by the end of this year. On the topic of those releases, Walsh expressed his hopes that each consecutive piece will bring in revenue to organically build up the studio.
Update: As our tipster Felix and MMORPG.com’s Joseph Bradford kindly pointed out to us, toward the end of Walsh’s recording, he actually blames the MMO press, specifically MMORPG.com and MassivelyOP, for our coverage; he suggests that somehow small video game blogs like ours are responsible for the mass waves of layoffs in the industry, which sure is one hell of a take. More soberingly, Walsh appears to be planning to hide away future news strictly for his remaining loyalist backers in an attempt to avoid unflattering coverage of whatever he’s doing, which is most definitely not in the spirit of the Kickstarter to which MMORPG players donated $1.3M. (Readers might remember the Kickstarter promised “development transparency” and published updates on the official website.) Either way, we assume the leaks will continue.
