We’re circling back once more to the sandbox MMORPG Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore to chronicle the continued series of development updates made by the team at Oath Games, which readers may recall was bought out by the game’s angel investor (and a player himself) earlier this year. Sure enough, a look back through some of the game’s latest major patches see continued updates being made, albeit spread out a bit since our last check-in.
Specifically, an August update introduced the ability for players to form guilds as its marquee feature, alongside over 60 new pieces of rare gear, three new quests, some performance improvements, and a new sunken depths map. A second update made later that same month focused on some visual improvements to the game world and UI as well as several quality-of-life updates.
The most recent major update landed over the past weekend: This self-described “big” patch reworked banks and inventory with features like more storage slots and linked bank access, new elite monsters, a rebalance for monsters between levels one to 20, three new paths, and a wide assortment of UI and world design updates.
Finally, Oath Games unveiled an upcoming relic system that will introduce a new layer to character progression, granting players a set of abilities that represent a class when they’re equipped.
Despite all of this effort, the MMORPG is still struggling on Steam, as it continues to harbor a “mostly negative” user score and extremely anemic player numbers. The dev team has a memo at the top of the game’s Steam page addressing the reviews head-on:
“Ethyrial experienced a failed launch May 1st, 2023, which led to the reviews you see today. I was a player who loved the world and saw potential in the game – so I bought it from the original developers and founded Oath Games. It is now 100% Free-to-Play while in Open Development. We patch and communicate with our community every single day. It is our Oath to bring our players an amazing game! Thank you so much for checking out the Ethyrial – we hope you’ll give it a try!”
