Chronicles of Elyria on the purpose and mechanics of Kingdoms of Elyria’s fog of war

    
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To read the latest dev blog from Chronicles of Elyria’s side project-cum-parallel dev title Kingdoms of Elyria, you’d think they invented the fog of war. That’s effectively what this post is all about, elaborating on how it works and why it’s important to the game’s overall feel.

“In KoE, ‘fog of war’ is the way we control access to the physical knowledge that players can gain, and we’ve chosen to exploit this to reflect the layers of strategic depth and story-telling we want to offer players. Fundamentally, without fog of war, not only would you be free to spy on your opponents at all times and anticipate all their actions, but in turn, they would be of little risk to you.”

So, yes, the fog of war will obfuscate players’ view of the overworld map unless their characters or vision-improving structures are placed down in a settlement, while players will also be able to use their character’s immediate family members to act as eyes and ears to expose more of the map and potentially unveil what other settlements are up to. As player settlements expand, managing their field of vision for interior parcels with resource management will become crucial as resource and tax needs start to balloon. So, basically, it’s all foggy and murky out there. Much like this game’s development.

Chronicles of Elyria stunned MMO gamers in 2020 by announcing it was out of money, had laid off the devs, had closed Soulbound Studio, and had ended development on the game. Though CEO Jeromy Walsh later retracted much of that and said the game was still in production with volunteer staff, the gamers who’d backed it for $14M+ in crowdfunds pressed on with legal action. In 2021, Walsh has been releasing new videos on the production he says is happening, though the focus has been more on spinoff game Kingdoms of Elyria.

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