Soulbound Studios'
Chronicle of Elyria has caught a lot of attention recently. The game's nearly funded on Kickstarter within 10 days, and that means the hype is real. We know you want to know more about the game so we did an interview with the studio's CEO Jeromy Walsh.
Can you tell us about your team? How many members you have and what does it like to work in the team?
We currently have a team of 17 people, ranging from programmers, to animators, to sound engineers, all the way to our community manager. As for what it’s like working with the team, it’s amazing. While we’ve never worked together as a whole, the team was built up largely by referral, with almost everyone on the team knowing at least one other person on the team, sometimes more. As a result, the team began with, and has maintained, a kind of synergy, as everyone is laser focused on the end-goal and really enjoys working together.
We also spend some of our down-time together as well. We’ve got a weekly game night, we take occasional breaks to battle on the foosball table, and most recently NERF has invaded the office and bullets are frequently whizzing by your head.
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Players saw many ambitious titles that failed to deliver what they had promised. Chronicles of Elyria has a lot of cool features but how do you reassure players that you can deliver them?
Two ways: By continuing to be super transparent with the community, showing them screenshots, video, and design journals, and by continuing to put out work of high quality. By being present to answer questions during Live Q&As, and by being always accessible via forum, Discord, or IRC, it shows people we’re here to stay, we’re not hiding anything, and we’re one of them. We are, after all, making this game as much for us as for them. It’s the game we want to play.
We'd like to continue the last question. Since CoE is a sandbox MMORPG, it raises some concern that would the game have a lot of glitches, would it take a lot of time to fix, because after all, you don't have a very large team and resources.
I spent the last several years working as a Software Engineer and Lead Programmer developing scalable, distributed, automated test infrastructure. For me, test coverage and automated testing in particular is very important. And while we can’t catch everything, we will be spending resources developing an automated test infrastructure to help catch regressions, etc…
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The game plans to provide a 10-year story line, but what kind of stories are we talking about? Since this is a sandbox game, how will the stories made by the dev team affect players' choices and gameplay experience in the game?
It’s not really fair to call Chronicles of Elyria a sandbox game. I mean, it has sandbox elements – the ability to buy land and build your own structures, contracts which allow you to create player-ran tasks, etc… but Chronicles of Elyria is really a new type of MMORPG.
Where theme-park MMOs give you a story, the story is mostly static in-between expansions and every player and every character experiences the same story arc. Sandbox MMOs give players the tools to create their own content, but there’s often no real story or reason to use the tools, aside for personal expression and creativity.
In Chronicles of Elyria, there’s multiple layers to the story engine which make it so individuals have their own personal stories and tasks to deal with, as well as an overall story. Elyria is a world where, if there were gods, they abandoned us long ago, and if there ever was magic in the world, its secrets have long been forgotten. However, both of those may change in time.
As to what kind of stories? Well, most MMOs focus on individual quests such as rescue this person, escort that person, pass this message between these people, kill x of these, etc…
Instead of focusing on the creation of individual quests, we’ve instead focused on mechanics which allow those quests to happen organically. As an example, I once played a game where you had to go into a cave and rescue someone from a “landslide.” Of course, the NPC was in no real danger, and there was no real land-slide. It was pre-scripted, and pre-created, like all the other content in the game.
In Chronicles of Elyria, rather than create a “go save the landslide victim” quest, we instead make it possible for landslides to occur. Now, you never know who, or when, someone will be the victim of a landslide. More importantly, if there is a landslide victim, they’re in real danger of starving or suffocating due to our survival mechanics, and just as important, once they’re saved, they are safe.
Being a survival MMORPG, what exactly do we need to watch out for in the game?
The main survival elements in CoE are hunger, thirst, temperature, exposure, fatigue, and toxicity. These equate to a character’s need to eat, drink, stay warm/cool, out of direct exposure to sun, sand, wind, etc., rest, and get healing.
These weren’t added arbitrarily. Each one corresponds to the opportunity for dramatic story-telling, in most cases, as a result of a desire to re-create difficult encounters seen in our favorite fantasy stories.
How does the gameplay of a young character different from that of an old character? In real world we hope we grow old very slowly, so is that also what you want players to believe in the game?
In CoE, as your character ages both their attributes and skills are affected by the aging process. To begin with,
as you age it becomes harder and harder to maintain your physical attributes, but it becomes easier to develop your mental and some social attributes. This naturally leads to inherent advantages / disadvantages between the young and old.
As well, the changes in mental and social attributes make it so the older characters are much more efficient at learning through study and research, rather than practice, and are also much more adept at instructing and teaching others, which is itself a way to advance skills. After all, the best way to learn is to teach.
Our objective here is that as the characters age they’ll pull back from the battlefields and forges and will begin to take on more diplomatic and political roles, as well as take on the mantle and mentors and sages to the other characters. In doing so, they’re able to reach their highest potential within any given lifetime.
The combat in the video you released early this month was like 2 players doing fencing. We wonder how it will be like when you wield a different weapon, say, a battle axe?
It will be more or less the same.
In CoE, there are different weapon sets, each of which have different stances and different techniques. So for example, there are a couple different stances for wielding a battle axe, and within those stances there are many different techniques you can use.
The main thing here, however, is that the heft of a battle ax makes it so that a rapier would be a great weapon to use for deflection. You’d likely destroy a rapier. So your options of facing a battle axe are to either use a shield, a weapon that could be used to deflect a battle axe, or you just have to be fast enough that you can either parry or dodge the battle axe.
We know player skill matters in combat, but any other things that can also affect the combat? For instance, wearing different armors, having different character stats, and so on.
Both character stats as well as armor effects combat. Most techniques are effected by one or more physical attributes, such as strength, agility, and stamina. When wielding a sword for example, while playing skill is used to determine whether you hit or not, your character’s strength effects how much damage is done to the opponent. Likewise, your stamina determines how much energy/vitality you have, in some cases making evenly matched players a battle of attrition.
Finally, different weapons and armor types are better suited against different armor and weapon types. Not all weapons can deflect other weapons, and using piercing, slashing, or blunt weapons is more effective against certain armor types than others.
This means combat isn’t just about reflexes and your ability to anticipate your opponents’ attacks, it’s also about perception and situational awareness.
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Will the success of crafting an item also relies on player skill? Could you go into more details of how the gameplay looks like?
Crafting is one of the few systems that’s still in-flux at the moment. Our goal from the outset has been to make crafting feel more immersive, like you’re actually creating the items yourself. We had initially approached this through the creation of “skill challenges”, which felt like little mini-games, but we’re currently re-evaluating that, in favor of including a different user experience that feels more hands-on without feeling so much like a mini-game.
Some of the features such as no mini-map and no quest from NPC seem to go against traditional MMO's basic settings. Are you worried about not being accepted by players and blocking casual players out?
Are we worried? No. But we accept this will limit our player-base to some degree. We once heard a community member provide an analogy between MMOs and chocolate which we find extremely applicable.
For the last decade players have become accustomed to a specific style and flavor of MMO. Other companies have come along and copied it with various degrees of success but we’re reaching a point now where players’ palates are maturing. They’re looking for unique new flavors, new challenges, and more than anything are wanting to play an MMO where their decisions matter. Players want to play a game where whether they log in or not has an impact on the world.
We consider ourselves the artisan dark chocolate makers of the MMO world. As an independent, self-published studio we’re “bean-to-bar,” so to speak, and we’re creating new and unique flavors that not everyone will enjoy. We’re ok with that because it’s our art, and we’ll attract the players who are looking for the experience we’re creating.
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And one last question that everyone wants to know, when can we play the game?
For us, player feedback is very important. It’s easy to develop tunnel vision when you’re so close to a project. Also, when developing so many new systems there’s an inherent question of whether the new mechanics are fun or not. So while we haven’t set any specific dates yet, we want to get at least our Alpha 1 players into the world as soon as we can, well before the game is considered feature-complete.
This gives them an opportunity to provide feedback, and makes sure we’re heading in the right direction. Ideally, that would happen as early as this winter.
