The MMO that never existed - The admirable stupidity of Chronicles of Elyria

imagine an mmo where you can be what you want to be one where your character ages and passes down their legacy to other characters you can start out as a simple peasant one that tends the fields and sells their crops or smith's weapons and armor for other players or delivers the mail you can start out as your typical adventurer maybe you decide to map the land and sell the maps to other explorers maybe you delve through caves for treasures as you might typically expect you can start out as a criminal one who dabbles in pickpocketing or creates a pact with other criminal players to form a black market you can start as royalty from a mayor of a simple town who commissions various buildings and drafts new laws into existence to a king who rules over their kingdom while sending armies of other players to do as their later commands and everything in between this was the concept of chronicles of valyria now if you're watching this and you think like me this sounds both awesome and completely unfeasible at least not without a lot of time and heaps of money being thrown at the game by a triple-a developer so what did chronicles of valyria have going for it a kickstarter by an indie dev team yeah this is going to go exactly how you think it is i first heard about illyria in 2016. obviously the features promised by the developer soulbound studios sounded too good to be true but i figured it was something worth keeping an eye on the kickstarter came and went and the game seemed to be constantly receiving developer blogs and updates but as the years went on i would occasionally think about what was happening with the game and every time that i checked out the progress nothing considerable seemed to have occurred with its development so let's get to the heart of what this game was supposed to be and what it eventually became before i start i want you to know that a little site called twitch exists and that i have a channel on it where i stream nearly every monday tuesday and friday that's it so let's start in march of 2016. this was when the game's kickstarter was announced after it had been slowly building up hype on sites like mmorpg.com everything was all conceptual at this stage various art had been drafted a website had been created with 25 000 members on it dev streams were frequent and answered hard-hitting questions like how realistic will professions be will there be in-game voice chat and can i build up a poison resistance by poisoning myself little by little that's a good question fast forward two more months and the kickstarter comes barreling into the world blowing past its 900 000 funding goal and ending halfway through 1.3 million at this stage there had been a technical demo for snow physics and some aging mechanics that were showcased but the kickstarter was really when the game started to take shape and what exactly it was supposed to be your characters age and die resources are finite quests are non-repeatable the economy is based solely off of how players value items the environment is fully destructible everything that you think should be in a realistic mmo is promised with all the bells and whistles to get you to strike that pledge button and a lot of people myself included to a degree ate this [ __ ] up from soulbound i mean what's not to love about the idea of your character aging from 12 to 14 real world months until they die what's not to love about having an heir to pass your character's skills and legacy down to what's not to love about your character still training their skills running their shop and defending themselves via ai scripting while you're offline from the game well okay that last one not only sounds [ __ ] impossible from a technical perspective but also like a nightmare of uncertainty when you're away from the game imagine selling your last shield for the day before logging off at your blacksmith shop and waking up in the morning to find your character has had their shop ransacked their wife [ __ ] and their dog stuck in a minotaur labyrinth that someone crafted in their backyard using a shovel and 10 pallets of oak planks but i mean this stuff all sounded amazing maps made by players could be faked on purpose making you really earn your reputation as a cartographer in order to have people buy from you the combat system relied on skill and timing rather than waiting for a cooldown bar to tick and spamming buttons contracts could be drawn up between players to create shipping routes and procure rare ingredients for player owned shops choosing for your character to be born into a family with specific physical attributes meant that you could only create your character to generally look like they were from that family and not wind up with some purple-haired freak which would break the immersion i could go on and on about what this game was supposed to be and hell i could probably just start making [ __ ] up alongside the devs oh yeah let's see your tools might chip a bit which makes crafting harder and if you paint your house and then lean on a part of the wall by accident you might leave an imprint of your ass cheek on the wall and every here and there your character forgets that there's six steps on the staircase instead of five and they have that life flashing before their eyes moment where they think they're going to fall off the face of the earth regardless all of the boasting did have people foaming at the mouth lining up to secure their place in the closed alphas and betas and all that that brings us to the pricing model from what i could tell it sounded like they were charging for their game up front and then also having a subscription model on top of that this subscription model allowed for people to buy lives so like i said your character was supposed to have lived for 12 to 14 real world months meaning that you'd be paying a yearly subscription more or less with each soul costing around 30 us dollars the only kicker to this was that if your character kept dying in the game their overall lifespan would decrease by two days at a time the system was certainly unique but definitely flawed had the game actually come out with this philosophy i can only imagine a syndicate of griefers banding together to just start slaughtering people and taking two days off of their paid time repeatedly i mean sure the devs had planned a whole jail system around this but i'm unsure if it would have stopped people from terrorizing the quote unquote honest folk so with the kickstarter you could buy in at a 35 pledge and get one of their so-called sparks of life if you paid more you got access to stuff like extra mounts beta access pets all the kind of stuff that you would expect from a kickstarter campaign now the issue here is what happens when you have roles like kings and queens dukes and duchesses and other high up management positions i've seen some kickstarter campaigns where the really big stuff winds up to be around uh 250 or so usd it's what i would consider to be about the limit of someone who really wants to help contribute in my eyes especially if it comes with a lot of really cool in-game bonuses with chronicles of valyria in order to become a ruler of a kingdom backers had to pledge 10 000 united states fun bucks and four people did it three people chipped in at five thousand dollars to design a creature or a [ __ ] fighting style 25 people bought in to become a duke or duchess at the low low price of thirty five hundred dollars and this kind of stuff went all the way through different points on the pledge chart design a relic for 2500 a piece of jewelry for 2 000 a weapon for 1500 a food or drink for a thousand a tattoo or hairstyle for 750 and become a count or countess for 500 bucks with a whopping 342 people backing that particular option now i can take the road here where i call out the devs for their greed but people did know what they were supposed to get and they made the big boy grown-up decision to sink a couple grand on a kickstarter indie team with zero games under its belt the point is that people were sure absolutely positive that this game was going to come to fruition well a little under 11 000 were sure of it at least i think my favorite part about this whole kickstarter is the pretentious drivel that was listed under the why kickstarter part of the campaign we've turned to kickstarter to fund this project because traditional game publishers won't take this risk they are incentivized to clone the latest success and merely reskin it but not all players want a wow clone or to play the same game every time our innovative ideas come from gamers for gamers uh reading this might have actually unlocked the secret to time travel because i swear to god i smell cheetos right now or maybe i just got reminded of it when i saw that every pledge package from 2 000 onwards included stuff ranging from a launch party invite to a private dinner to a gaming weekend with the devs oh gosh i i hope the address is correct hey hey chris or should i say king gunther it's uh it's gunther oh come in bro we ordered some dominoes and we got a case of ice cold monster energy well i mean it should be ice cold by now hopefully brandon forgot that we were starting at eight i told you daylight savings time just started brandon not in front of king gunther it's uh it's gun theater anyways come in come in we just hooked up the land and we're gonna start with some cod three everything after that one was garbage as we all know but once we get a few rounds of tdm in we can switch over to some everquest 2 for a few hours before rounding it out with you guys watching me speedrun super mario land for the game boy i just started speedrunning but i've gotten pretty good this is gonna be so lit yeah you're good with totino's and timbits for breakfast bruh so with the kickstarter fully funded with the 115th highest raised amount for a project at the time and the team raring to go soulbound began hammering away at their masterpiece due the rest of 2016 in the hopes of getting the game out by an estimated date of december 2017. 2016 kickstarter updates included tons and tons of concept art vague screenshots and animations which made it look like the studio was doing something with its time and money most of the time though it was just the devs further elaborating on these enchanting systems that they consistently seem to invent the official website updates on the other hand were almost all entirely about getting the store working properly alongside the forums oh yeah did i mention there was a store where you could buy nearly the same stuff that you could buy on kickstarter well there was and it raised another eight or so million dollars over its lifespan for the developer so grand total rounding down we're looking at a nine million dollar budget or 8 million if they included the initial kickstarter funding into the final figure all right sure let's put that into perspective take something like everquest it was about as simple as an mmo could be for the most part upon its release in 1999 and that had a budget of about 3 million dollars when adjusted to 2016 standards that's about 4.3 million dollars now let's compare it to world of warcraft's initial budget the best info that we've got on that is a budget of 200 million over its first four years of development so we'll divide that by four and adjust for inflation to come out to 63 million by 2016 standards alright last one let's look at star wars the old republic's development budget right i'm not even going to adjust that for inflation now i'm not going to sit here and discredit these games they all had their moments in the sun and they all made an impact on the mmo genre in some form or another even with two of them dying off by now but the important thing is that these games had a very tight focus of things that you could do explore places follow a story if you want do quests level up kill bosses maybe do some side things that could be integrated into those previous steps chronicles of illyria's focus was everywhere it's an adventure game with a focus on combat and exploration no wait it's also a shopkeeping game about the economy no it's a hardcore survival game but it's also a town management game the game was trying to do everything with a severe lack of budget even though 9 million dollars sounds like a lot to give one final set of examples games like borderlands 2 beyond 2 souls heavy rain and half-life 2 all multiplied this 9 million dollar budget several times over during their development cycles so with 2017 ringing in the new year the team transferred all of their news from kickstarter to their shiny website with pledge packages and again a lot of this tended to be q a coverage but as much as i've been raking these guys through the coals soulbound actually did come up with quite a few new things to show off in time for pax east in march of 2017 this all took place in the form of an offline demo which was showcased to let players get a feel for the mechanics of the game or at least the adventuring mechanics the whole thing was done in unreal and likewise looked very good graphically for an mmo but obviously this still wasn't an mmo at this stage beyond this the devs continued their habit of overextending into an absurd amount of features which encompassed the likes of a 2d multi-user dungeon or mud so that they could test their online features and an isometric city management game which was supposed to be a major part of what the rulers of valyria do when playing these two whole other game modes wouldn't come into existence until later and as pax east came and went the devs continued their cycle of showing screenshots and answering questions for months at a time say what you will from the outside looking in soulbound was very good at keeping its backers sated enough with new ideas animations and concept art to keep the naysayers to a minimum and as someone who hadn't personally backed i too thought that the studio was toiling away at their magnum opus because let's be honest they were but none of this ever really had a chance with the budget that they had and the time constraint that they self-imposed so 2017 barreled on with the main updates being various in-game animals coming to life a voxel-based look for illyria's mud being settled on and a pretty decent looking jousting system being showcased additionally the soulbound team had picked up quite a few new employees which had worked on mmos like world of warcraft star wars the old republic and guild wars 2 for many years honestly had the devs been looking at a 2020 release i'd say that these updates were right on target but by the end of the year this is what the team had come up with hell there wasn't even an update in november which says a lot about how these guys were probably scrambling to get something more ready for the end of the year and again from the outside looking in someone could easily look up chronicles of valyria at the time and see this intentionally ugly voxel-based imagery and wondering what the [ __ ] was going on so here comes 2018 and people are starting to get antsy which is reflected pretty heavily in the blog updates the first update of the year was that kind of alright guys we're ready to kick some ass and get things ready for this year but the second update was a lot more telling which was a long flowing blog post packed with the usual semantics of gee developing a game sure does take a lot and we set a pretty solid foundation in 2017 there were analogies which compared the hardships of game developing to architecture there were reassurances of how much the studio truly accomplished in the past year there were memes horrible forced memes that i don't want any part of personally but lastly there was the promise that the people who pledged enough fun bucks to get access to the first alpha would definitely get to play the game no matter how finished it was in 2018 now mind you these were people who paid at least 350 dollars on kickstarter and god knows how much on the site's official shop so this blog update wasn't enough to keep the negative energy from a chunk of the community at bay five days later a news update titled state of valyria state of the studio gets pushed out explaining some of what was going on in the background so basically these guys started approaching publishers and said something to the degree of hey we want to make an mmo with players that are always logged in and ai which takes over for them when they're offline and a focus on adventuring shopkeeping farming town establishing map making player created laws death that affects how long a player can play for physics based landscape terraforming animal taming and writing and a couple hundred more features which we won't bore you with will you fund us well the publishers which didn't laugh them out of the room said something along the lines of yeah sure we'll find you but uh we're gonna want a return on our investment we want loot boxes micro transactions something that gets people to spend money so that we can make money and soulbound being the prolific gamer-oriented visionaries that they are declined at those offers alright let's make something perfectly clear here do i like loot boxes no and that's obviously not a revolutionary brave stance but i do think that they can be done right if loot boxes are purely cosmetic and offer no gameplay advantages then i'm definitely more okay with them if the same things that you can get in a loot box can be earned in game or you can earn the boxes themselves in game especially if the game's free to play which i guess this one wasn't going to be then i have no reason to be upset honestly i know not everyone shares that opinion but sometimes games with super broad ideas that would normally take a lot of money to integrate or games that are typically free to play otherwise kind of need money to survive that's just how things work now i wasn't at these meetings obviously maybe these guys were getting offers from the seediest companies which had nothing but ill intent and only wanted to drain a player as much as possible with gameplay affecting bonuses from microtransactions and that very well could have been the case but at this stage you've taken millions of dollars from random people with the assurance that you would deliver them what you've been working on you've hired people onto your team under the assumption that they weren't going to be canned a few months later and the most [ __ ] up part is that as we established those millions are only a fraction of what's needed to make something of this magnitude a reality so when i see the devs dismissing the idea that they would never include something so heinous as loot boxes in their video game but are ultimately foregoing financial help to actually make the video game a video game well it all kind of seems like a stupid decision ultimately especially when they outright admit in this blog post that they knew that they would never be able to continue working on the game at the rate that they wanted to without the aid of a publisher integrity is great until it chains you to the ground and makes you unable to get your game off its feet but this lack of good decision making ultimately only continued to make itself evident when soulbound continued to put out stuff like these half-finished animations that might normally be a fun pet project for a hearthstone ad and the whole hey guys i promise we're still working on the game and are involved in the community haha only seem to get more desperate at this stage as stuff like a discord screenshot was posted to prove that the devs are still active in the community see us all saying the same thing one right after another intentionally totally proves that we answer questions and ingratiate ourselves into the community of course this is before blog updates disappeared for another month in february store updates and reservations for various in-game stuff continued to roll out as usual but the actual in-game footage trickled to a crawl sure there were some various new lore blurbs that were vomited out every here and there but not a lot of visually reassuring footage was presented beyond some character creation stuff which looked to be slightly more advanced than what had been shown before i think the funniest thing to look back on in these updates were the meet the mods aspect of them these chunks of text had people learning about the moderators of illyria's various sites and social media and were always followed by information on one of valyria's player made kingdoms kingdom colors black red and gold nice alright let's see red and black red and gold red and black black gold and red oh red black and gold usually this chunk of a blog update would take a solid third to over half the update the worst part about these non-updates was the fact that a lot of these ideas sounded really good most of them were really thought out the crafting update in particular utilized a lot of jargon to make it seem like the devs knew exactly what they wanted to do and how they were going to approach it but again without anything besides walls of text and still images they might as well have just been updating their twitter feed with what-ifs and like i said before these cool features were just further and further from actual development it's almost as if a day at soulbound consisted of rolling into the office sitting around with a group of people and going right guys today's topic is communication and then people just started tossing up ideas well uh what if someone wanted to be anonymous and they put on a hooded cloak and it hid their nameplate well uh what if someone wanted to forge a new identity for a specific kingdom and they just came up with how that would work meanwhile greg who's been programming water physics all night is falling asleep at his desk while the idea people go to lunch without him anyways half the year went by before alpha 1 was finally mentioned again and what was mentioned was that it would simply exist well sure there were details on how it would work but nothing new on when it would work the thing is these guys knew that their lifeblood was crowdfunding anything to make the game look like it was progressing at a rapid pace anything to keep people involved contests sales events you name it and by august these contests sales and events were basically the main things that soulbound had actually produced and the worst or maybe the best part about all of this is that it actually did work to a degree because i remember the searing plague event making enough ripples for me to actually go check it out at the time it was a simple kind of time waster thing but it got me to the site it got me thinking that these guys were hammering away at the game and most importantly it got me looking at pledges again which i thankfully did not actually buy by october the community seemed to once again get rightfully concerned about the lack of actual gameplay footage from soulbound there's only so many times that you can show someone a still image of something in game before people start going alright cool but can you make it move around for a recording or two so the october update again started coming up with a metaphor to describe building a game this one was about cars but just like with cars people quickly wanted to see what the game was going to look like well yeah and just like with cars people tend to want to see it go vroom vroom when they drop ten thousand dollars on a deposit for one of course the blog post continued to instead flaunt things that they did get done which was accompanied as always by hardly any evidence of it the best part was how much they continued to talk about their mud which had now moved away from voxel graphics and was now in the process of being converted to low poly meshes in the unreal engine again this mud was almost exclusively for testing online functionality in their client it was something taking up a huge chunk of time just getting it to work properly and it wasn't anything that the players would be able to use yes that's what the backers want to hear about and so october blew by with more updates about the mud than anything else beyond another lore dump and the infamous metamod feature at this stage we can comfortably split blog updates and news updates into their actual categories fluff with a side of features and distractions with a side of please fund us october's distraction news brought about voting on what each server wanted its map to look like this was followed by november's news of players being able to select which server they wanted to be on i actually participated in both of these events while still managing to cling onto my wallet thankfully but as far as the rest of the year went nothing i mean not nothing but it may as well ben november and december saw the same amount of blog updates combined as october and offered about half the substance and now we're at 2019 and shit's starting to hit the fan but slowly the fan is on low and the ship pellets are small but it's happening first off the only update in january started by telling everyone that the discord community was kept safe from not safe for work spamming bots because someone built a bot to stop this from happening fantastic start then the rest of the update showcased 5 sets of armor over 4 bullet points of information and the kicker was that the meet the mod section had been redacted because the mod had no longer wanted to be associated with soulbound anymore oh at this stage alpha one participants were getting fed information by the soulbound team on a private forum and the only public bit of info which we got was that nothing was happening yet so anyways here's march in this update we see soulbound hire another three to 20 people and double their office space size a great sign if they had say a large publisher backing them a not so great one when all of their income comes from crowdfunding as a reminder our goal for the completion of release 0.5.0 is to have a complete playable game composed of all the many features that we've been working on over the last 18 months or so we knew it was going to take a lot of hard work so the studio entered a bit of a heads-down focused mindset no longer content to just tell you about what we're working on the team has committed to showing you alexa what is chronicles of illyria chronicles of valeria is an upcoming mmorpg also commonly referred to as that was a long and windy one thanks alright so we're at the very edge of that stalling for time phase before people start to actually get pissed off so as a last-ditch effort to prevent that soulbound has now began showcasing some of the in-game footage of their low-poly client that started out as their mud and boy does it sure look like a game moving on so april comes and soulbound has decided to start letting players stake out land on their maps in a game that doesn't exist in any form besides its soulbound's office this process takes 4 months of time and is the only thing reported on during it besides farming the mere concept of farming is explained in great detail along with gorgeous one frame animations that really showcase what a carrot looks like the team has now ran out of mods to interview and has resorted to interviewing their discord bot instead the team has run out of red black and gold kingdoms to ask about and is now scrambling to find more backers in order to fill this niche the fan is on medium and the [ __ ] is starting to pile up in mid-august soulbound posts another strangled plea which amounts to them posting four videos from various developers talking about how hard it is to make games on time while also ensuring that they point out the existence of no man's sky and how it went from hated to beloved this seems to stave off criticism for a month as a new mod is featured in the mida mod section and a new kingdom in the illusory crimson red and gold flavor is showcased while this combination of colors does save people for august soulbound then makes the fatal mistake of not doing the same in september and instead finally feel cornered enough to show off their mud adaptation dubbed pre-lyrium now mind you this is the same [ __ ] client that they've insisted is only for internal testing and maybe an alpha or two but despite all of their sidestepping they finally released about 10 minutes of a game that looks worse than runescape did in 2009 which is probably the worst thing that they could have done after stalling for this long people were absolutely furious openly mocking the studio in the video's comment section and demanding that the studio lawyer up oh but that didn't stop soulbound instead of going oh right maybe we should pin a comment with a disclaimer for the general public or maybe we should just unlist that video so random people don't get the wrong idea or maybe we should talk and say hey this is just kind of a internal testing model we just want to show off some mechanics here directly at the beginning of the video instead of doing any of that the studio doubled down by posting a soundscape showcasing the sounds of a particular biome this of course also looked like complete [ __ ] especially when you could check their previously posted videos and looked at jousting from two years ago sure people laughed and continued to berate the studio but did that stop soulbound kind of the team decided to continue posting their preliria updates in the safety of their echo chamber forums away from the mean mean youtube commenters nice nice nice nice nice nice and finally the 600 pound gorilla in the room has dropped a load into its hand and has flung it at the fan with the december of 2019 update this was the last time i had checked up on illyria until recently and there's a good reason why at this stage soulbound was aggressively out of money and as a last-ditch effort to procure some more from the pockets of their backers they divided up the leftover land on the map and began auctioning it i'm not kidding these [ __ ] took the leftover land that nobody wanted and started marketing it off to the public for anywhere from sixty five dollars to three thousand five hundred dollars we went from a developer who claimed that they never wanted to put in loot boxes or micro transactions to one that actually decided that selling off pieces of a map to a game that wasn't even close to completion was the way that they were going to stay in this thing during the event npcs will also be settling in illyria this means that if you're eyeing up a new settlement county or duchy waiting might mean that an npc swoops in and claims this domain so act fast when you see the right holding at the right price yeah what little sympathy for the devs i had is completely gone at this stage the updates were almost completely dedicated to soulbound settlers of illyria event and not even the orange and black county of drake can save the game from its fate soulbound then decides that hiring on some more people is the right call before spending four whole months even getting their auction to work correctly and finally the last nail in the coffin came on march 20th 2020 after talking about getting a working alpha out to its players for over two years alpha one players got access to a pre-alpha with a strict nda attached this pre-alpha consisted of an obstacle course on illyria's infamous pre-lyria client complete with such features as climbing walls jumping over gaps zip-lining across chasms and running along walls and jumping between them propelling the pre-alpha into existence as the worst thing to happen in 2020 thankfully the second worst thing to happen in 2020 started ramping up right around this time and made sure to shake soul bound for the remainder of its lunch money before the studio closed down in april of course the ceo went kicking and screaming down with the ship making sure to wildly flail in a news post about how preelyria intentionally looks like garbage this mile-long wall of text is probably some of the most absurdly funny [ __ ] to read when you haven't paid a dime to the company but probably pretty [ __ ] up if you have i won't read the whole thing but i will leave it up on the screen for a bit this is my favorite and probably the most telling bit about how this game was handled we had publishers from all over the world flying in to meet the team see our development progress and get hands on with the game but after being in production for just a few months there wasn't enough to show yet so the conversations generally went something like either work faster show us more or we're going to want to take over development and make changes to the business model this was unacceptable to us and one by one conversations with publishers fell silent yeah that sounds about right so anyways the ceo goes on to say that the land auction floundered and flopped horribly and that soulbound had run out of money forcing him to close down the game's storefront and to fire all of his employees including the ones that he had just hired a couple months ago now all of that said there was one key point in here that might have actually been true the ceo admits that they had considered bringing back all of the store stuff that had been sold out or was no longer available while being completely transparent with illyria's dwindling community about the state of the game he claims that he was certain that the community would rally behind them and get them far long enough to get to that ever elusive alpha one state so that they could meet again with investors for another chance at outside funding but then he claims that kovid started to rip through the world and that he decided that this was the morally correct choice now if that was 100 true i'd actually have some pretty big respect for this decision but there's also a pretty big chance that he just didn't want to face a reality where even the game's biggest fans turn on them in a shitstorm of untold magnitude effectively barring the game from ever rising up from the ashes in some form or another we'll never know for sure but i'd say that both realities are distinct possibilities especially because at the end of this admission of defeat is the idea that many of the developers had reached out to the ceo to tell him that they would be interested on working on the game for free if it took them this long to come up with what they have with a pretty sizable paid team i imagine that the game would be ready for alpha by 2040 on free labor alone oh but this isn't the end of our tale what did you think the backers who threw millions of dollars collectively at a developer would just go oh shucks looks like we messed up on this one maybe one day nah dude these gamers rose up and started immediately getting together some fat lawsuits aimed at the studio for fraud to which the ceo came back and threw his hands up while going whoa whoa whoa when i said the studio was shutting down i didn't mean the game was ending no no no no no no hold on hold on let me clarify you see game development is a challenging endeavor yeah the ceo is about to hit the community with the old tried and true in the hopes of staving off being sued so after telling the community that the game is definitely still going to come out our guy eventually puts out an faq hoping to quell the bloodthirsty backers let me summarize this for you question when will i get my money back answer never we spent it question how do i get my money back answer you won't like legally we are fine to not give you your money back you [ __ ] nerds question what happened to the money answer we spent all of it two mil a year for four years baby question prove it answer no question why do you suck at answering questions answer we're trying our best not to piss people off and failing at every turn there are a lot more questions and answers here but you get the gist most of the questions in the funding category have to do with the lawsuits and complaints to which the ceo responds by saying that they're not in hot water with the law yet but that they could be if things escalate as far as the general game development questions went the ceo continued to repeatedly state that the game was still going to be worked on no matter what by him and six or so volunteer devs the guy links to a few videos which have been around for a long ass time to show off the progress which the studio made like it was something new and then fields a few questions about why they locked down the forums the discord and inadvertently made it so that people couldn't access their account transactions anymore and finally the ceo promises to be as transparent as he possibly can be from the faq on out stating what progress might be made on the game and if any timelines begin showing up on the horizon and then he stopped communicating for eight months well technically he made a little post to tell everyone that he fixed the whole missing transactions issue in june but beyond that nothing now at this stage backers had continued to try and rally together some kind of lawsuit that would stick but the issue here is that soulbound hadn't technically legally done anything wrong they were able to prove that they spent the money on development well so they claim and as always kickstarter is never held liable with these particular types of things but i do believe soulbound just because they never had enough money in the first place to accomplish the seemingly endless features that they intended to include honestly they probably just spent the entire eight million on too many different ideas rather than just focusing on one or two really good ideas and then expanding from there additionally soulbound was able to say that they were still working on the game however small so the threat of legal action rang hollow for the most part enter december of 2020 soulbound breaks the silence by releasing a video on youtube titled inside chronicles of illyria episode one except this time they figured out the best way to stay transparent and to regain people's trust was to talk at them with the comments and the like to dislike ratio turned off in this just under 8 minute video our guide jeremy decides that using the pandemic as an excuse for all the really poor decision making throughout the game's history was the best route to go i mean come on who can't relate to being affected in some form by kovid am i right he then goes on to state that an independent auditor verified all of the funding was used solely for the game which again we don't have any direct proof of but i'm willing to believe it it just doesn't sound too good to the average person when you tell them that some random auditor definitely verified that you spent 8 million dollars in 4 years on a game that looks like it's trying to run death stranding on an n64 the bulk of this video can be summed up as here's everything i said in text here's what i meant by it here's all of the stuff that we accomplished for the 43rd time and the reason that we didn't show much of anything was because no one wants to look at code in an update and we got code for days baby this is not only essential for our approach to development but also showcase the flexibility of our backend and its ability to cater to different clients now your computer didn't just lag the [ __ ] audio and video for this apology explanation video straight up lagged when rendering or something and they didn't re-render it which speaks volumes about the development process seeing as nobody was expecting this video to come out at all and they had all of the time in the world to get it just right to give you a sense of what that means we've worked on features that fall into the areas of account management character selection creation access restriction animal and npc ai survival mechanics combat communication equipment and inventory items and containers identities knowledge and gossip locomotion npc interact many of the game systems i mentioned earlier are a lot further along than most people realize oh yeah which ones where are they at tell us jeremy you're trying to be transparent right yeah this whole video is literally every major update rolled into seven minutes of video so cool but would you be surprised to learn that these videos have continued getting posted every month through the most recent one on june 13th yeah me either but let's see what's going on anyways alright so 2021 saw the return of both news and blog posts blog posts were initially relegated to fielding more questions from a community of dozens i imagine whereas the news was just them posting their youtube videos in video 2 dark souls default character jeremy walsh managed to get the background for the game's title to fit on the whole screen which is a good step when we set out to create coe god [ __ ] dammit he's talking about what they've done again alright so after half of the video is taken up with regurgitated information this is where things get spicy again so as we've established you got the adventuring shopkeeping part of the mmo you know the things that make a traditional mmo and mmo and you've got the wild card in the form of resource management which the ruling kingdoms and royalty participate in aka the [ __ ] that the people who paid the most money paid for guess which one that chronicles of valyria is now pivoting towards yep with january's video soulbound has now effectively announced that they're going to focus on only the resource management and city building mode of the game instead of all of the other cool [ __ ] that would have made the game what it was supposed to be video 3 continued to detail this idea with what exactly this online strategy game is supposed to be oh yeah and this is what it [ __ ] looks like now if the citizens don't like your offer or simply don't like you they won't help so this came with a myriad of exposition as is soulbound tradition a blog post followed up this video to answer questions that the richest backers had as far as breaking down the game's overly complicated system for getting it released first off this new game is called kingdoms of valyria and yeah it's a standalone game release that the devs hope to later ingratiate into the main coe game secondly the game is supposed to be arriving in four phases first is a colony settlement sim then as a grand strategy game then as an mmo game and finally as an mmo but much closer to the original scope of coe say what you want about soulbound they are big dreamers at all times the first chunk of this game is actually supposed to release sometime this year though god knows if we'll wind up getting more screen recordings of stronghold 2 or a new video game the next few blog posts and videos all seem to further expand on which mechanics are going to be put into their now colony management sim while peppering in a good amount of reminders as to what's been accomplished so far i'm actually fairly sure that you can condense every single update video from december 2020 through may 2021 and stripped down the repeated info to get a video that's probably less than half the length of this one and finally we hit the june 2021 update which is actually fairly big because the crazy bastards finally did it they made an alpha test sure it took five years sure it took over eight million dollars sure the game looks like someone ran their balls across a keyboard with unity up by accident sure the game isn't even an mmo anymore but they [ __ ] did it so right now things are just popping into existence as needed of course this alpha was packed with an nda that had people agreeing to [ __ ] like i promise not to pursue any class action lawsuit against soulbound studios if i play your alpha but that was later redacted after the developer got called out by various influencers and concerned citizens damn those influencers and concerned citizens why are they looking at our ndas and not giving us the benefit of the doubt now all that said it was also reported that various people online decided to start verbally harassing both soulbound and its community with threats of violence and i know this sounds like a really obvious and totally normal stance but if you saw a video or heard someone talking about this game and explaining the issues with it and decided you know what i should go hit the dev with a few death threats then you are a [ __ ] [ __ ] so yeah i hope i'm not perpetuating that kind of [ __ ] with this video but i guess i thought i'd cover my bases but this is where things have wound up at soulbound the latest updates have all been on kingdoms of valyria the youtube comments and likes are still disabled and the developers seem to be content with trying to keep their heads down while they toil away at getting something out that might avoid a lawsuit honestly part of me still feels for them but the large majority of me still thinks that these guys had a couple of great opportunities to see their game finished would there have been compromises of course a aaa dev would have compromised 20 times over by now but aggressively holding on to that vision of the perfect game with a budget that undercuts a lot of single-player games that come to market accosted them much more than compromising ever would have it's actually kind of ironic when you think about it whenever soulbound compromised on a timeline and did their best to reassure their backers that these things happen they always pointed out all these other devs from these massive companies noting that the road to a great game is filled with hardships but they never realized that this form of hardship might come with the idea that their game might have to include these dreaded micro transactions to exist it's admirable stupidity because on one hand these guys stuck to their guns even as they drain their funding dry but on the other hand this game doesn't exist in any form that they ever completely envisioned so that's it as far as anything further involving soulbound or illyria for now i doubt that i'll ever circle back to this particular topic again but i just wanted to share this ride that i didn't even know that i was on until recently i didn't realize the topic had been talked about by a few different people until about two-thirds of the way through this script but i guess i still wanted to do this while i'm waiting for my fable two [ __ ] to get here hopefully this entire experience is either amused or informed people somewhat on the issue of funding something that sounds too good to be true though there are definitely other countless horror stories to draw from still maybe this was a fun time for you regardless it definitely has been for me and hey maybe one day illyrio will make its grand debut and knock all the naysayers out once and for all or maybe it'll just remain a distant dream thanks for watching like i said i kind of did this because i had about a 10 day wait or so while my xbox 360 and fable 2 purchases arrived i had no idea that the game wasn't on pc at all so here we are until then i've got merch here i've got a twitch here i've got a twitter here i've got a discord somewhere and i've got a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 1,594,144

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Id: u5byfi2JVdo

Length: 45min 58sec (2758 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021