This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).
I am surprised there aren’t any posts about Chronicles of Elyria on HobbyDrama yet! The community was so rife with drama from start to finish that I don’t even know where to begin.
Throwaway because I will probably be doxxed if I post on my main.
What is Chronicles of Elyria?
Chronicles of Elyria was pitched as a Kickstarter in May 2016 as a dynamic MMORPG with procedurally-generated quests, a fully destructible environment, closed economy, finite resources, and survival elements. The goal was $900k, but they made about $1.3 million in the initial campaign, and through their subsequent crowdfunding efforts made close to $8 million total over the next few years.
What went wrong?
In terms of lofty ideas, Chronicles of Elyria was right up there with Star Citizen, but with a fraction of the funds. We’d be here all day if I went into detail about all of the game’s proposed features, because it’s like they were trying to be Crusader Kings meets medieval life simulator meets Harvest Moon meets survival game meets action RPG all at once. Browse through their Developer Journals; even without a background in game development, it’s clear that the scope of what they were trying to pull off would have been ambitious for a major studio, let alone a small crowdfunded team.
The game’s initial release date was a laughably unrealistic Q4 2017, so it was no surprise that this would get pushed back again and again over the course of development. However, on March 24, 2020, lead developer Caspian made an announcement that rocked the community: State of Elyria: Into the Abyss (autoplay warning). In his typical long-winded fashion, Caspian spent the bulk of the post outlining the milestones the team reached over the past year, but only in the last few paragraphs did he mention that due to financial stressors from COVID-19, they ran out of money and had to lay off the entire team, shuttering development of Chronicles of Elyria. Because of several factors I’ll cover in the next few sections, the community did not take this well. In less than two weeks, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office reported they had received over 150 official complaints against Soulbound Studios, the most they had ever received for a company in that amount of time. Community whales formed a 'CoE Lawsuit' discord and discussed plans for a class-action lawsuit, demanding accountability and refunds. Some of them even pledged over $20k on the game, and they weren’t going to let Caspian cut and run.
Amidst threats of legal action, on April 9 Caspian dropped another blog post, A Letter from Soulbound Studios to Our Community claiming that the March 24 post came from a “very emotional place.” He said that the community misinterpreted his intent, and that he was actually trying to communicate that he was still working on the game while looking for ways to secure additional funding. As you can expect, this was just as poorly-received as his last announcement.
Wait, why did people spend so much money on this game? And how did the drama get so spicy?
By its own design the game stirred up drama even before release. With social stratification based on medieval feudalism literally built into the system, there was no way around it; the developers cheekily called it the “Dance of Dynasties.” There were multiple tiers of "pledges" and if I’m remembering correctly, the prices after the kickstarter were $500 for a Mayor title, $1000 for Count, and $3000 for Duke. The most coveted were of course the King/Queen titles, which had people shelling out a whopping $10000 for the chance to be royalty in an unreleased game. Even with the limited supply (6 kingdom slots per server iirc), these kingdom packages sold out all but one server. A few monarchs even purchased TWO kingdom slots to guarantee their supremacy on their chosen server.
It’s very difficult to overstate the cult-like mentality of the community during the “peak” years of 2016-2018. There was an official CoE discord server where the developers frequently engaged with players, but most of the drama happened in what were called the Discords of Elyria. These were community-run discords for individual kingdoms, duchies, counties, towns, and baronies. Each had their own cliques of ‘advisors’ and elite roleplaying cabals.
No, ‘elite roleplaying cabals’ is not an exaggeration; these people were spending thousands of dollars for a title to justify RPing as nobility to lord over the peasant rabble. This attracted a lot of entitled narcissists; the game’s structure practically encouraged it! I’ll give you an anecdotal example: I was really active within a kingdom discord and was eventually appointed as an advisor (the equivalent of what a guild officer would be in a normal MMO). This title was almost useless until release, so it was mainly just a glorified clique with a secret discord channel where we would theorycraft and talk shit about people we didn’t like in the kingdom. But I was the only one on the advisory council that did not possess a noble title, and a Countess kicked up a big fuss about this. Just like the real-life aristocracy, she was scandalized! Wording it in an RP-appropriate way with paragraphs of purple prose, she claimed that the $60 I pledged to the funding of the game wasn’t enough to prove I was fully committed. She and her cronies were so bothered that they tried to get me off the council. They went around DMing a bunch of people, accusing me of being a spy because I used to RP with some guy that left for a rival kingdom, and dredged up screenshots of year-old discord posts as proof my conduct was “unbecoming” of a representative of the kingdom.
There’s a saga behind that story and many others; I can absolutely go into more detail in another post if enough people are interested in the byzantine “Dance of Dynasties” and the inter- and inner-kingdom drama that went down during the development of this beautiful disaster of a game… and developer involvement in said drama. If you want to waste several hours of your life, there is plenty of RP cringe archived on the read-only forums. For now, that’s just a small slice to help illustrate how detached from reality and cult-like this community was. Going back to the downfall...
Early Red Flags
As I alluded to, there were already red flags when the game was first pitched on Kickstarter. Despite hitting the initial $900k and going well into their stretch goals, the devs were still encouraging players to crowdfund long after the Kickstarter ended. There were several additional promotional events (somewhat outdated post that doesn't include everything) selling both cosmetic items and mechanically useful items, despite the developers going through hoops to justify over and over again why the game was not pay to win (it was). Eventually, the constant promotions and gamey tactics prompted community members to question why we were seeing more promotional events than development updates.
The devs then admitted that the original Kickstarter campaign was meant to raise enough to be able to create a demo to attract investors and secure a stream of income that didn’t rely on crowdfunding. Unfortunately, no investors took a gamble on a risky debut from an inexperienced team, and despite Caspian making a few weird statements on Discord and implying they had “other sources” of funding that they did not have to divulge to the community, he too later admitted that they were relying solely on crowdfunding to make this game work.
Well, this news was a departure from their previous claim that all they needed was 900k to develop the game for a Q4 2017 release, and that all funds would be used towards the development of Chronicles of Elyria. No one knew this was all just for a demo to attract investors, and people were justifiably upset.
The Community Begins to Turn
There was (and still is, last I checked!) a particularly loyal and obsessive subset of the community. At the slightest hint of criticism they’d quickly jump in to defend the game and devs. The community moderators were no better, and a lot of posts were censored or deleted from the forums. The developers had built up a sort of cult of personality with their over-involvement with the community. Despite a hilarious lack of transparency about the actual development of the game, they were… uncomfortably close to the playerbase.
Caspian complained about specific players on the official discord and publicly accused two kingdoms of cheating during a cheap browser event meant to (surprise) raise more money. A player made a post on the forums saying the community outreach manager should be replaced (he was known for being snarky and condescending). Said community outreach manager actually private messaged people that upvoted the post, basically saying “if you think I should be replaced, please don’t contact me if you ever need anything in the future.”
Yes, that came from the guy handling outreach.
The "Map Selection" event was rife with its own kingdom vs kingdom drama, but the devs weren't able to redeem themselves here. After months and months of delays for a map event, Caspian failed to deliver the high-resolution maps as promised on November 5, 2018, claiming they were taking too long to render.
"Remember, remember, the 5th of NoRender" became a meme and rallying cry across the community in reference to the constant delays and deception, to the point where people were banned just for saying it in the official discord.
Then there was the issue of Prelyria. Prelyria was the low-poly pre-alpha client of the game they were developing. Meant to be like a graybox, it became a lot more involved than that and seemed to eclipse the development of the “real” game. People felt they had been bamboozled when they looked back:
Pre-alpha video September 2019
Some players with industry experience were pointing out that the amount of time the devs were spending on building the Prelyria assets and developing the low-poly client first (it was a lot more involved than a simple graybox) was actually going to be more cumbersome and definitely not save all the time the devs hoped it would. At this point, Caspian still looked like a well-intentioned idea guy with his head in the sky, and most people didn’t think he was intentionally scamming anyone. Personally, I believe Caspian definitely started out in earnest, but he spoiled his own vision with mismanagement and obfuscation.
Funding was always a touchy subject.
Despite first claiming they only needed $900k to finish the game, then saying no wait actually we need like $3 mil, Chronicles of Elyria raised almost $8 million in total and after 4 years in development had nothing close to a minimum viable product.
We later learned that $500k of that initial $900k came from Caspian himself. This of course was not disclosed until after the Kickstarter.
On March 20, 2020 (four days before the infamous Into the Abyss announcement), the devs released an exciting update claiming that Pre-Alpha Testing Has Officially Begun! Players that had pledged (iirc) $1000 or more now had access to test Alpha I! But excitement quickly faded as players realized this wasn’t really an alpha, but a 10-15 minute demo showing off movement and parkour mechanics and ONLY that. I didn’t have alpha access so I don’t know how bad the demo really was, and those who played it are still under NDA, but I heard it was terrible, and looked like something that could be slapped together in a couple weeks using Unity store assets.
Let’s look again at the timeline Caspian pulled out at the end of 2017 when he admitted the Q4 2017 release date wasn’t going to happen:
- V3 of the Website (Q3 2017)
- ElyriaMUD (Q4 2017)
- Alpha 1 (T1 2018)
- Server Selection (T1 2018)
- Settlement / Domain Selection (T2 2018)
- KoE (T2 2018)
- Design Experiences (T3 2018)
- Alpha 2 (T3 2018)
- Beta 1 (S1 2019)
- Prologue & CoE Adventure Toolkit (S1 2019)
- Exposition (S1 2019)
- Beta 2 (S1/S2 2019)
- Stress Test (Any paid account)(S2 2019)
- Launch (S2 2019)
By March 2020, the only milestones they hit were V3 of the Website, Server Selection in November 2018, and Settlement/Domain Selection (after a series of delays that included a period of radio silence lasting over 100 days, it began somewhere around Summer 2019 and never officially concluded).
The Downfall
Now for the big question I’m sure all of you have: why was it such a big deal when he announced they ran out of funding?
Indeed, projects are cancelled or become vaporware all of the time. While it's obvious Caspian and team were drowning in too many ideas and not enough tangible progress, why was this scummy enough to warrant hundreds of complaints to the AG and a class-action lawsuit?
About a week before the March 24 announcement, Caspian launched the “Settlers of Elyria” event. It’s hard to explain out of context, but basically all the unclaimed duchies, counties, and baronies were going on sale, and players could purchase them at reduced prices.
Yes, up to a day before he announced he laid off the entire team, he was allowing people to spend thousands of dollars on fake titles. Worse was the fact that this event was designed for new members of the community that didn’t have a chance to buy titles before or weren’t able to because of the prohibitive cost.
Illegal? Maybe not. Fucked up? Absolutely. This, combined with Caspian taking a PPP loan right afterwards painted a damning portrait of a man squeezing every last penny out of this failed endeavor before he ran.
Caspian kept the official discord open for a couple days after announcing the shuttering of the studio, but on March 29, he “fired” all of the community mods and deleted the discord, claiming that people were saying “horrible, unimaginable things” about him. There were rumors that he was cheating on his wife with a (much younger) community member. Apparently, a dev was corroborating these statements and providing receipts. Whether these awful rumors were true or not, Caspian’s reaction in the mod forum was nuclear.
The Future of CoE
After nearly six months of radio silence, a few days ago on December 17, 2020, Caspian gave interviews to MassivelyOP and MMORPG.com and released an “update” video that is a nothingburger rehash of old 'gameplay' footage and platitudes. He keeps saying that CoE is in development, but he has nothing to show. He keeps saying some of the staff have volunteered to work on it, yet based on their LinkedIn profiles it looks like most of the original team have found jobs elsewhere. He refuses to release the results of the studio’s audit. The new FAQ on the website is an obvious attempt to avoid lawsuits and in the two interviews he hilariously continues to extol his own transparency while being as transparent as a brick wall.
People are still able to find justifications for Caspian's actions and to this day are in the community-run discords and subreddit trying to keep the hype train going. Maybe it's a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost fallacy, but a lot of people still maintain absolute trust in his vision. I personally did not invest a significant amount of money (but I did waste my time, RIP), but it's still as saddening as it is maddening. Yes, those "Dance of Dynasty" posts on the forum might be cringey now, but people put SO MUCH creative energy and passion into coming up with lore for their kingdoms and duchies and towns and such, and despite being a skeptic for most of my time with the community, it was an incredibly unique experience to be part of this group. I just wish they would move on; put that energy into something productive and not waste it on a failed game. Caspian used them and he will continue to use them if people keep giving him a platform.
EDIT: added more links
EDIT2: Obligatory "wow I didn't expect this to blow up!" but I really didn't! Thanks for the gold x2!
Disclaimer
This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.
Read the original here