Hey Luccheno,

I'm happy to answer. When you think of a typical "game engine" you think of the set of libraries used to perform model/terrain/water/particle rendering, camera movement, animation, physics, user input, and sound. These are all, in general, things that the user experiences directly on the client-side and defines the "look" and somewhat the "feel" of a game. For these things we're using the CryEngine. 

In contrast, there are a set of services/libraries running on the back-end that drive the dynamic story engine. These servces are scanning for and initiating dramatic situations and controlling the hierarchical, goal-based AI of the NPCs. These services also define the rules/mechanics which make Chronicles of Elyria different from other games that use the CryEngine. This collection of server-side logic and services is the Soulborn Engine.

The full set of features which are provided by the Soulborn Engine will be revealed over time through developer journals and from answering questions here on the forums.

Cheers!
Caspian

Noted! We'll add it to the FAQ.

FAQ updated. Thanks!

Indeed. We found many of the tasks we wanted to accomplish in CryEngine were simply taking too long. This ranged from UI development, to getting art assets into the right formats for the game, to some of the feature work we were doing.

Our level designers were already more familiar with Unreal anyways so we opted to give it a try.

In the end, it was both faster to get stuff done in Unreal and we're much happier with the results.

There was some lost effort. But we felt it was worth it for the faster overall workflow. We actually experimented with a few different engines, so we knew how long it would take to get us caught up again.

We will be leveraging the community to help us test out the demo before PAX. The criteria we use for selecting who will test the game hasn't been decided yet.

We will likely pull in people who've done a great job posting bugs, some that we feel have heavily influenced the success of the community thus far, and a good mix of males and females and people that have expressed interest in different mechanics.

Ultimately we're looking to get the most valuable feedback we can.