Good morning all,

Public access to Chronicles of Elyria will come in a few different steps:

1. Offline Demo
2. Closed Alpha
3. Open Alpha
4. Beta
5. Early Access

The offline demo will be available this spring and is intended to give players hands-on experience with the game client. There will be some baked in logic from the Soulborn engine, but in general it'll be there to give players a chance to see what the game looks and feels like. We'll also be releasing the Architecture Tools this spring.

Some time after the offline demo we'll have a closed [pre-]alpha release. This release will be to a fairly limited audience and is designed to give us feedback before the game is feature complete. Because the game won't be complete, and will be in a rough state, we won't be allowing streaming or YouTube videos of the closed alpha. We just don't feel like there would be much benefit to showing the game to world in this state.

However, after we've gotten the feedback we needed and have had a chance to address the major concerns, we'll remove the NDA on the closed alpha so that those participating will have a chance to show the game off to the larger community. This will give us even more feedback, but will come at a time when we feel good about letting people see what pre-alpha/feature complete looks like.

Next, once we're feature complete and are mostly looking for bugs, stress testing, etc... we'll roll out an incremental beta. As with the open alpha, it'll be fine for players to stream the beta. Beta access will be granted based on Influence - using the new Influence format.

Finally, after all is said and done we'll release Early Access. Unlike other MMOs that grant a 3-day Head Start, Early Access for CoE is about populating the world with families, getting the kingdoms set up, establishing early story-line, etc... As a result, there will be a longer-than-normal Early Access, possibly of several months. During Early Access streaming will not only be allowed but encouraged! And, as the goal of Early Access is to populate the world, the servers will not be wiped after Early Access ends.

KnightsBayane pretty much summarized our thinking on this. Chronicles of Elyria has been designed from the beginning to cater to a specific audience. We know that it won't appeal to the mass-market and we're ok with that. Rather than develop a mediocre game that appeals to "most people", we want to make an outstanding game that appeals to a smaller market.

With that said, when we make announcements about the game, people indiscriminately flame the game for not being designed for them. This creates a lot of negative publicity around what is otherwise an awesome game - for the right people.

So our plan is to have multiple closed and open test periods which are specifically designed to include our target audience. This ensures that whatever press or publicity comes from our testing period, it's by the people the game is designed for. There's a huge difference in our mind between constructive criticism coming from our target audience, and noise coming from those who are not.