On April 9th we posted an update to let you all know what was happening with Soulbound Studios and Chronicles of Elyria. In that post we promised to be more transparent with our community, and we subsequently followed that up with a detailed FAQ on April 27th. It has been a bit longer than we hoped since that last communication, but we have been heads down working on many of the things we addressed in our prior posts.
Restored Forums & Transactions
First, in an effort to preserve the community history, all of your hard work - which is still being used, we have reenabled the forums. The forums have been restored in a Read-Only format, as we still lack the bandwidth to ensure that it is a safe place for the community. In the interest of transparency, we have removed all threads from March 24th forward to the state they were in just prior to our controversial March 24th post. We’ve done so to keep the focus on the state of the game and development. You’ll be able to reference all of the discussion threads from the inception of this project. It is our intent to, at some point, re-open the forums once we have established a new volunteer moderation team.
One of the biggest concerns we heard was your inability to view your Transaction Histories on the Chronicles of Elyria website. The Chronicles of Elyria site is custom built which presented unique technical challenges when we disabled the store. However, it was never our intention to remove that access, and we know that being able to see your Transaction History is important. So, we have restored the functionality and you should once again be able to view all of your previous transactions.
Transparency & Inside Chronicles of Elyria
Over the past few months, during our ongoing conversations about the best pathway to deliver Chronicles of Elyria to you, we’ve had to take inventory and revisit our past progress on the game. Much work has been completed but it is not yet ready for release. Because we want you to be a part of this process, even in its current state, we have decided to start a series of video posts where we can discuss and show you the state of development -- what’s done, what’s not done, and what needs to be improved before it’s ready for release; as well as share our plans for moving forward. We’ll announce the date of the first installment shortly.
Trial of the Tested
We know this process is taking longer than we’d hoped, and we are anxious to get something playable into the hands of our community. In that spirit, one area of the game that we previously released for feedback to our Alpha 1 backers was the game’s parkour and traversal mechanics, which were released as part of a playable demo and competition we called the Trial of the Tested. We have decided to make the Trial of the Tested available to all Chronicles of Elyria backers who have a pledge package and an account in good standing, not just the Alpha 1 backers. This in no way replaces the game we have promised to deliver, but allows you to experience something playable in the Elyria universe while we continue development. See our previous news post for more information about the Trial of the Tested.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we launch our "Inside Chronicles of Elyria" video blog. We look forward to sharing more news with you soon.
Sincerely,
Jeromy Walsh
CEO & Founder
Soulbound Studios, LLC
