Chronicles of Elyria - an MMO Like None Before

Chronicles of Elyria is an extremely ambitious MMO, currently in the making by a crew of developers who had worked for major studios like Pandemic, SOE and Bungie. The effort is crowd-funded, and although the makers are looking to raise some $900k through KickStarter, they are apparently well on their way to meeting that goal. Chronicles of Elyria is much more than the latest take on the concept of perma-death, already tackled by games like Ark:Survival Evolved and Rust. It is an attempt to create a living-breathing world in which characters grow old and eventually expire over a 10-14 month-period, and where the family and various other social connections play a major role. Players can get married and have children and there will apparently be an heir system implemented as well, which will essentially allow players to continue their life-voyage in the game.

"Dying" in the classic MMO sense will in fact be possible in the game, but given how such trauma can be hard on the body, dying this way essentially shortens one's overall life-span by a couple of days. In case someone is an influential person (like a king for instance) dying will have a bigger 4-5 day impact on his overall life span.

Families are extremely important in the game, not only defining one's starter-spot, but also being responsible for many of one's character traits. Families can be built on the go, so players can in fact get their friends into the fold through them. The Spark of Life is at the core of the game: upon purchasing the title, one will start out with one such spark. Upon death, the soul remains, and other sparks can be used to essentially re-incarnate the soul, so the skills built up during one's previous life don't go entirely to waste.

The big question remaining in regards to Chronicles of Elyria is just what sort of ways will players find to exploit it all and exactly how well will all these interesting and challenging aspects be implemented?

Philip Thalberg is a Dota 2 player and a long-time member of GosuTeam.