Monday, July 09, 2018

The Chronicles of Elyria

            This week I happened upon something that I found so exciting that it’s captured all my attention and it is scooping up all of my free time. Naturally, that means you get to hear about it now. It’s called... The Chronicles of Elyria.

            The Chronicles of Elyria is a new Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game that won’t even come out until next yet – and here I am, waiting for it as I haven’t waited since the days of waiting for the new Harry Potter books to come out. And I’m not the only one! There’s a huge community waiting out there, some of whom have been desperately waiting for this game since 2016 or earlier. That’s how awesome this game is!

            So, let me tell you a bit about the Chronicles of Elyria. To start off with, I suppose I should tell you how I found it. It was through an online add I saw for the game. Normally I ignore adds, but this one caught my attention – informing me that this was a game where creatures could be hunted to extinction. This was such an intriguing notion that I clicked – and was dragged down the rabbit hole.

            Now, for those of you who don’t know about MMORPGs, basically they are video games with large worlds where you can interact and play with other people. However, aside from that, they’re an awful lot like any other video game – there are real people around, but you don’t have to interact with them. Everything you need is still provided by the Non-Player Characters, and you have a set of quests that you do – and if you get stuck, you just have to look up a guide to figure out how to get unstuck.

            With CoE, everything is different. For starters, you don’t get sent on quests by NPCs waiting around to send you on a mission – when you create you character, an A.I. generates a storyline unique to your character that will appear randomly in the game, with larger events only occurring if you do something in the game that triggers them – such as stealing for the first time, or travelling to a specific town. Rather than chasing around after stories, your story follows you.

            And that’s not all! The kingdoms and towns in the game are primarily run by the players – that’s right, you can climb through the ranks and become a king, bringing whole new levels to the game – shifting from being and adventuring game to a resource management game if you so choose. This, coupled with the resources in the world being finite (they’re usually unlimited), including species being able to go extinct, makes for an incredibly in-depth survival game.

            But, wait, there’s more. Apart from all the wondrous gameplay elements that are too numerous to mention, one incredible aspect of the game is that your character actually ages and dies. That’s right – not only are the resources finite, but so is your time. A character lives for roughly one real-world year, then dies – but their soul lives on. You can then create another character, who inherits skills through the soul, and who might even be part of your own family (yes, you can have families and kids).

            And, the final and most interesting element is that, to maintain the continuity of the game – keeping everyone aging at the same rate and whatnot – when you log out of the game, the A.I. takes over your character and it keeps playing! You leave instructions, and your character continues on in your absence – perhaps saving you tons of time training skills, or performing other tasks.

            There is so much more to tell about this game, but those – at least for me – are the key highlights. The community waiting for the launch is also wonderful, friendly, and welcoming – at least, the one I joined up with is. I was welcomed so warmly when I joined that even I – antisocial though I am – am actually interacting with them. I’ve even contributed to the Lore they are creating – which, it is worth noting, the awesome game developers are incorporating into the game.

            So, if any of that interests you, go check out the Chronicles of Elyria! If you poke around and decide to join the community, I strongly encourage you to consider the Duchy known as the Conclave of Aritaur located in the Kingdom of Vornair on the NA-East server. If I see you mentioning that I sent you, I may even be able to get you welcomed into the county I joined.

            And if you know me in person, I strongly encourage you to send me a message if you plan to sign up on the Chronicles of Elyria website; I can give you my friend code, which will not only earn me points, but it will tell the game we’re friends so it can try to place us relatively close together in the game world – otherwise we might have literal hours to walk if we want to play together. If we can even find each other.


            That’s it. Now, go! Become madly obsessed with Elyria that you might share in my torment as we await its release date!





Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.




Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

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