Hard to decide - Revival or Chronicles of Elyria as my primary game.

Yanocchi

I am waiting for a deeply immersive storydriven next-gen multiplayer sandbox role-playing game. I see only two good candidates on horison, Revival and Chronicles of Elyria.

Two candidates is better than one, but which one would I play if they both get released succesfully with all the planned features?

I don't care about any differences in their business models because I can afford any of them. I imagined dividing my gameplay time evenly between these two games, until I realised how stressful it could be to play two games that have obligations and risks for houseowners, toll on offline player characters, decay of skills, everchanging and evolving world and storydriven approach. A much more realistic approach would be to invest and dedicate myself a lot more to one of these games and play the other casually without pressure to keep up with its world changes, evolving storylines or fear that something happens to the house or items while I am playing the other game. 

So, which one would I choose as my primary game if they both get released with all the planned features? I had this difficult question last time when I was trying to decide my primary theme-park MMORPG, Neverwinter or Elder Scrolls Online.

Revival and Chronicles of Elyria represent same genre and game category. They also share a low-fantasy theme and a lot of similar innovative game mechanics, features and goals, but each of them also has its own flavour that distinguishes it from the other game.

I have made a list of ten things revealed in 2015 that sparked my interest in each game. These are things which might be missing or noticeably less prominent in the other game.


CHRONICLES OF ELYRIA will have (partially or completely exclusive to it in comparison with Revival):

1. Subterranean building that enables players to build their own underground dungeons

2. Path to becoming a vampire or lich for certain players

3. Role of genetics and family ties in character creation, time on the astral plane and other game features.

4. Soul mate features

5. Research in item crafting and curious balance between production and research

6. Realistic approach to item inventory and backpack space.

7. Use of architecture tool for house building

8. Unique skill or talent randomly attached to certain souls

9. Reincarnation of a soul after 8-12 months into a physical body that is more apt to learn skills

10. Offline player characters staying around in the world




REVIVAL will have (partially or completely exclusive to it in comparison with Chronicles of Elyria):

1. Professional live dungeon masters with DM toolset lurking behind scenes on gold servers

2. Focus on dark fantasy and horror with Lovecraftian setting, gritty world, scheming gods

3. House decoration mode and neighborhood politics for house owners

4. Monstrous appendages or slow transformation into a monstrous shape for certain players

5. Tag system features tied to many game systems and features

6. Fortune-telling skills, origin matrix in character creation process

7. Simple mundane magic and hard to discover deep or ancient magic that can lead to madness

7. Magic based on use of verbal incantations, consumed material components and/or persistent focus item

9. Good and evil karma which is not black and white but more like grey or relative in a mature way, karma with individual gods

10. Realistic approach to farming and growing crops and animals



Here is also a list of some things that both Chronicles of Elyria and Revival aim to have, though not necessarily in completely identical form. The list is longer but I am too lazy at the moment to remember all of the things that these games seem to have in common.

1. Cartography and next-gen approach to maps (creating maps, sensory mini-map features etc.)

2. Astrology (the sky of the game world and position and movememtn of stars on the sky affect astrology and/or fortune-telling)

3. Disguises, reputation and identity

4. Ageing and heritage

5. Contracts between players

6. House management tools (if house owner wants to dedicate a room or some part of a house to another player or NPC)

7. Effects of weather (wearing full armor in hot desert or not enough clothes in cold environment being dangerous and other such things)

8. Player character's body and appearance changing depending on amount of physical exercise or hygiene.

9. Crafting skills based on mini games that mimick actions performed for that type of skill in real life.

10. Complex smart active NPCs (that go about their business and don't just stand with an exclamation mark above their head)

11. Goods and information have to be carried with caravans, couriers, ships or other means in the game world.

12. Resources are finite in the game world and some goods can perish or decay.

13. Gold and goods have to be stored physically in banks or warehouses.

14. No global chat like in existing MMO games.

15. Special plane of existence where player character's are sent when they die (Astral Plane in CoE and Plane of Animae in Revival)

16. Taming and complex management of creatures and henchmen.

17. Different types of ships, fishing and whailing professions.




For now I remain undecided which game will be more interesting as the primary game, but perhaps now in 2016 there will be more clues to help with the decision.

LyingShadows

Didnt even know about Revival, so thank you. Its nice to have options if one doesnt do so well. 

bincritter

Yeah, I will be looking into revival as well. Also Crowfall just added a similar feature with the soul and necromancy features. Needless to say, there is a strong resemblance.

Yanocchi

LyingShadows said:

Didnt even know about Revival, so thank you. Its nice to have options if one doesnt do so well. 

Knowing that two different companies are trying to make quite similar games gave me a bit more optimism that their ambitious features can come to fruition.

bincritter said:

Yeah, I will be looking into revival as well. Also Crowfall just added a similar feature with the soul and necromancy features. Needless to say, there is a strong resemblance.

I read about the necromancy features of Crowfall too this week. It does sound distantly similar to some features planned for necromancy and golem building in Revival.

Zultra

The Payment scheme of revival is a massive turnoff for me personally.

SpottyGekko

I'd probably be worrying about what I'll be playing in the next three years, but that's just me...

There are so many uncertainties around these two "game concepts" that I'd not get bent out of shape about which one I'll eventually play. No telling what these games will look like when eventually produced, if they are even produced...

Grelf

SpottyGekko said:

I'd probably be worrying about what I'll be playing in the next three years, but that's just me...

There are so many uncertainties around these two "game concepts" that I'd not get bent out of shape about which one I'll eventually play. No telling what these games will look like when eventually produced, if they are even produced...

Uncertainty can be good, it means some boundaries are being pushed. We'll never get interesting things without some risk.

Yanocchi

SpottyGekko said:

I'd probably be worrying about what I'll be playing in the next three years, but that's just me...

There are so many uncertainties around these two "game concepts" that I'd not get bent out of shape about which one I'll eventually play. No telling what these games will look like when eventually produced, if they are even produced...

The games won't appear for many years but they are already beginning to collect money from people. The dilemma is how to balance money between them. Both games sound awesome but pledging 50% of available money for one and 50% for the other may turn out to be a waste after 2-3 years. These games are designed to dominate a person's time and someone who begins to spend more time in one game and less in the other may be in danger of loosing items and progress. This won't be a problem if the Kickstarter campaign of Chronicles of Elyria offers something that players won't risk loosing in the future even if they play the game quite casually and only for 3-4 hours once or twice per week. In Revival it may be an issue because for money pledge player gets a house that is always in danger of being reposessed by town authorities if the player fails to pay monthly taxes with in-game gold.

Yanocchi

Zultra said:

The Payment scheme of revival is a massive turnoff for me personally.

I like it because I have a bit of experience with real estate property business in real life and I was pleasantly surprised how Revival gets relatively close to a similar experience in a virtual world (closer than other games). Before you buy a property, you have to analyse a lot of factors regarding the layout and capabilities of the property, the town district and location, security, wealth, history and the past of the district. You pay money for a property and you must pay monthly taxes to the town, insurance fees to protect the property and you will get access to neighborhood meetings where you and other property owners in the neighborhood close to you decide things like whether to build more parking lot space (horse stables) and other such things. You can also rent the whole property or a part of it to someone.

Maquiame

Not interested in Chronicles, the combination of such high feature bloat and Kickstarter means = scaled down and you aren't seeing the game anytime before 2020. Not to mention the existing lore is far too vague for my tastes. They are going to have to make concessions just to get the game published.  Lastly the combination of pvp-permadeath and having to pay 40 dollars for each life along with a typical lifespan of one year does not excite me. Its like they wrote down a list of what they thought would be cool and ran with it without any real business plan to explain how they are going to achieve everything they say they are. Sorry Jeromy but you need a more solid business plan on how you are going to achieve the game. I trust Snipehunter and co more atm because I know who they are, I played Rift, I know who's backing Illfonic financially and they have a far better business path by building the game in stages.

Right now I'm more interested in Hero's Song tbh. Sure its 2D and also has feature bloat but at least I can be expecting to be playing it within two years.

And the lore isn't vague as hell.

Kyleran

Grelf said:

SpottyGekko said:

I'd probably be worrying about what I'll be playing in the next three years, but that's just me...

There are so many uncertainties around these two "game concepts" that I'd not get bent out of shape about which one I'll eventually play. No telling what these games will look like when eventually produced, if they are even produced...

Uncertainty can be good, it means some boundaries are being pushed. We'll never get interesting things without some risk.

Perhaps, but the biggest uncertainty is whether either title will have the funds to ever deliver the target set of features, and even if they do, when will it all be delivered by.
 
MMORPGS are very much a sum of all their parts, very difficult IMO to deliver them in "sections" that are enjoyable enough to keep them going.

Yanocchi

I'll keep an eye on Hero's Song. It looks like a retro style game similar to Ashen Empires or Tibia. I might get excited about it too if they introduce a lot of features that weren't explored in old games.

I agree that at the moment Revival has a much stronger lore because Chronicles of Elyria hasn't really chosen a lore setting yet, while Revival relies greatly on Lovecraft's fiction and Cthulhu mythos in a medieval dark fantasy world setting. It's also true that Illfonic is better known and more established in the gaming industry as Soulbound Studios.

The flipside of the coin is that Illfonic have three other games in the pipeline as a developer/publisher. The other games could bring more revenue to finance Revival but they might also delay game development.  Snipehunter mentioned recently that crowdfunding is no longer completely out of the question for Revival. In the January newsletter it was mentioned that they had some setbacks and delays with early cancellation of their Star Citizen contract. Without advertising and crowdfunding Revival could get delayed even more if the other game projects don't fare too well.

It's true that Revival has a much more clear production plan for consumers, but I won't be surprised if Chronicles of Elyria surpasses Revival in funding this spring and gets produced faster. It has been gaining a lot of publicity over the past five months and could potentially have quite a succesful crowdfunding campaign to boost finances for the development this spring. Just like Illfonic did a year ago, Soulbound Studios also switched from CryEngine 3 to Unreal 4 this autumn to help speed up development.
 
Just like with housing in Revival, I'm also okay with the business model that sells souls in Chronicles of Elyria, as long as the $29.99 soul can last at least six months (or at least three months if the game turns out to be an exceptionally awesome game).

VictoriaRachel

Maquiame said:

And the lore isn't vague as hell.

This is something that I have issues with too. However, they do have a reason for it. They are currently looking at getting a Story Director on boad and while they have written a lot of story themselves they want it to be as open as possible for a Director to come in and put their stamp on it. The more the release of how they thought the world would work the more limited it is for a Director coming in and the more they would put them off.

So for me personally, vague lore at this point is okay as long as we get really deep good stuff later.

Vucar

Maquiame said:

Not interested in Chronicles, the combination of such high feature bloat and Kickstarter means = scaled down and you aren't seeing the game anytime before 2020. 

Caspian himself has said that, depending on how the kickstarter and other things go, some extra features will be added to the game post-release. Core features that are hallmarks of the game are non-negotiable for release. I'm a realist, so I think a good number of the features we've heard about it will have to come later just for the sake of time, but I fully believe this game will come out with its central features in tact, and long before 2020.

Maquiame said:

 Not to mention the existing lore is far too vague for my tastes.

This is intentional as Victoria said.

Maquiame said:

They are going to have to make concessions just to get the game published.  

Caspian's goal is to not use publishers for this reason. If crowdfunding is successful enough he won't have to make any concessions, and I suspect it will be.

Maquiame said:

 Lastly the combination of pvp-permadeath and having to pay 40 dollars for each life along with a typical lifespan of one year does not excite me. Its like they wrote down a list of what they thought would be cool and ran with it without any real business plan to explain how they are going to achieve everything they say they are. Sorry Jeromy but you need a more solid business plan on how you are going to achieve the game.

The business model is very intentional and inexorably intertwined into the foundations of the game. No other game like it has been tried before, and so no business model of the past will quite fit. This is my longer post on the subject:

Vucar said:

The payment model isn't a subscription because a subscription would tear apart the whole point of the game: risk vs. reward. What risk is there in attacking a caravan on the road for their valuables if I know that it won't cost me any more either way? 

I read this whole thread and a lot of people seem to think this will be a game similar to other mmos they've played in the past but with a twist. They are wrong. 

This is not going to be a game you are familiar with, or have anything to compare it to. 

-You won't be throwing out 'x's in region chat to party up with a healer, dps and a tank to go do the region dungeon for the purple chest piece your class needs and level up to 50. 
-You won't be queueing up with teams to do team death matches and walk away with all of your gear.
-You won't be walking out of the city walls and immediately find groups of goblins manifesting out of nothing, being slain en masse by you and other players, just so they can re-manifest out of thin air, and drop lots of gold for you to spend at the global auction house.
-You will not move through a loading screen to new zones, where tons of other people are going from one "!" to the next "?", just like you, following the same path, doing the same storyline quests, breadcrumb-trailing you through the entire world

There are, however, countless different ways of playing the game you might see

-You might see one guy who spent $30 for one Spark of life, became the city blacksmith and spent 12 months IRL never dying, just becoming the greatest most well-known sword maker in the land.
-You might meet another guy who rides into town on some never-before-seen beast as a mount, having traveled to the far edges of the world to explore the most hidden pockets of the game and returning with his finds
-You could come into contact with a royal guard; a player whose character comes from a long bloodline of skilled guards and whose family name is famous for defending the king, including when the player is offline and his OPC guards the King at night.
-You unfortunately could be the player who finds the unassuming cave entrance to the player who months ago discovered and utilized a ritual turning them into a lich, or a vampire, only to very quickly be torn apart by them, far out in the wild away from civilization and without any help
-You might be lucky enough to actually be the player who one day discovers he has a natural talent for manifesting fire in the palm of his hands... a gift no one has ever seen before in your city

Yes; making thoughtless risky decisions will take away your game time. Planned risky decisions, however, are entirely different. The player who gets ganked (Coup de graced) ten times in a day of playing because he kept trying to kill the king all day and be a troll deserves to lose play time. The player who spends weeks or months IRL (years in game) plotting the assassination of the king for one clutch attempt may actually succeed, and if he dies, he has only "died" once.

Trolls in this game will quickly learn the real-life cost of their in-game actions. Very rich trolls may stay at it for a long time, but unless they have a clan of other very rich trolls, all willing to spend real money to be trolls in game, its not going to end well for them. 

Nothing "respawns" in this game, so I don't know what you could bot, and if you did bot, it wouldn't be hard for an assassin to throw on a mask or a disguise, make a quick kill, and escape, leaving the afk-corpse to be looted by other players while the assassin tosses the disguises and stays low for a few days.

Suffice to say, a lot of you are trying to use past mmos as mental schemas to interpret and understand this game, when really you should treat this as if it was something completely new, because it is.

Vult112

I think I will just try both games

Yanocchi

The newest blog in Revival is all about healing. Master chirurgeon's work will be very tricky, gory and messy, very different from the traditional healer in MMORPGs. Some crafters will have to specialise in creating bandages and other supplies required by medics and chirurgeons. Some magic will be tied to healing, but in Revival magic will be rare and difficult to achieve.

https://www.revivalgame.com/blog/71-weekly-blog-update-68-it-s-not-brain-chirurgie

Is there any information on how healing will work in Chronicles of Elyria?

whilan

Yanocchi said:

The newest blog in Revival is all about healing. Master chirurgeon's work will be very tricky, gory and messy, very different from the traditional healer in MMORPGs. Some crafters will have to specialise in creating bandages and other supplies required by medics and chirurgeons. Some magic will be tied to healing, but in Revival magic will be rare and difficult to achieve.

https://www.revivalgame.com/blog/71-weekly-blog-update-68-it-s-not-brain-chirurgie

Is there any information on how healing will work in Chronicles of Elyria?

After doing a google search, and only really coming back with reddit and forum posts on it, the word is no, there is no real information on how that will work in CoE. Speculation will probably get you using bandages and possibly potions or it may be a more, try not to get hurt in the first place type of role.  The reason is magic and thereby healing is based on a talent which you don't really have any solid control over when and what you get. 

Yanocchi

whilan said:

Yanocchi said:

The newest blog in Revival is all about healing. Master chirurgeon's work will be very tricky, gory and messy, very different from the traditional healer in MMORPGs. Some crafters will have to specialise in creating bandages and other supplies required by medics and chirurgeons. Some magic will be tied to healing, but in Revival magic will be rare and difficult to achieve.

https://www.revivalgame.com/blog/71-weekly-blog-update-68-it-s-not-brain-chirurgie

Is there any information on how healing will work in Chronicles of Elyria?

After doing a google search, and only really coming back with reddit and forum posts on it, the word is no, there is no real information on how that will work in CoE. Speculation will probably get you using bandages and possibly potions or it may be a more, try not to get hurt in the first place type of role.  The reason is magic and thereby healing is based on a talent which you don't really have any solid control over when and what you get. 

Thanks, Whilan. I searched for information on healing in CoE but found nothing either, so I thought it might have been mentioned in some Q&A video. I do remember that bandages were mentioned somewhere but didn't know that healing hasn't been discussed more thoroughly yet.

As far as I remember, developers said that in Revival health and stamina will regenerate slowly over time, unless there is some injury or condition that prevents that. Food will provide buffs to that regeneration.

It's interesting that a chirurgeon will cause damage to a patient with certain procedures or a failure to complete a procedure properly. It may be necessary to hurt someone in order to cure them. A healer's role has been traditionally very straightforward and simple in MMORPGs. I guess CoE is going to have some untraditional approach to the healer's role too.

Vucar

whilan said:

The reason is magic and thereby healing is based on a talent which you don't really have any solid control over when and what you get. 

Healing in CoE will definitely be of the more mundane and physically based abilities, not magic or talents. There's no guarantee that any magic will heal anyone. 

Its true we haven't gotten many explicit details on the healing system yet, but it can be presumed that things like eating good food, resting in your home or at least in a bed, some kind of poultice made from an alchemy-line of crafting, and probably something like tourniquets and bandages will be the primary forms of healing.

Yanocchi

DMKano said:

Making a decision between 2 games that haven't even shown actual gameplay footage....

Jumping the gun a bit? 

You'll probably get a chance to play them both and then decide.

People who want to pledge money have to think about the decision already now. Revival is already selling property and CoE will enter Kickstarter after a few months.

1) Supporting both games with a substantial risk of later loosing money pledged to the other one because it is impossible to dedicate enough time to both games. People with a lack of time and dividing time between both games will be at risk. There will be property taxes in Revival and soul aging in CoE, and burglary and destruction of property risks in both games while you are offline.

2) Choosing one and crowdfunding only that game with all the money, risking that the other game turns out to be more interesting.

rojoArcueid

I would make a decision after both games launch. Buying into promises is the deepest dark hole people love to jump into over and over.

rwyan

Getting hung up on these questions now just seems dramatically premature.  As it stands, both of these games are purely concepts with some development behind them.  We honestly don't know how these games will truly play, and it is kind of silly to force yourself to make these choices given their current state.

Yanocchi

Without Kickstarter and pre-funding we wouldn't have some wonderful games like Pillars of Eternity.

SomethingUnusual

Both? Personally I wouldn't mind checking out Revival -- not many occult games out there, yet alone MMOs. (On a side note, the Call of Cthulhu shooters were fricken awesome.)

Chronicals of Elyria has the realism to it, Worth checking out for that alone I think.

Both are a long ways away.

Yanocchi

After seeing the video of CoE running on Unreal Engine 4, I've begun to wonder how much change for the worse will happen in the visual quality of forest areas (trees and bushes) in Revival too. The video of Revival wood density test was made before the developers switched from CryEngine 3 to Unreal Engine 4.

Ikisis

Revival will have Open world Full loot PvP
Elyria wont have any pvp if i understand correctly

So really do you like pvp and Risk Vs Reward
or 3d farmville?