REVIEWS

Chronicles of Elyria: The Searing Plague and Beyond

Six hundred years ago the Searing Plague engulfed the world of Elyria for several years as many tried to thwart it or hide from it. The effects of it still impact Elyria to this day.

To determine the outcome of the Searing Plague, Soulbound Studios made available to all players registered at their site an opportunity to determine how the plague was truly fought with a six week event that occurred in August and September. You did not have to be a package owner. Even better, if you did not have one, just registering and joining in this event, gave you the Elyrian package. This package includes the choice of three souls and one spark (life) to live with that soul, along with some other perks. After that, you can determine if you want to pay for a new spark to keep the soul’s legacy going. I found this rather refreshing, compared to several of my game experiences in pre launch scenarios of the past three years.

If you were not a package holder at the start of the event, you were put amongst the plagued. As the plagued, you wound up helping the plague spread, unless you found someone to help purify you. Thankfully, plenty of pure people existed and many were purified, including myself.

I realized, looking at my account, I’ve been a three year lurker of this game. Time flies for sure, but Soulbound Studios has done a great job with their public to keep us in the loop. This event proved that further, making me wish I had a budget to upgrade my Elyrian package, but there is still time for that.

I did not jump on this event immediately, with the email telling me about it, due to crazy life in general. However, when another Gaiscioch member invited anyone interested to join in with a group doing the event, I hopped on over and got a clue. I became purified and did my best to help purify the plagued we kept drawing into our fairly large group that will be at least a county, if not a kingdom someday in Elyria.

How Did The Event Work?

Once registered for the event, you had access to the one page that was used throughout to track the plague’s progress, do all your available actions throughout the day, and make up links for others to fill, to gain more plague or purity. Depending on your status and chosen profession, you would assist the plague or combat it with your actions. A reset occurred every 24 hours with any plague marks you had dumping to help the plague bar. Purity could be rolled over each day and shared to purify someone, or traded to complete skills for the day.

The plague bar had red for plague (outbreak) and blue for purity (cure) progress. Milestones would occur at varying percentage markers that would assist the plague or combat it. Some examples were:

  • At 25% outbreak the nobility trying to avoid or ignore the plague started succumbing to it producing plague themselves
  • At 15% cure some of the people with plague have died off and can’t spread it anymore. Also, the knowledge from this is used to help understand the plague better. The plague bar was reduced by 3% when this occurred.
  • At 50% outbreak, now it isn’t just the nobles, but the aristocracy begin producing plague even as they attempt to stop it.

Milestones like these continued as everyone participated over the six weeks, with everything being recorded in an ongoing blog, handled by the event leaders at Soulbound Studios. (links listed at the end of this article)

Each profession had three skills they could do each day. One could be done every 8 hours, one every 12 and one every 24 hours. On top of that, the pure could generate purity every four hours at the click of a button. Some examples of purified professions are in the picture below.

There were two tiers and each had 4 professions for the pure to choose from, giving us a total of 8 professions to use, to combat the plague. The eight choices were:

  • Soldier - worked to keep the plague away from the uninfected
  • Undertaker - cleaned the dead and assisted in helping find a cure
  • Plague Doctor - worked to fight the plague directly and find a cure
  • Sage - sought a cure through knowledge of history and medicine
  • Nurse - fought the plague by comforting the infected and lightly helping find a cure
  • Corpsetaker - kept the streets clean as direct fighters of the plague
  • Guard - maintained order and did their best to keep the plague off the streets
  • Herbalist - a vanguard of the effort to find a cure by the use of their abilities

I think I was only plagued about five days, if that, before my group purified me. I don’t remember a lot about being plagued, but most of my plague was properly disposed of by the group. The purification took 180 purity seals and then another 30 so I could become a sage to help find a cure. As a sage I used three skills to assist in researching the plague. Every 4 hours I could produce a purity mark and after hitting a milestone it turned to 2 every four hours. I had three skills:

  • Ease pain which added 1 purity seal to my bank and could be done every 8 hours
  • Make Tincture which could be done twice a day to increase the cure bar and produce more purity seals - request 5 purity seals and it would produce 4 new purity seals
  • Research cure which could be done once per day and would produce purity seals and lower the outbreak bar. It could also neutralize a certain number of plague marks, if the person you sent the seals to had any at the time.

The group I worked with coordinated how everyone, plagued or purified, was to work to help find the cure. We had a great deal of sages at first to help accumulate purity to stockpile for curing our plagued. As the event progressed other professions were added to help fight the plague. The realism built into this event made it feel like we were attempting to fight the Black Plague.

This goes in line with the dynamic and realistic world of Elyria. They expect us to come together to create kingdoms and do what we inspire to, good or evil. What we managed to do in this little event is only the tip of the iceberg of how the dynamic world of Elyria will play out, based on what each of us does in the game.

How Does the Final Outcome Impact the Game?

We succeeded in holding back the plague so it is a thing of history, but we achieved advances in medicine to be seen within the live game. Much of the plague’s events will stay in annuals and be passed on as stories by the survivors.

Anyone cured and at a Tier 2 pure role during the plague event will gain the title of Plagueborn and have resistance against the Searing Plague. My soul for the game will have this and it will be passed on to descendents in the game.

World Maps

Not only did CoE take time to run this plague event, while still working on having the game ready for the first alpha testing, they are letting the players determine what map the world will have. You will choose which server you are voting for and which map you want in two stages.

Stage one will be voting on all twenty possible maps, except for the special server called Oceanus, which has only 5 archipelago style choices, so is not in the first stage.

Stage two voting will involve all servers. There will be five maps to choose from for each server based on stage one elections.

How many votes do you get? It is based on how many sparks of life your package contains, or how many you have bought. To keep it somewhat fairer, the more votes you have the less influence they have on the overall vote. So my little Elyrian package with one spark has one vote, so it has full 100% influence on where I put it. If I had two, each would be set at 50% influence. It continues to divide the percentage down. This allows for those with more votes to vote for more than one map, if they choose.

What will I do? I’ll probably go with the one most popular with the crew I might actually play this game with. My one vote might make the difference for them, even if I’ll just go with the flow of whatever we get.

Conclusion

I am looking forward to the future of this game. We have already had the chance to impact the dynamic world of Elyria while it is still in pre-alpha stage. More events like this are a possibility in the coming year, so register at the site to stay up to date. They keep throwing us candy and have a month by month idea of what we might see as promotions or events into the future.

At some point in the coming year opportunities of player testing might occur, but nothing is set in stone on that yet. Your package will tell you what access you will have to such pre-launch testing opportunities and they will be sure we all know as each occurs. That’s one thing about Soulbound Studios I like, they are doing a great job of making sure the community is aware of what is going on with the game.

To find out more about Chronicles of Elyria go to https://chroniclesofelyria.com.

To read more about how the Searing Plague event progressed and the history of the plague check out the blog post at https://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/26893/The-Searing-Plague.

To read their blog about the conclusion of the event go to https://chroniclesofelyria.com/news/28726/Event-conclusion-The-Searing-Plague

To see how they are planning future events by the month go to https://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/28673/Official-Calendar-of-Promotions-Events.

Published: November 18th, 2018   |  8,006 Reads

About the Author

Althea "Briseadh" Damgaard
Senior Editor

Althea joined Gaiscioch back in October of 2009 and has been here ever since with only a few month hiatus between Warhammer and Rift. As soon as she knew they were in Rift, she jumped ship to Faeblight and has followed them onward through every chapter since with a few side games thrown in for spice.

She has been an avid player of RPG style games since 1980 when she first played Dungeons and Dragons. Since then she has created her own tabletop gaming world used with various rule sets as D&D progressed. Once she could get online she played MUDs. Her MMO days started with Everquest and have moved through over a dozen games with some lasting only a month's time in her life and others going for years. She has tested several games from the perspective of a disabled gamer with hand issues due to her multiple sclerosis.

When not writing about or playing games, she can be found writing novels, reading and doing various art projects. She also writes items based on her faith and is working on publishing a novel. She also does editing for a gaming developer.

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About Chronicles of Elyria

Quests generated just for your character, a fully destructible environment, closed economy, finite resources, and survival elements, means Elyria is experienced differently for every player! Each time you log in there is something new to do. No daily grind! Local, regional, and national conflicts are continuously unfolding, giving birth to repeated opportunities for you to change the course of history. Enter Chronicles of Elyria as a member of a player or NPC-ran family, then work your way up from a humble adventurer to a landed vassal, develop your dynasty, and work your way to King. Not interested in running a kingdom? The fully skill-based system and lack of classes means you're rewarded with the ability to create the exact character you want to. Full of dramatic opportunities, Chronicles of Elyria pulls the best from sandbox and themepark MMOs to create a new type of game - an event-driven story we call a Multiplayer Evolving Online World or MEOW.

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