Inspired by the classics, made in the present.

Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore is a new MMORPG that aims to bring what we love from older MMORPGs such as Tibia Online, Ultima Online, and Runescape into a time where we have advanced development tools and can expand upon the concepts that we loved but feel have been lost in modern game design.

Before you delve into the details below, we want to inform you that a full open-alpha is already available to play, and will last throughout the entirety of the Kickstarter campaign. We wish to prove through action that what we’re doing is real, and you can play the game by clicking the banner above and simply adding the game to your wishlist on Steam and opting in for the playtest.

The world of Irumesa is dynamic and ever-evolving. Each server is different since the results of events and player interactions shape the land as time goes.  This means that it is truly up to the players to work together (or not) as a community to alter the threads of fate. 

Ethyrial is designed with player freedom and fun at its core. Not every player will want (or need) to play a combat-driven character for example. Maybe you are more interested in  analyzing the marketplaces around the world, and developing your own trade routes. Maybe you are the type of person to perfect your craft as a Blacksmith or Leatherworker, aiming to be the best one. No matter your playstyle, your actions will have an effect on the world and communities around you. An experienced trader providing much needed provisions to mining towns in the outskirts will increase said town(s) prosperity levels, allowing further development and exploration of the mountains for gatherer-type players. Gatherers who explore deeper into said mountains might encounter ancient ruins filled with dangerous monsters, which highly combat-driven guilds of players will be inclined to clear for fame and glory. No matter your role or playstyle, there is always a home for you in Irumesa, and your actions can send ripples throughout the threads of fate.

As a result of a “play your way, the world adapts” mentality, character progression works very differently in Ethyrial. Firstly, you do not choose a class. You develop a backstory for your character before you take your first steps in Irumesa, and then your character’s skills, spells, and abilities develop based on how you play the game. Additionally, within the skills you advance in, there are systems that allow you to alter spells and abilities tied to those skills even further. This means that players have all the tools necessary to create truly unique characters that are tailored to their playstyles. 

Player guilds in Ethyrial will be a driving factor on the shape of the lands and its developments. Player and guild housing in the world of Irumesa is non-instanced, and guilds have a dedicated estate manager in which they can organize infrastructure, plots for their players, and even lay down plans for future expansion. Do not expect for these plots to be easily attainable, however, as guilds will need to prove their worth to the kingdom in order buy and maintain such strategic pieces of land. Once players have obtained said land, they are truly free to develop anything they wish. Building in Ethyrial is grid-based and players can place walls freely, as well as both build up and down in floors. Always wanted to design your own grandiose guild hall? You now have the chance to!

PLEASE NOTE

The feature-based objectives you see for the various pledge levels are all features planned to be in the game. The pledge goals simply determine if these features will be available on release, or released later. 

For the budget-specific upgrades such as 3D studio involvement for original models and textures, these are dependent on their respective goals.

Lead Developer and Lead Designer continue full-time.

33% of Irumesa Accessible

 Although the world of Irumesa is a big world, we see no point in having it all there for players unless there is rich, immersive content. As a result of this, the initial pledge goal of €60,000 will still host a decently sizable portion of the map, but we will ensure that it is filled to the brim with dynamic content that engages players on all fronts.

Non-instanced Player & Guild Housing

Features a full estate manager system for guilds to allocate property within their lands for infrastructure or guild members. All housing (both smaller player housing as well as guild housing) is non-instanced and within the actual world of Irumesa. Guilds and players will be free to construct workbenches, processing stations, marketplaces, and anything else they can dream of on their property.

Dynamic Infamy System

Performing criminal acts in Irumesa such as trespassing, theft, or murder will cause the player to gain Infamy. The amount of infamy a player has (both positive and negative) will affect their interactions in the world immensely. This will be our core system for ensuring that Ethyrial does not become an Open-PvP Gankfest.

Professions

Professions in Ethyrial are more than just a past-time. Gatherers and crafters who dedicate themselves to their art will be a large part of every server’s player and NPC economy, and also play a huge role in server-wide events.

Developing and honing your craft takes a large deal of effort. If you want to become a highly skilled and experienced Blacksmith, you’re gonna have to do a lot of blacksmithing. In fact, becoming really good is not something you will be able to do with all professions, which is part of what makes Ethyrial a community-driven game, since gatherers, crafters, and even combat players will have to work together to achieve things.

The list of available professions for this pledge goal are:

Localized Marketplaces for Cities and Prosperity

Auction houses in Irumesa are local only. This means that materials and goods that are abundant in some parts of the world might catch a better price if you are willing to risk the long and arduous journey. This stocking system also makes it so that we can manage the prosperity of towns on a material level. A mining town in the Eternal Mountains might have an abundance of iron ore, but they need pelts and hides to keep their workers warm and food to keep them full. Players who take the time to supply these things will see the prosperity of the town grow, making more content available for everyone.

Skills

Combat-oriented skills in Irumesa are plentiful, and your time invested in developing these skills will be a large part of how your character progression unfolds. Individual skills are vast and deep, encompassing much more than a singular playstyle. For example, Cryomancy can indeed be used to cast your average bolt of ice, but it can also be used to conjure a magical blade of ice in your hands, used to channel elemental magic and utilize your prowess in blade fighting as well.

25+ Unique and long-lasting questlines that take you through the available areas

Quests in Ethyrial are long spanning adventures that take at least a few hours on the short side to several hours or even days on the longer side. 

5 dungeons of varying length and levels. (Shortest 1hr, longest 8hrs)

 Dungeons in Ethyrial span from shorter dungeons (1hr) to long and epic journeys (8hr+). These dungeons also vary in group sizes as some are 5-man dungeons while others are up to 20.

• The Old Mines
• Elemental Rift
• Ruins of Alathar
• Underwater Depths
• Caverns of Melnyr

1 Endgame Raid

A Raid in Ethyrial is not just an instanced zone where you run in and kill some bosses. It takes days or even weeks of preparation in the overworld, involving gatherers, crafters, and even researchers to unlock and progress through events that lead to the raid itself. The dynamics of the raid will be dependent on the choices made by the community throughout the various events.

3 Unique World Bosses

World bosses will be dangerous creatures in Irumesa that will be a big challenge for even the most dedicated of players.

Two unique arenas for Matchmaking PvP

• Barbarian’s Pit (1v1, 2v2, 3v3)
• The Colosseum (1v1, 2v2, 3v3)

Two unique objective-based battlegrounds

• 8v8 Capture the Flag
• 12v12 Zone Control

Lead Level Designer is brought along full-time, allowing for a full release of the initially planned zones, new dungeons, and a new raid. Additionally, the Enchanting profession will be added for launch.

All planned zones for main launch accessible with base level of content

Note: The remaining un-highlighted zones are planned and scheduled to release 3 months after launch. The geopolitical landscape of these zones will be dependent on players’ choices during dynamic events and wars within the first three months of launch.

2 new high-level dungeons

• 20 Person Dungeon – Ancient Castle Theme
• 10 Person Dungeon – Greenskin Encampment Theme

1 New Raid

An evil stirs within the Eternal Mountains, ready to be unleashed upon Irumesa. With this tier, an additional raid will be available on launch, with dynamic events tied to it.

New Profession: Enchanting

Enchanters strive to use alchemical reagents combined with magical prowess in order to strengthen or alter the properties of materials. They will be able to perform feats such as enchanting metals to be sturdier when used for other professions or even enchanting gear with magical properties.

Lead Quest Designer is brought along full-time, extensively expanding the quests, conversations, and lore within Irumesa. 

60+ new and unique questlines will be available across Irumesa

These quests will add a lot of discoverable history across the lands of Irumesa. These quests offer exciting new rewards and content for the game such as:

• Unique Spells/Abilities
• One-of-a-Kind Weapons and Armor
• Ancient crafting recipes and long lost gathering secrets
• Discoverable secrets in various pockets of Irumesa

Advanced Conversation Groups

With our text-based conversation system, players will be able to extrapolate information from NPCs using clever questioning and phrasing. With this, we can develop advanced conversation groups so that guards of a certain town speak, interact, and know different information than guards from another. These conversation groups will be expanded to all NPC assets of the game, and a lot of unique dialogue options will also be added to interesting NPCs around the world, further increasing immersion.

Lore Upgrade

The general lore available in-game will be expanded dramatically. This includes things such as

• In-Game books written by NPCs (both current and past)
• Ancient stories and sagas from different lands and times in Irumesa
• Dialogue options with knowledgeable NPCs to learn more about the world.

Currently, we have a number of original tracks for our OST, but our first step after having core personnel transition to full-time is to continue development of our OST with over 40 new unique tracks.

An additional full-time game designer will be brought along to the project, allowing the lead game designer to delegate tasks and focus on more advanced concepts.

Advanced Summoning

Although many of the skills in the base game feature some degree of summoning (Pyromancy with its aggressive fire elementals, Spiritualism with its supportive wisps), advanced summoning takes the concept of summoning one step further and offers a whole new level of control for the player. 

Adept summoners will now be capable of summoning elementals, spirits, or even shadows of themselves that have changeable behaviors. Always been annoyed that your summoned minions are incapable of performing mundane tasks such as digging, picking up loot, or even skinning animals for you? Well don’t be, because it’ll all be possible now.

Complete Dye System

Although the base game features a basic system for dyeing your armors, the complete dye system allows alchemists to create different types of dyes for various materials in the game. This allows players to apply unique dyes to leather pieces of a mail armor, while having another color for the metallic parts of the armor. This will allow players to create unique color combinations for their guilds, groups, and friends.

New Combat Skill: Blood Magic

Draw upon the blood of yourself and your foes to unleash powerful magic. This new combat skill will feature a unique approach to spellcasting in Irumesa. It will utilize power of the leylines and enhance it with the life-force of living creatures.

Expanded recipes and materials for all existing professions.

• 38 new recipes for Blacksmithing
• 24 new recipes for Leatherworking
• 70+ unique new potions, poisons, and dyes for Alchemy
• 14 new recipes for Fletching
• 25+ new recipes for Cooking

From a visual and performance standpoint, we consider our current character models to be the biggest thing we’d want to improve with a bigger budget. As a result of this, the jump to this pledge goal is spent towards hiring 3D Studio assistance to rework our character models as well as some of the most important visual assets in Ethyrial.

3D Modeling and Texturing

• Reworked Character Models.
• New Wall/Building textures for improved visuals on Guild/Player Housing.
• New Carpentry and Worldbuilding assets for a more diverse and unique-looking world, as well as more housing options.

An additional full-time game designer allows our lead designer to transition more into his engineering background to help develop more advanced features for the server infrastructure and tools.

Cross-Server Matchmaking

For a true global rating on our instanced PvP (Arena, Battlegrounds) we feel that cross-server matchmaking is a must. Being the highest rated PvP player on a single realm means nothing compared to being the highest rated PvP player in all of Ethyrial. Additionally, this also removes the burden of being on a server with a low population for instanced PvP, since you’ll have the entire player-base at your fingertips.

Reaching this goal in our budget will allow us to hire a 3D studio to assist with the overhaul and creation of new 3D assets to populate the world of Irumesa. 

Unique 3D Assets

• Foliage & fauna models and textures unique to the landscape and fantasy world of Irumesa
• Creation of unique tile textures to give the landscape of Irumesa more depth
• An assorted list of 3D assets to enrichen the variety and options for our level designers, in turn allowing them to create more unique landscapes.

The money from this goal will be put towards concept art that will be used together with voice acting to create a form of cinematic for some key plot elements in the world. 

Cinematics

• Concept art and voice acting for character creation backstories
• Concept art and voice acting for 11 large and impactful quests
• Concept art and voice acting for 2 dynamic world events.

Although there is much we want to do, all of the above options still take time from our core team regardless of the amount of money that the project receives. As a result of this, we do not wish to promise any more features for launch, as we need to ensure that we can stay on schedule and deliver on our promises. However, if the Kickstarter keeps growing, we will not shy away from sharing some post-launch goals that we can all work together towards achieving, and we will want our community to pitch in with some ideas.

                             Pledges & Rewards