Hello there, everyone! I know that it has been a while since we have sent out any updates, but we are back! We have all been hard at work and are looking forward to sharing more details throughout the upcoming year. While there is a long road ahead of us in order to build the world that The Lays of Althas: Sundered Order takes place in. The team looks forward to showing you the progress we make as we step closer to achieving our shared vision of this game!
The update that we have for today is the Tools Update. Tools are one of the key indicators as to how a society functions since they are used for mining, agriculture, cooking, smelting, and may other occupations that are essential. These tools that we are showing up are also an indication as to the pride of the craftsmen who create these tools. These are not the tools of a society in complete squalor, but rather one who takes pride in even the smallest things in life. They are able to make great tools and maintain them for long periods of time despite the hardships that they may be facing when we meet them in the game. How the events of the game might change things, well you will have to find out when the time comes!
I would like to thank everyone for supporting our project! We will have many interesting updates coming to you throughout this year as we inch closer and closer to the finish line. If there are any questions that you might have about The Lays of Althas: Sundered Order, feel free to leave them in the comments and we will answer them to the best of our ability! Have a wonderful day!
Recently we had a conversation with Ben Kelly one of our “Level Designer” who created this awesome tunnel creation tool to help ease workflow. Let’s...
We wanted to show some of the in-game menus that will be used in game.
A Showing of natural cave system that has been around for centuries, with only mild human modification and tunneling done in that time.
Talking to our “Environment Artist” Kevin Eriksen about the new created shaders for the game.
This is the first chapter of "The Hawk and the Stone" in a .pdf file. Download and you can open it with e-reader apps like the Kindle app and of course...
This is the second chapter of the story Hawk and the Stone. The file is a PDF format. Illustrations by: Joan Maldonado, Owen Yulefield, and Ruo Yo Chen
Some thing to consider:
With the Unity engine drama over big shareholder companies owning game engines, and your history with what happened with WB and MERP..
Links:
( Pcgamer.com )
( Gameworldobserver.com )
( Gamingonlinux.com )
Have you considered moving from Epic's Unreal Engine 4 to an open world engine like Open3d?. Open3d is a Free and Open Source (FOSS) fork of CryEngine which Amazon bought into Lumberyard, and then sold to the Linux Foundation after Amazon's attempt at anti-competitively tying the engine to AWS failed.
( En.wikipedia.org )
( Open3d.org )
Remember that the original CryEngine is what the photorealistic medieval Kingdom Come Deliverance RPG used in 2018, and the improved Lumberyard is what Amazon's recent open world MMO New World uses. The engine is eminently capable of AAA open world games.
Kingdom Come Deliverance on older Cry Engine, released on PC, consoles, even Nintendo Switch:
( Youtube.com )
The heavily modded RTX videos with latest GPUs you see for these types of games look almost like a real life video:
( Youtube.com )
( Youtube.com )
Open3d is cross-platform on PC, supporting Mac and Linux.
Open3d is under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. So you don't have to share back engine changes you make for your game, if you don't want to. You can do what ever you want, although if you make massive amount of sales you may want to hire or support engine coders, or give back engine changes. Your project can be fully or partially closed source. It's also free, which would be a useful thing for a volunteer indie team establishing itself. As a bonus, you retain full control of the source code, forever.
There's no company holding anything over you with a FOSS engine, which you might appreciate after the fiasco with WB and MERP. The downside is that CryEngine/Lumberyard/Open3d tools might be a bit less user friendly?? than Unreal Engine, although it is free and will give more budget later.
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Aside:
If anything can be learned from the behaviour of big companies owned by stock exchange or private investors, whether it's WB or Unity, is that it's the people in the game industry that lose in the long run.
If you look at Bethesda even, there's the latest fiasco with Starfield, which is rated at only 38% positive in the last month on Steam. With paid mods incoming. But Bethesda made 750 million in 24 hours after launch of Fallout 4, not counting pre-orders.
( Forbes.com )
That's enough to make Fallout 4, and make a 600+ million game, let alone Starfield.
Skyrim made 1 billion in 30 days waaay back in 2011.
( Tweaktown.com )
Can you imagine how much Bethesda made over the years, with no other competition for the Fallouts and Skyrims?
Yet Bethesda leave Fallout and Skyrim a buggy mess with bad mod tools, animations, voice acting, story lines. In fact Fallout 76 was full of bugs that weren't fixed from the previous game. Guess where the money went? Stock holders. This is money from players that would have funded creators to push open world genres forward through engines and content. In the long run gaming loses.
Just some info you may want to consider. Good Luck:)
Switching engines is out of the question with how far along we've come.
With the acquisition of several LOTR licenses, including video games, by Embracer, would there ever be a chance of returning to development on MERP. In whatever way, shape, or form!
Its possible, I came here because there was a job opening for a 3d artist posted (although its volunteer)
Hey mate, the odds of picking MERP back up for Skyrim are relatively minuscule. Most of the team has moved on in their careers and life. I personally am working on an indie game called The Old Forest with strong influences from that chapter and maybe someday if we can get a license, I would really like to create an open world RPG in Unreal set in the first age in Beleriand, but that's a pipe dream in all honesty.
Hi The_Grey_Wizard,
Same Guest as this post and the one below (I really should make an account!).
That's sad to hear a return to MERP is unlikely, I am working on some LOTR inspired skyrim mods at the moment, and would love to see a big project attempt this again. Maybe with the new owner of the rights this might be possible.
The Old Forest looks great and definitely inspired by The Hobbit.
Thanks for your reply
Is this still in development? It's been almost a year since the last update!
- from an old MERP fan (again)
We're still here, we're beginning to revisit our public-facing sites since we got work to show now.
Hey mate, this game is still in development. I spoke with leadership a few months ago and the team is undergoing some transition with the release of UE5 and a new framework that they are working with. But I can promise you that it is going to be worth the wait. I can't divulge any more details than that though.
Is there any word on a release date yet?
Not yet, you'll have to wait and see.