Chronicles of Elyria - Retrospective of A Missing MMORPG - 8 Million Dollars Funded 

Watching Kira talk about CoE is my favorite youtube series right now

At this point you have spent more hours covering this scam of a game, than they have actually making the game. Keep at it my man!

This is like one of those moments when the teacher calls someone in front of the class to read their homework, but the kid has done nothing, and is just trying to bullshit his way through it. Except the moment goes on for half a decade, and people have paid millions to hear the answers.

It looks like not only did they just start working on it, but their developer is having to google how to do each step.

Maybe he's so obsessed with the fog of war is because he wants to cover as much of the game with it so when someone claims he hasn't done any work he promised to do he can just point and say "Sure I have! It's all behind that fog of war, you see?".

Game dev for 10 years here. None of what they say makes sense, converting from typescript to C# is a complete rewrite (if they're using typescript on the server than they're using headless unity which is basically prebuilt and not overly complex). There is no game here, the lighting is barely more than default settings, the art assets are clearly unmodified assets (NOT game ready). Volumetric fog is NOT something you work on during beta, thats ridiculous. Even the art team wouldn't be touching that yet. I'm barely aware of who these people are but this all looks like the work of maybe 2 or 3 people (at most) and people that aren't particularly well versed in modern game dev.

"Please stop covering CoE. It's a dead horse. You're just a hater. Just stop, ok?" --Caspian's 10th account.

Kira has spent more time shitting on CoE than Caspian has spent working on the MMO

'You're beating a dead horse' And it couldn't be more entertaining ❤

I love how their advanced Kingdom simulator is like 3 houses and some people walking around. WTF are they thinking?

They're using an insane level of jargon to justify their milestones. It's insane. I used to work in game dev and even I'm having a hard time wading through the bullshit.

Are they really trying to deliver the expected game? or just something good enough to avoid lawsuits?

Imagine scaming the world for 6M, being sued and at the moment of peak despair being saved by a glaobal pandemic stimulus check. And then making a 6M game for 175k (yes, I'm subtracting cocaine fees). And it probably will hold up in court.

I AM NOT crowdfunding this until i see some fog of war....

Lovin this coverage man, swindlers and scam artists rely heavily on lack of awareness and this type of coverage is one of the best types of prevention of this in the future.

Lmaoooooo Caspian: "We're expecting a May release." Kira: "Great. We're in April, so soon we'll be seeing everyone playing CoE soon. And by 'CoE' I mean KoE. And by 'everyone' I mean almost no one. And by 'see' I mean we won't... because of the NDA. God bless Kira.

CoE is the most blatant example of a total scam in this genre, but I think it's fair to ask at this point what crowd-funded MMOs have actually come to fruition. Crowfall, Pantheon, Star Citizen, Shroud of the Avatar, Camelot Unchained. 4 of these games are probably never going to officially release. One of them would have been better off if it didn't. The only hope for this way of doing things is Ashes of Creation. What else is there?? These games are just far too massive and hard to see to completion for the crowd-funding model. Chronicles of Elyria is the most egregious skim of people's money, but make no mistake, no one who has donated to the games listed above is going to get anything close to what they envisioned when backing the game. I guess I'll add the caveat that Crowfall may actually get an official release. Any bets the servers are shut down before two years are up?? People need to stop crowd-funding MMOs. You'd get more enjoyment from setting your money on fire.

From the first video my thoughts were "This is a charade to convince non-technical lawyers to convince and old non-technical judge that they are 'working on it'

Maybe they should add Team Kills to their updates, they'd be nailing it right now!

"April 12, 2050 - We had intend to include Fog of War in Empires of Elyria Milestone 1 but we still haven't found a suitable algorithm. Expect it in Milestone 2."

You mentioned Banished, which is Shining Rock Studios. That was a 1-man dev team and that game still has legs. This is just abysmal and I'm glad I never threw money at it.

nah I love this. The more negative coverage they get the better.

As someone whom has lost $$$ 5k on this game, I am thankful for your continued coverage of this SCAM of a game.

one of their 5 employees is their composer? DUDE sound track is the absolute least of your worries.

this "game" is just some assets from the unity asset store. It looks like a two hour effort.

Caspian has a picture of Kira taped to a dart board with his eyes cut out

Can't even create a proper fog of war system, how the hell are they going to deliver on an actual game?

Looks like you're becoming pretty popular lately. It's great to see. You should be rewarded for your valuable perspective and insight into the darker corners of the MMORPG industry where few often go. These are the things that need to be discussed the most. Best of wishes and expecting to see much more growth in the future.

"It's obvious they just started working on it." uhh yeah it 100% looks and sounds like that. Like so much so there's no other possibility.

"We started using BASIC but after 6 months of development we kept hitting a memory wall because of the constraints of a 128k Spectrum environment so we instead decided to go with DOS" - The SAGA continues lol.

KiraTV covering Chronicles of Elyria reminds me of the scene in Office Space where they take the copier out into the field and beat it with bats. It never gets old.

The people that don't like this is probably the "five" people at soul bound "studios"

I am autistic. Just keep making the same video with the same content and i will watch everyone of them, sometimes twice. I enjoy this type of critical content.

NOBODY funded this "KOE" game. This is not what they promised. This will not hold up in court. They are just digging themselves a deeper hole as we see that they are dumping more money into the dumpster fire. Wow.

That $250k is going on legal expenses.

As one of the stupid people that backed CoE to the tune of 1.3k I'm personally interested in CoE news as I want to see them burn. Personal vengeance aside its also important to keep these videos coming as a warning to those that come after. If you get even a single person to hold on to their money rather then back the next CoE then I'd say its worth it.

These are my favourite videos you post and please never stop covering this story until the very last stone is unturned! You're doing a great job exposing him and your recent video just exploded and got over 200k views. You are definitely not beating a dead horse lol.

I don't know why but I'm sensing a strong Everquest Next vibe here where they tried to cash in with their world building tool before pulling the plug...

I swear if this guy had put 5 percent of the effort he's spending right now into trying to make the game initially... God, what a world we live in.

10:58 Developer here. Don't worry, your instincts are correct- changing this is a huge effing deal. Frankly, I was shocked they tried to do TS and node for the kind of thing they've been promising.

It's kind of infuriating how his name is spelled "jeromy"

Like ? I personally LOVE these video's. It's not beating a dead horse it's keeping us updated on scam artist so they wont get away with this bull sh**. Keep up the good work.

Fog of war can literally just be a black circle on the UI layer. It's like a keyhole you look through into the 3D environment

Long time Software Dev here: Moving from TypeScript to C# is a huge effort. One is a scripting language, one is compiled. Not only that but they have different patterns, so you need to adjust the whole layout of the project as you refactor the code. Not to mention that your vector for testing (lol like they test) is entirely different. Another thing is all the resources (libraries, frameworks, etc) that are used and possibly key for the project are now all incompatible due to the language change. Damn... Also it uses .NET, so they using Core or just committing it to launch on windows only?

Keep up the great coverage really want to know how this story turns out.

I found out about this channel because of your CoE coverage. I LOVE these videos so please keeps them coming.

As a modder and now indie dev, I can't comprehend this scam. We delivered Fallout: New Cailfornia and RimWorld Save Our Ship, mods people said were impossible to make, on a budget of fuckall free and 2 dudes, me and a coder. We're now working on an indie game and it's going super slow, but we replaced all the Unity assets in the first months and have at least the bare minimum of some systems prototypes, with goals of iterating and improving later. It's been 8ish months of full time dev work from 3 of us... (two artists, producer, coder)? And that guy has 8 mil and had 19 guys. Like... 3 of us do more work than that... in weeks... with a budget of good luck.

Take a shot everytime Kira reads fog of war xD.

Hey guys thanks for joining us for the Milestone 2 preview! So, I'm sure a lot of you want to know what we're going to be doing next. Well, for Milestone 2 we've decided to spend our time and resources doing everything we said we were going to do but never did for Milestone 1. Project is moving along an acceptable pace, we feel, and by this time we can confidently say you can expect a full release of KoE around the same time as Star Citizen.

I am a simple person, I see KiraTV and CoE. I click.

Cover this until everyone gets arrested. Lol and while I'm typing this you're saying people are sick of coverage but no, this needs to be covered

Is Caspian also Yandere Dev? These dudes are the same level of game developers.

The only thing that needs fog of war is Caspian, to escape from courtroom

I visit this channel to make sure I never miss a single video where you humiliate Caspian. It's thoroughly entertaining.

Developer here. Taking *that* long to decide to rewrite things is extremely telling. There's a story of a studio (Looking Glass's Thief? Bethesda? Blizzard? I can't recall) that had to rewrite their engine with just a few months to ship, but they had a team of more than 1 software engineer. Also, the fact that they were going to release their game using Javascript (Typescript, whatever) actually speaks VOLUMES to their lack of knowledge/experience/planning. A game like this would have almost certainly been a Unity/C# project from the very beginning. That last comment about it being able to now run offline means that they were basically teasing the entire game being run IN A WEB BROWSER. I'll let that sink in for a minute. Also, when he says they switched to GOAP, he means this: github.com/sploreg/goap (aka, we googled and found a library that does what we don't know how to do) No software developer with *any* credibility would be at this stage in the game after years of development. "Stand-in" is a nice way of saying 'it isn't done, so we're hoping to fake it" Caspian really is just trying to keep himself out of a legal bind, isn't he?

I don't even play MMORPGs but somehow I stumbled onto the CoE dumpster fire and became captivated. I just finished listening to all of Kira's videos on CoE. What a mess. Truly a comedic tragedy for the ages. I agree that Walsh is almost certainly trying to stand up _anything_ just to fend off the lawsuit. Crowdfunding rewards are a contractual obligation but there's a lot of room for interpretation in CoE's promised rewards since they're mostly in-game perks. Although if that's the plan then I wonder why Walsh didn't just contract out a browser game and call it CoE.

11:02 it's like studying french for 3 years and then realizing you dont even like french to begin with. generally there are talks way before a prototype is even begin designed, that end up leading to the proper programming language. you'd have the programming lead and the production team sit up and come up with various different options and iterating on them, untill a clear vision is set to stone. at that point you create a couple of prototypes and see what works and what not.

Backers gonna get a 'game' of empty digital squares with King/Queen Your Name written on them. Lol.

make videos based on what you want to make videos about, we are here for you. fuck the haters

Watching Caspian dance around showing off the crap he has put together lately is fucking hilarious. This dude said his engine was 7 years into development at kickstart. Then proceeds to develop Unity shop assets.

I love the CoE videos. More liars need to be exposed like this. Love your Dreamworld videos too.

"If I was a cynical man... which I am" I felt that. 😂

This CoE coverage is great! Perhaps one of your videos will even be used in court when the lawsuits finally get going!

Seems like selling the promise of an impossible game where 'you can literally do ANYTHING' is a really popular and lucrative business model nowadays. I thought Chris Roberts would've patented this already.

That village looks like a half finished school project from a seventh grader.

Upcoming COE DLC : Caspian Sea Monster

I really love your outros with the music :) kind of weird, on the one hand its a pity the video is already over, on the other you get to hear that amazing song bit

You are not beating a dead horse! I kind of forgot about this, and I never saw your channel before. This coverage is great and in-depth.

Keep covering this bro, the more exposure the harder it is to rip people off!!!

Wow... Developer: "We're making a RTS game now because making a MMO was too difficult" Also Developer: "We are struggling on every BASIC part of making a RTS" Seems promising.

Those milestones slowly slipping into the next one is giving me work gantt chart update flashbacks

i would appreciate if KiraTV continued to report back on this topic, i am intrigued as to what will happen.

I absolutely love watching this. by far my favorite thing to watch on youtube. Almost a mini "series"

Fantasy is deffo a word to describe this game.

Thanks for another video regarding this farce ;) Regarding their fog of war issue: To be honest I do not see how this could be an actual issue if you think about how it basically works. All you need to program is this: assigning states to your terrain: unvisited, explored, character present. Based on the state a certain fog (dense for unvisited, less dense for explored) or no fog (character present) is displayed, based on the same state certain elements (buildings, trees, animals, ...) are shown or hidden. Finally you assign an area to your player character which sends out signals, so the terrain can update itself to the correct state when the player moves around. At least that is how I would try to resolve it. I am just a hobbyist game developer with limited experience, so there are probably even better solutions.

@KiraTV Im glad i've stumbled to your channel while searching for a new MMORPG to play that will fit my needs. Sadly, i didn't find anything suitable so far (im currently playing FFXIV, wich has set a very high bar for expectations) But watching some of your videos gave me so much transparency (heh :D) over some practices Studios or Publisher will use. Im not delusional in any matter, and im trying to find some latest critical Information about the current Status of a Game i seem worthy of playing (thats how i found your channel).. Don't worry, i never considered playing CoE at any time, i just stumbled upon that story on your channel and i like the kinda comedy-ish content Soulbound Studio is producing here. But i would like to let you know that i love your content and how you are breaking down all these informations regarding these games.

Chronicles of Elyria: The 8 Million Dollar Meme!

I like when you cover this because it's like a good drama/scandal you would find on television but in the gaming industry.

Thanks as always Kira!!! I agree that he is doing exactly what he is told, as well as reiterating what some of the dishonest statements he has made in the past. Please keep covering this, I don't want to look at that damn site or hear more of Caspian's manipulative words. " Putting out an alphay test as early as we are", do me a favor!!! LiF comes to mind when I think of this game, but they're gone now so... Fog of War lol? I'm surprised that Snipe is still there, what a trooper! I fell terrible writing this, but due to Caspian's in ability to be forthcoming I have zero desire to play this game and just want my money back at this point. PS I wasn't able to follow your discord link, it gave an expired message.

This is why I come to your channel for MMO coverage. So yeah keep doing Elyria videos, at the very least it's hilarious watching this game spiral into the abyss.

this is a once in a lifetime reality show, we must see it through. this is the way

Honestly, I could make KoE in a 12hour day, it really is not that hard, most of the code they would use is readily available in tutorials and all the assets are from the unity asset store anyway.

10:13 he carefully worded how they bought a lot of pre-made assets and systems for their game and had no clue how to actually use and integrate them properly.

I remember hearing about this game a while ago and it completely left my mind until today when I watched your videos on it! I love these kinds of deep dives into topics, especially poor game development/kickstarters. You've got yourself a new sub :)

At around 4:20, you start saying that the allocation of money doesn't make much sense. However, you missed a key element when he listed the people he has working on the project: he doesn't say he's paying them. He explicitly says "our former X", "our former Y", meaning we don't know what they are doing right now or if they are even employed. If they are employed, why not say that he has re-hired people and this is their title. Instead, he goes through the pain of naming them as "our former lead dev (known as whatever)". I fully presume this is for legal reasons and that he isn't paying them and these guys could or could not be working on the project (they could be the only ones who accepted to see their names as part of this charade to help him for reasons unknown to us).

Of course nobody here is really learning something new. But its one hell of a comedy program that keeps on giving xD

Please keep making videos about this, it's absolutely fascinating.

I'm a professional unity developer (programmer) with a primary focus on environmental programming, game framework controllers, UI,Animation/AI, and shader programming. I can tell you that in the videos I have seen there is really nothing there. And setting up a global controlled fog shader is not difficult, the truth is that they don't know what they are doing. They don't have any professional shader programmers or unity engine tools programmers. Sounds like a bunch of hobbyists reaching way beyond their ability. When you are building a game of that scale you need actual professionals with experience with various systems, especially lighting, baking, ECS, shader programmers and it goes on and on. You also need good project managers that can coordinate such complex systems cross integration, you need people just to do documentation and design. The project described is orders of magnitude to large for 5 people to accomplish. You also need project/department managers with experience working on large scale projects. You need competent game designers with the ability to flow chart mechanics and understand the complexities and cross integration mechanics of all the systems. A game like this you can't just "start building" and hope that your "prototype" turns into the game you imagine in your mind. It has to be well designed from the start and well thought out. Not to mention, level/world designers! Level design can be complex and very time consuming as well.

Love it. They got $350 from me and I’m salty. I HATE what happened here. Not because of the $350, but because of the total sham and time I invested in theory-crafting / planning / time spent following etc with my mates.

Keep up the coverage. Love this stuff.

I had never heard of this "game" before your videos but you are doing a great job covering it!

@11:00 developer here, changing the language a project is written in after you've done literal years of work on it is like building a house and then deciding that the entire foundation is bad and needs to be re-done. Needless to say you'll have to tear the whole thing down and start over from scratch. So yes, a pretty big fucking deal. Also typescript and node.js for a game backend. Not my first choice to put it mildly...

Love the CoE news you put out, keep going with it

hell yeah lets beat the dead horse :D

Someone has to bring light upon those scammers. And you're doing it so well. How could we resist ? :D

Developer here. When they talk that extensively about how C# is expediting the development process, they actually mean "we're putting together something with Unity and calling it a day".

Fog of war. That's such a new concept.

It was Chronicles of Elyria that first brought me to your chanel (thx Asmongold) so yeah its fun to hear you shit on them lol 🤣

I appreciate the coverage of this situation. I didn't know till I saw your account.

100% in for this full saga and each update. keep em comin!