Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore launched on Steam on May 1st, 2023, but it hasn’t been a smooth ride. The last time we met to talk about Ethyrial, I mentioned server lag and some bugs that were causing me a lot of stress during the beta. Unfortunately, when the team fixed one issue, ten more seemed to pop up.
If you’ve been keeping an eye on Ethyrial - there were so many issues with the game’s first launch that the crew over at Gellyberry made the call to relaunch the game on May 12th. My first foray into the world of Irumesa didn’t go so well, so I was relieved to hear that the team was taking a step back to set everything straight. The Ethyrial Discord was alive with activity and feedback and it felt like the developers were actually listening to the community. However, that enthusiasm would slowly start to wear away over the following week.
Launch day started off pretty optimistically. Well, for the most part. I encountered some issues with the login credentials for the press account because Steam replaced where we were previously able to enter in credentials manually. Thankfully, one of the developers was around and able to assist me through direct messages on Discord.
Our resolution came in the form of game time on my Steam account, as Team Gellyberry didn’t have a current fix for Steam replacing the manual login. It was a fresh start anyway so it wasn’t like I lost anything. Initially, everything seemed fine. After logging in for an hour or two and trying out a couple of classes at level 1, I decided to take a break since the servers were struggling with lag. I had some RL things to take care of and I figured launch day would be a little rough (what MMO launch isn’t?), so I decided to wait a day or two before logging back in. Surely those horrible bugs from before had been squashed by now, right? It couldn’t get any worse, right?
However, I still kept a close eye on the Ethyrial Discord. Slowly but surely, the tone of the community began to shift. Anger, frustration, and accusations started pouring into the general chat from left and right. This was really startling to see, because up until May 1st, the community had been reacting mostly positively to the updates. I’m not certain if this was because of the enormous influx of players just discovering the game, or if the community as a whole were just frustrated with the progress of Ethyrial. I knew it was in a rough state, but I grossly understated just how broken Ethyrial was.
With renewed vigor, a hot cup of coffee, and a purring cat in my lap, I created my new character from one of the many archetypes available. This time, I decided to opt for the Warden. At this point you might be thinking, “Why does Emily keep picking these nature classes? We want to see something cool - like the Cultist or the Spellblade!” And to that I say to you, I had every intention of trying out each of the classes. I’m an altoholic in just about every MMORPG I play, so I was pumped to look at all of the new spells and abilities. Wardens or Druids, especially in a medieval world, just pulled my attention first. Trust me, there’s a good reason as to why I didn’t get to the others.
At first, everything was going pretty smoothly. Tutorial Island still had areas with NPCs that didn’t offer quests or items, and buildings filled with monsters that I couldn’t slay. However, the general workflow for the main tutorial questline was seamless enough. So far, so good! Boarding the ship to the new world, I ran to Dorian the Dockmaster upon arrival and started scanning through to collect his quests. The first quest mentioned grabbing bottles from a crate to take to another NPC on the other side of the village.
However, when I reached into the crate to pick up the bottles, the funniest thing happened. It was like…my hand just…phased right through it. Nothing happened. I clicked, control clicked, opened the context menu - nothing. After several minutes of moving my character around and struggling, I gave up. Well, maybe it was just this one quest having issues.
I knew the Dockmaster had another quest for me, and this one entailed killing spiders! I took said quest and made my way to the well where little Sara was looking for adventurers to help her catch her frog, Hubert. Easy enough! Click on the well and try to catch him with the context menu. When you fail to catch Hubert, a cute little dialog pops up to say “He slipped away!” That horrible phrase is the only thing I saw for nearly ten minutes. Click, control-click, right-click> “Catch Hubert” > “He slipped away!” Over and over and over again. I swear, I see that well in my nightmares.
Needless to say, I didn’t catch Hubert, and I wasn’t the only one. He didn’t say much, but I had another determined, silent companion that kept walking around the well trying different angles as he attempted to catch Hubert. No such luck. Finally, I had to give up and walk away. I was honestly kind of disappointed because I liked this quest. I liked going into the next town and feeling a sense of satisfaction when I found Sara’s father and received a new cooking recipe for helping out their daughter. Maybe I’d have more luck with the spiders?
Off to the spiders, I went. I trudged through the tall grass and slaughtered as many as the quest giver asked for and then some. I hadn’t gotten a single bit of EXP this entire time, so might as well try to get a few pips in while I was out here. Running back to the Dockmaster, he asked me if I had actually killed the spiders. Of course, I said yes. First, he ignored me and shoved potions into my backpack to give to the Spider Hunters - which promptly disappeared.
And do you know what this gray-haired, goldfish for brains, fish breath Dockmaster had to say to me when I tried to turn in the spider quest? “I apologize, I didn’t hear that clearly. Have you disposed of the spiders?” This went on for several minutes, with me just spamming the quest over and over trying to brute force through this deaf dockmaster’s questing bug. Another quest. Down the drain. Unable to complete.
This cycle went on for several more quests. I honestly felt like I was losing my mind. There was absolutely no way for me to progress unless I wanted to go out into the field and grind spiders. I had enough grinding in Embers Adrift, and that still wouldn’t give me my other spells because I needed to complete a QUEST at my class trainer. What was a girl to do but head to the Discord in search of answers?
There I saw a new day of warnings from a Mod letting me know not to log in because of the ongoing issues. It was just like beta and the first launch week, with new issues popping up. Now the pieces were starting to fall together. It was too late for me at that point, but it wasn’t like I lost anything. I hadn’t gained anything to begin with. Regardless, I would have liked to have seen an in-game warning over the login screen, or for the team to have taken the servers down while they implemented the fix. I think most players would have preferred a server downtime as opposed to losing progress or items. Another day passed, and one issue was fixed. Then, several more were announced with fixes incoming.
We made an attempt to reach out to PR to let them know about the current issues I was facing and to see if they could assist me with these problems. However, as of writing this article, we still haven’t heard any word back. I was truly at a loss for what to do.
With this final attempt behind me, I decided that I just had to step away from Ethyrial. As much as I love the concept, it is just not ready to be played at this moment. A term I’ve seen thrown around in the Ethyrial Discord that I think we typically see crop up with newer games is “cash grab”. Personally, I don’t feel like that’s the case here. I think we have a small, inexperienced, indie team that got in a little too far over their heads and wasn’t expecting nearly as much hype and support as they received. Is that an excuse for putting out a subpar product and charging a subscription for it? Absolutely not. It is very clear from the frequent updates in the Ethyrial Discord that Team Gellyberry loves what they do, but that love isn’t going to be enough to make players see the value in their product if they can’t provide what they advertised.
With that being said, there was an announcement recently in the Ethyrial Discord stating that they will be onboarding new developers to the team to help work through the issues. It’s still not a lot of hands-on deck, but it’s considerably more than they have now.
As it stands now, I do not feel comfortable recommending Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore to our readers. It is still far too young and volatile, with substantial breaks and fixes happening every few days. Personally, I am going to have to wait another month or two before I feel comfortable diving back into Ethyrial. It's definitely not worth the subscription price it's asking for in its current state as well.
It’s going to take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears for the team to take back the narrative and prove all of the negative reviews wrong, but I would welcome any and all change and improvement to Ethyrial. We need more diversity in the MMO space, but we also need transparency. You can make ten announcements saying “Transparency is coming!!” but I will believe it when I actually see it.
Too often we’ve seen small projects with big aspirations burn with passion and implode, taking the dreams of all those that supported them with it. We’ve become jaded - I certainly have - and tired of having our feelings played with. If your game isn’t ready to launch, don’t hit the launch button. Don’t give us hope and feed us crumbs when the bread hasn’t even finished baking. We’re all excited to taste the bread, but no one wants to eat raw dough.
Full Disclosure: The product discussed here was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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