The Ember Sword team held its latest land sale recently, and the team is reflecting on that sale, playtesting (including another round soon), and their roadmap to Early Access.
Bright Star CEO Mark Laursen, in the latest devblog, discusses the past several months and where things are going. An alpha testing round took place in the spring and the team was able to open up some of the world and let people see some of what to expect. Solarwood was made accessible to testers, and shortly after the playtest, a land sale was announced. With the concept of player ownership and collaboration both coming up often from the team, these two things happening one right after the other makes sense.
The land sale happened in two phases, including through an application where they wanted to pick buyers from those who had expressed interest in not just buying a piece of this but also in participation and building that community.
Laursen announced that Bright Star had “we’ve made some critical decisions around the structure of our team”, which could mean anything from reassignment to cuts, but this shift “increases our confidence of being able to hit our goal of reaching our Early Access release phase before the end of 2024”.
The team will be focusing on core elements of the MMO in Ember Sword.
“In this current phase of development, we are laser-focused on the core elements of what makes Ember Sword unique. We will be making further advancements to combat, trading, crafting and exploration.”
As far as what will happen on that journey to Early Access, the next playtest will happen in October. This one will take place inside the game's first dungeon, the Ultra Deep, and there’s even a new teaser. The previous playtest was based in Europe but they will be adding additional servers in different regions for this round.
See more at Ember Sword.