Team 21 Studio held a new Tavern Talk to respond to community questions on Ilysia, the beta tests, why they chose to head into beta now, what happened to Freeforge, and what’s ahead.
The VR MMORPG recently finished its second beta test and the community was ready with tons of feedback. This recording of the discussion was shared today, with a new edition of Tavern Talks happening this afternoon with even more questions and answers.
In the recently shared talk, one of the biggest takeaways was a promise to be better at communicating with the community. “We need to get back to Team 21 Studio and the Ilysia community making this game together, ” studio co-founder and Ilysia Creative Director Art Fogle says.
On the subject of the promised freeforge class system, which was dropped before the first beta test, they acknowledge that they should’ve let everyone know what their plans were and what their thoughts were on the system. They withdrew the player-choice class system, where you could use any weapon or gear that you found, because they were worried about their ability to balance PvP with that kind of freedom. They presumed that PvP would be too big to ignore, so they went ahead.
Turns out, when it came to feedback, the community would have much rather had the freeforge class system than PVP–including those that had tried out the freeforge system in alpha. This gave them even more reason to want to return to greater transparency. So they’re working on getting the freeforge system back into Ilysia, while taking time to get it right and listening to feedback.
Overall, Team 21 continues to work on Ilysia, with gear, items, armor, starting areas, and other functions like voice acting and polish are in the works. For their Early Access, they are committing to polish and learning the lessons that they need to be more upfront and work with the community. They’re even considering some kind of polling or a better bug report and feedback system.
There will be a new talk today at 4PM Eastern/ 1PM Pacific on Discord.For more, head to Ilysia.
