Dear Humans and Elves,
In the live stream from last Friday, many of your questions were answered by our game designer Timon and artist Oliver. For those who missed the stream, we have collected the questions and answers and present them to you in this thread.
Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team
What are your plans with Elvenar? What kind of features can we look forward to? Is there an estimation of if/when the next tech tree expansion, or new buildings will come? There are some awesome ideas for this on the forums.
We are already working on several big new features. Of course, we can't announce all of them today, but I can share with you that we are indeed working on a tech tree expansion. And - I think I can say that much - this expansion will certainly be more than just some more buildings and upgrades. We hope this expansion will deliver a surprisingly new and challenging experience to you. Since we have already been working on that for quite some time, I'm sure we can tell you more about it in a few weeks.
What makes Elvenar different from all those other city-builder games?
Elvenar is a City Builder set in a unique fantasy setting. Until launch, we focussed on creating a traditional and proven city building experience. Now, having a healthy and stable foundation to build on, we will add more and more fantasy elements to our core gameplay. Features that are only possible because of our setting. Today might still be a bit early to talk about that, but we will definitely share more information about those features soon.
After hearing about a chat, I was wondering if there are also plans for something like a Fellowship Forum, where information can be shared within the Fellowship?
Actually, there are two reasons why we didn't add a Fellowship forum. First, we wanted to add the Fellowship functionality as soon as possible so you all can enjoy playing Elvenar together. Thus we focussed on the core functionalities like adding and removing members, trading without fee and Neighborly Help. We will certainly listen to your feedback how you want the Fellowship feature to be extended in the future. The other reason is, that when taking a closer look on how Guild forums in other games work and what they are used for, we came to the conclusion that most forum features can be replaced by using the message system. You can write circular messages to all your Fellows and share information with them that way. Most Guilds in other games actually behave like that: Using the forums only occasionally, most stuff is done with messages.
What is the reason for limiting the size of Fellowships to 25 members specifically? I get a limit in general, but 25 is too small when accounting for less active players, those lower levels, and with the same boosts as you etc, and will mean only a few people you'll actually get to trade with. And, is there a way to alter the amount of members in a Fellowship?
There is currently no way for the player to extend the limit of 25 members. We also discussed this number internally a lot. What we really want to achieve with the Fellowships, is that every player can be part of a vivid community. Now, the bigger the community gets, the less personal it gets, the less important is your own part within that community. In other games, bigger Guilds tend to have lots of inactive members, and oftentimes, even the active members don't know which members have left the game and which they can still rely on. That's why we choose a relative low limit of 25, to keep the group members closer together. To give more importance to every single one of your Fellows. We want your Fellowship to be personal!
Will be there any easy-to-access list of my Fellows like in FoE or... I have to maniacally click my Fellowship, scroll down, click members name, click menu option 'visit' just to aid them? (just thinking of doing things that way makes me tired)
Currently, that is indeed the best way to do that. We know this is not optimal and we are already thinking about how to improve this. The challenge for us is, again, to keep things personal. It is important for us to speed up daily routines like this, but it is also important that social interactions like helping each other still feel social. Originally, we also thought about adding a button where you can help all your Fellowship members with one click.
Are there any other features that are being considered/in the works to add to the Fellowships? I understand they've only just been released, but I won't know without asking.
As said before, our top priority was to deliver the Fellowships to you as soon as possible with a reasonable scope of content. We would like to add more "meat" to this feature in the future - we already have some ideas for that. But we also want to gather your feedback on this one to find out what you would like to see there.
Chat is mentioned in the video. Can you elaborate on what players can expect from the chat (the system itself) and also when it might realistically be released?
We will add a Fellowship chat system simultaneously or shortly after releasing the Fellowship feature itself. Our research regarding chat systems came to the conclusion that the Fellowship will most likely be the place in the game where a chat is most helpful, that's why we concentrated on creating a Fellowship chat only. For communication with other players in the game, you can still use our message system.
What is the goal (final purpose) of the game?
Now that's a big one. If you follow the story line a bit that is mostly told through quests, you might have heard about the background story of Elvenar. There once was a great race, called the Elvenar, which is regarded as the highly developed first mother of all other races on this world. Unfortunately, this race and most of its deriving races somehow disappeared over time. Only Humans and Elves survived. Your task as a Human or Elf is to uncover the secrets and mysteries of this world's past to lead your culture to former glory.
Are there any plans to do group events?
We can't announce anything specific today, but of course, now having Fellowships in the game, it would be a wasted opportunity not to offer group events and activities, right? For us, this is a very interesting and important direction since Elvenar is supposed to be a full-blown MMO, and right now, the Single-Player part of it is far more developed. Certainly we will consider features where players can actively play together in the future.
Will it be possible to rotate buildings? It would make easier to build my city.
This is a question we actually receive quite often. Now, the short answer is no. But here is why. Every city builder needs features that make placing buildings challenging. In Elvenar, this challenge comes mainly from two sources: The one is that most buildings need a street connection, and the other is that every building has a fixed shape. The combination of this makes it challenging to build an efficient city. Of course, the downside of every challenge is that sometimes it feels like a burden. If you could rotate the buildings, this would make things much easier. But the downside of a low challenge is: when it gets too easy, it also gets boring quite fast. So, since this "city puzzling" is a core mechanic in Elvenar, we never implemented any technical base to make it possible to rotate buildings.
Will there be ways to plunder or battle other players? Or, will there be another kind of PvP battling system? If not, are we going to be stuck with battling provinces?
We have no plans to add plundering to our game. Even though we put a lot of effort into our battle system, many of our players play the game peacefully, and we want to keep an environment where a peaceful playstyle is possible and successful. On the other side, I don't see why we shouldn't enhance our battle system for the players who like it. I'm sure the future of Elvenar will hold more opportunities for you to send your army into battle. But for now, that is all I can tell you about that.