There have been a few updates posted to the Elderlands website since late August, which I’ve been lax in getting posted here. Elderlands, you may recall, is the 2D, tile-based MMORPG being produced by (among others) Jason Ely, who also worked on Ultima 8.

There was, for example, a lengthy news update posted by Jason Ely (who goes by the handle Lothgar) on August 27th:

So we’ve been quiet lately but for good reason. We have a lot coming down the pipeline and which takes a large amount of time and effort from the team.

Jilly has been working very hard on human models with full animation sets and directional facing. She has completed the male and is working on the female. Once she is done with that she’ll begin building paperdoll clothing pieces for the models. All our human npcs will be using this base model and sets of outfits. Jilly will eventually get animation sets and directional facing for ALL creatures in the game. This is a very long road for her so please give her your support. That is a lot of pixels.

We will post some gifs soon showing some of the animations on the base (nude) models. They are pretty cool.

Those GIFs were posted in early September. Here are three, showcasing the male human model with (and sans) clothes:

The update continues:

Rizla has finished up some very cool maps for Zima. He is now working on Gloomwood. He is taking on the task of creating points of interest, towns, dungeons and other areas in the zone. This is a massive amount of work and I know you will all really love his work.

You all may know the player Tonsafun. He has been the guy I go to for analysis of our systems and number crunching. I’ve asked him to help us out with his talents. He is currently evaluating items in the game and will be adjusting some of the stat scaling and distribution of stats. He’ll also reworking gear distribution for the quartermasters in Darnorlth.

Notir has been working on the website and database back end. His work is going to help us bring on multiple servers and better account management.

The good Mr. Ely has also been quite busy himself:

I’ve been working on the framework for the Login Server. I should have this online in a few days. In addition I’ve been re-prioritizing my tasks. I will be making a pass through the Darnorlth content and closing up any open ends as well as finishing up areas that were not completed. We need to have one zone that is 100% content and feature complete. Darnorlth is not there yet. We have multiple mini-bosses as well as 9 world bosses that need to have loot tables, spells, and AI.

I have enabled basic PvP with the standard loot rules. I have some changes to make for player dead bodies before I can make that a live feature. Once that is done and we have the Login Server online I’ll launch two servers… PvE Testing and PvP Testing servers. PvP Test server will have PvP enabled once players hit 25… An npc in Darshire will automatically convert any new character into a level 25 and teleport them to Rualdon with some starting endgame gear.

So there is a lot that has been going on with the game, in other words…lots of development time being put into it. And the most recent news adds another new, potentially interesting wrinkle. It’s a very short update, consisting primarily of this image:

This cryptic bit of news accompanies it:

Things are happening. Soon my anxious community… Soon!

I’ll note that the sub-title — Dawn of Creation — is a new thing, and I’m curious what it could mean. Could it be the formal title of the game we currently know only as Elderlands? Could it indicate that the game is now planned as the first in a series of titles? Could it be an indication that the Elderlands Kickstarter campaign, which Jason Ely alluded to when I interviewed him, is about to kick off (as it were)? Could it be the name of the sequel to Elderlands?

Hopefully, we will soon find out.