Jason Ely has posted an update to the Elderlands website, discussing what is in store for that game and the small company that develops and maintains it. I’ll leave out the part where he dives into the history of the game and its predecessor, Dransik, which Asylumsoft revived a few years back as Lothgar Online. Ely doesn’t pull a lot of punches in his analysis; he admits flat-out that work on Elderlands suffered as Asylumsoft worked to satisfy the demands of the Lothgar Online community.

Which, then, brings him to this announcement:

Starting immediately, Asylumsoft and all current developers are shifting focus back to the flagship project of the company. There is a lot of work ahead and the game needs some content and technical work. And entirely revised backend and the rest of the engine needs to be retrofitted.

Our goal is to bring Elderlands back online as soon as possible. We’re focused on rolling back some poor choices made in 2015 and push the game back into the direction I want it to go. I’m making this game in my vision. I believe that was the winning formula for Dransik. I didn’t make it for others, I made it for myself and I had that passion for it. I love Elderlands. I think the game is a hell of a lot of fun, it has so much potential for unique content and can provide endless hours/days of gameplay, not just grind, gather type gameplay.

I think this is the best direction for the company to go and for the product line we have put our time and money into.I think this is the best direction for the company to go and for the product line we have put our time and money into.

As for Lothgar Online, it won’t be going away any time soon:

Lothgar Online is an unfinished game and needs something. It can go either way. If we stay on the hard-core pvp path the game is dead and I might as well shut it down now. I think there is a place for LO and I think it will do well on Steam with the right direction.

With that said, we will leave LO up and running. As I can, I will assign some amount of design/art tasks to the project so there is some content flow into the game. We have a number of things in the queue that is very close for release (Crafting, Rebalance of pve content/items, reworking of formulas that are moving away from the Dransik style of play). This content will be released but only when we have the bandwidth to do so. I gave this game two years. In its current form it does not have any sustainability. A perfect example is even after a huge expansion of the world and content players started dropping off after 30 days without an additional update. I’ve sat with a number of people trying to find gameplay that fits this game which would keep players engaged for months. Without bringing in EL type systems I couldn’t find a way. This game is a Dransik close at its current state… a grind-fest and gear-hoarding game.

So the server will stay running. We may disable or at least limit player loot drops. We will shut down the coin store on the Lothgar Online site at the end of September.

So, if you were thinking in recent years that Elderlands seemed to be languishing, that it wasn’t getting the attention it should have been…it would seem you weren’t wrong. And it would seem that Asylumsoft will be working, going forward, to make right on that situation.

Albeit they are having some issues with the third party company that handles user account creation for them, at the moment. Hopefully that system is restored to good working order in the near future!