The penultimate update posted to the Elderlands website — this is the tile-based MMORPG developed by former Ultima 8 programmer Jason Ely’s company, Asylumsoft — teased that big things were coming soon for the game:

Huge Changes

Elderlands is going through a huge Facelift!

A bunch of things are changing for the better. Here is a quick list of things to come…

• A Redesigned Elderlands.com
• All in game zones have going through a revamp
• Combat system overhaul
• 4th Class: Ranger
• Customized classes at level 50
• A Kingdom/Faction system at level 50
• New Spell system
• New Skill system
• New Treasure system
• All new quests
• Creatures and Items totally redesigned
• Guild and Faction oriented PvP
• Much More!

However, as of about yesterday, the website has been replaced with a simple splash page featuring the Elderlands title block, the Asylumsoft logo, and an “Under Construction” image. Asylumsoft seem to be making good on the first bullet point, above.

On the Asylumsoft page at Patreon, there have been a handful of polls posted over the last month or so. One of these evidently queried whether players would prefer a manual attach or an auto-attack, and another asking what the next big feature added to the game should be. Back in April, there was also a post announcing a then-imminent private test. Most recently, however, there is a poll up — available to backers only — asking when a public test of Elderlands should take place.

To my mind, these posts all suggest that Elderlands has undergone — is undergoing — a very big overhaul indeed. The game itself has been playable for years, so if it now doing private tests and contemplating public test builds, this suggests that the next update to the game will present us with a very different experience indeed.