Legends of Ellaria

Can't recommend. It's the kind of game I would like to play. But it is not nearly finished. Been over a year since the last update too. Looks like it's abandoned.

Abandoned indie game that came out in early access with a great idea, which was never completed. Somehow its still available on steam.

Sometimes you back a game, and it turns out like No Man's Sky. Other times it turns out like this. Abandoned.

Something weird happened to this game somewhere along the way. It was this kind of fun little Indie RPG where you'd go into dungeons and fight monsters. You'd build a little town along the way by placing buildings in the open world you could walk around in.
Now it's this weird hex based thing where you really never even have to touch your character. It's like they never improved the quality of any aspect of the game, they just kept slapping more and more stuff on top and none of it is good.

I bought this game for 3 dollars so I'm not mad at my purchase but this game really is bad. Melee combat is very clunky. options UI is slow and it takes forever to scroll through the available resolutions. Ranged combat is incredibly inaccurate and sad, I get it's an RPG but mouse/keyboard skill should help a lot more than it does and the fact that you can barely move with a knocked arrow is making me pretty mad. magic will rarely hit even though i'm shooting it directly at targets. character creation is pretty ridiculous, they don't even give you all the same haircolor options for your facial hair... selecting each option on character creation causes a load circle to take a few seconds, very unresponsive and annoying. this game needs a ton of work to be considered good and I wonder if the developers ever hope to make it a good game.

A buggy mess, clunky movement, insane loading times, no info on basic stuff like what attributes do. Had a bug that just randomly placed me under the world looking up at the dungeon, couldn't do anything - happened twice, once while mining, once in the middle of a fight. The devs are still working on this, but it's best avoided for now. Too bad, it looked promising.

This games tries to be everything, and fails at every aspect.
The UI is ugly, the missions are silly, the controls are weird, and the graphics look like a benchmark demo from early 2000's.
I got this game over 4 years ago, and every time I try to play it- I give up after 5-10 minutes.
Even with 80% off that it has now- skip it.

Unfortunately it's too broken too play the games story. you can really only skip to the last chapter and you have to use cheats to do that.

I really enjoy this game. But it has major flaws to it, it's broken in a lot of ways. It CTD's alot, enemies walk through the walls, icons and the map HUD disappear, jumping is totally broken, door teleportation is wacky and sometimes you'll teleport under the map, the camera is glitchy and much more. I'm a pretty tolerant guy so it doesnt bother me too much.

The combat system would be really good if the mage wasn't so OP. Once you got the fireball you generally just blow everything up and armies don't really stand a chance. But I enjoy it, I'd actually prefer being OP so i can progress the game sooner. It's also fun landing those fireballs and wrecking whole armies in minutes.

So far it seems like there is alot of gameplay, mostly based on how you play. While, I've only done a few missions and theyre usually all the same thing, just go kill stuff, theres decent narratives and dialogue. In between quests there's lots of managing between towns and clearing the map.

I'm not that much of a reveiw guy, but I think it's a great game, other than it's broken and discontinued. This game has alot to offer, but sadly, I think it's been pretty much abandoned as is. I havent gotten too far but I'd already want more content.

Jesus, here we go.

INVENTORY

No inventory sort function.
You can't pick up money if your inventory is full, despite the fact money is not stored in an inventory space.
When selling items to a shop, it adds equipped items of the same kind as those in your inventory to the amount sold. Leaving you without armour or weapons.
Some bags use the belt slot.
Amulets use the shoulder armour slot.

USER INTERFACE

When you pick up an item that gives you xp, the message is not spelled: "experience" it is spelled: "expirience"
Item tooltips can appear off the screen if the item is on the right side of your inventory, leaving them unreadable.
When your inventory is full and you attempt to pick up an item, it says: "inventories is full"
Some item tooltips have text overlapping the sale price of the item.
Items in the shop are missing their proper names and are left with names such as 'ALC_Bulb_C' and 'ALC_Big_retort'
A location was labelled as a tavern, the building at the location was labelled as a house, the inside was a mage shop.
The design of the experience bar on the HUD makes it difficult to see how much experience you actually have at glance.
Some chests are labelled "Game Object"
The barracks "traines" Soldiers
Build Fountain, is misspelled "Fontain"
On the compass the marker for ruins is a gem, but has a black square behind it. It's the only compass marker with a black square behind it, and looks like they forgot to make the backround invisible.
"windmill", "granary" and "warehouse" all unlocked before the associated research had been started.
Random events take place during the game, such as "your men become lions" i assume this is a morale boost, but it doesn't actually say on the notification what the events do.
When you're inside a cave, the exit doors still say "Enter cave"
When selecting an army on the overworld, Military Strength is misspelled "Military Strenght"

COMBAT

Enemies sometimes disappear into the floor.
Enemies inside terrain can still shoot you.
Enemies Sometimes get stuck on terrain.
Enemies sometimes refuse to shoot back at you.
Enemies are often just standing in a group in the middle of a room, or all stuck together on the terrain.
Visiting a farm placed me inside the floor.
Projectiles Sometimes pass through enemies without hurting them in first person.

GAMEPLAY

There are sometimes invisible obstacles inside buildings (the Library)
Interactive objects such as woodcutting, mining and cooking points suddenly stop working. (this happened to me after using one cooking fire, and at first i assumed i needed to find an axe and pickaxe to use the other points, until i tried a fire again and realised they had all broken)
Overlapping rug textures in buildings leave them flickering constantly.
The Interactive marker to enter a cave (you press E on it) was not in the entrance to the cave, and i needed to took around to find it.
Some caves are so poorly designed that you get stuck on terrain, then get caught on the ceiling and float around.
Objects continue to sparkle after they have been looted.
3 Hours played and it's clear that the game has a memory leak. The game has slowly increased in ram usage and is now scraping 8GB,
Trees in front of doors, preventing access.
Tanning Racks give xp (why?)
While in first person, you can see your clothes clipping.
There are multiple objects inside dungeons that look interactive, but are purely cosmetic. Giant glowing gems, Glowing bowls, etc. Items that look like they are collectable, but literally do nothing.

Developer. Listen. Free advice.

Take a group and have them walk around asking people if they like video games. If they say yes, ask them if they like this style of game. The ones that say yes, get their info and ask them if they would be willing to play a game and have people taking notes. The ones that say yes to that, you set a day and time that works for them and have them come in.

Now, set up some computers, install your game, wait for the people to show. Have one person stand behind each gamer and tell them to keep their mouths shut and take notes. These notes should be, problems the player was having, complaints, likes, dislikes, etc. Then, once they are done gaming for a bit, you sit them down for a Q and A session and get input. Just honest, raw input.

You just got people to help you fix the problems with your game at little cost to you. You have to pay a few team members some OT and maybe buy some pizza? You'll spend more time and money implementing the fixes.

Now, have some team members scroll through all the bad reviews. Just the bad ones. Pull all the "issues" and fix them. Now, the good reviews. Take note of the "I really like this" from each good review.

A few weeks and your game will be playable and get better ratings. Shoot, and it didn't cost that much.

For everyone reading this, asking themselves "should I buy this". Do you like handing money to random people on the street? Until the developer fixes this, you are just giving them money for wasted HD space on your rig.

This game has become painful to play. Not sure what they did in the past year but it was pretty nice during early access. Now you can walk around a couple of blocks while screens load, you get a screen load just going into a small shop or cave. Every move you make is a screen load basically. Items go missing from inventory and the game has shut down for no reason a couple of times. Its just too painful to watch such a unique concept go down the drain. Would not recommend

I just do not understand how this is out of Early Access...

The game is fundamentally super interesting and really have a great potential. But playing it few hours just was really really frustrating. From limited game option setup, stuttering gameplay with FPS drop or somekind of loading freeze, very bad pathfinding for you troop when exploring cave, villages and forest, no possibility to mine stuff, your troop not reacting to your order, very simple inventory management with no item comparaison, no sorting or filtering option etc... and so on...

This is not a finish game. Not at all. I simply cannot recommend it unless you want to support this project and hope they can get rid of those bad bugs all around...

It is again a very interesting project and idea all around and I can only relate to what they want to do with this... but it feels it was rushed out of EA too early ...

Even though this game has a great concept, the execution was just terrible.

It tried to be a mix of everything, action 3rd person, action 1st person, RTS, a nation management game,
but not being good at any of them.

The Action part has Physics bugs.
RTS part Control Scheme is worse than Warcraft 1.
Nation Management has unintuitive design.

And Loading time is just atrocious.

Also, my PC can run Cyberpunk without a hiccup, and yet it has FPS issue with this game.
I wish they should have at least solve the FPS issue before getting out of early access.

As it is now, this is just a mediocre game of each genre mashed together.
It is being more ambitious than it can handle itself.

If the developer choose to focus on one aspect and minimize the others,
then it might have been a pretty fun game.

My recommendation to reference a game design of this genre would be Pathfinder.
It focuses on the RPG part, while the Kingdom management was minimized.

I liked the concept behind the game, but even though the concept is great it's execution is terrible. Gameplay is really clunky, not bearable even. Fighting is awful, you just mash one button, watch some horrible animations and hope for the best. Most of the assets are taken from somewhere, I actually saw most of them in another game. Strategy gameplay sounds good on paper but in reality it's even worse than tpp. Kingdom management is ok, but it's nothing original, it's very limited and unintuitive. Game also crashes constantly. The only good and original thing about this game is the idea behind it, but that's it.

It's just not worth it, to be fair I couldn't recommend it even if it was free.

I am honestly surprised at what the game has become. Early legends of ellaria had quests, this introduction where you ran from a failing kingdom under siege, it explained mechanics, you were able to place buildings and talk to your citizens. You traveled in a open world to different towns. Now the game has become like Evony online, or a 3rd person Risk game. Instead of traveling in an open world, you merely click on a hex and wait 30 seconds to cross half of your starting area. Before if you needed houses, you walked around looking for a good spot and placed down a few, you were actually able to craft how the town looked and the placement of everything. Now the game just does it for you, with the slow choppyness of being in town I am unsure if you can still place buildings but there is also no point when you can use the town management UI to increase your population and production. You also lose the need to raid chests and bandits pretty quick once you obtain a lumber mill because resource locations like farm slots and mining spots easily are built once your wood income is stabilized. What charm Ellaria had is now gone, and I can't recommend anyone play this now. Its a game in early access, there is no morality issue that comes in with most medieval games now, there is hardly any need to actually enter your town other then when the game forces you to when your traveling between locations, even adding soldiers to your party is done outside of town via transfer troop system. The idea to mix this sort of dragon age and a rts wargame was cool but it now has just become a idle game with a risk map style and a browser game style resource collection.

I love the IDEA of this game. It was on the right path but has not logged an update since October, so I am nervous.....

UPDATE: Devs Reached out and said they have not posted anything new but have had a couple updates since then. I will try soon and revised my post if it feels like there has been additions.

12/28/2019 UPDATE: Changing to a yes recommendation after seeing the Beta. Thank you again Larkon for letting me have a glimpse of your vision.

Update 2.0 23/12/2020
I see a lot of negative reviews with people upvoting them and honestly it baffles me when someone reviews a game with barely 2 hours on it. People keep forgetting that this game isn't even on a true beta stage yet. It's still very much in development and its come far from when I originally posted this review. Yes they are 3 year in development and yes they still have issues but people keep forgetting the sheer size of the goal the are trying to accomplish here. Great games have taken up to 10 years to complete and I personally feel you shouldn't judge if you don't actually put on 10 hours or more and keep in mind just how far they've come and how far they still need to go... In only 3 years they've managed to create a entirely new perspective on how these types of games could be played. I stand by my positive outlook I wrote about below... Don't go pi$sing in your pants just because you got fractional lag every now and then with your supercomputer....optimization has always been the last thing to do in any game development....
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Let me start out by saying that I personally feel this game's concept is the future. The concept has so much potential that I cant even begin to explain. That being said this is also the first game I've encountered with such an ambitious goal. I don't think this game will every fully develop to do justice to the concept but I do think that it will do a very good job laying foundations and exploring a lot of the functionality, customization, game mechanics, possible content, game systems and managment mechanics such a game could have.

The game itself is in very early development which makes it quite clunky at this point. Lots of pathfinding issues (you can litterally walk up a cliff-face), tooltips and managment info is non-existant, a lot of future content is missing, combat systems is a little glitchy and cumbersome, navigation is somewhat of an issue (no map and very rudimentary markers on minimap) and quests is still glitchy with the occasionall bug. DESPITE all this I am looking forward to what this game will become. Yes it probably wont win a ton of awards but 10/10 for effort. I will update my review based on the development teams output of updates and my experience with how well they cope with patching problems and the time they spend on new content.

UPDATE: The Devs rolls out the fixes and minor updates like every week. Extremely active so thats a HUGE +

For now though I would recommend it if it's on sale. As soon as the update arrives with local maps of the overworld and dungeons I would say its worth buying at full price even if its not a finished product purely because I would like this game to pioneer us to a new age where we RPG in a HUGE open world with the option of building actuall NPC towns and managing territories in perhaps a multiplayer environment competing against eachother. Imagine Ark or Monster Hunter World but only with sprawling NPC empires on the edges of a GIGANTIC map and player controlled territories battling it out in the centre RTS style with fully interactive towns (as in the town you build is like skyrim like interactive RPG like but also manages resources and manpower like a real RTS). The possibilities are endless.

Let me start by saying what so many other reviewers said, this game looks promising and the idea behind it is even more promising.

But, five minutes into the game I realized how shallow it currently is. From the pictures and videos you get the false idea that even in its current form of the game you can at least spend some time just fighting stuff and exploring. But the 3rd person combat system (in its current implementation) is too simple and boring, you left click to attack and right click to defend.

And after I realized that, I went through the positive reviews this game has and I noticed that 90% of the people who left a positive review have spent less than 10 hours actually playing this game. They are all praising it for what it could be in the future they are reviewing what they hope to see in the game and are giving the devs too much slack. And this is bad both for the devs, that will sit back, relax and continue developing a game that lacks any depth, and for the gamers, that will get their hopes up too high and will surely be let down in the future.

So I won't be doing that. In its current form the game has nothing for me to enjoy and I won't leave a positive review for what it could become.
If the developers read this I would highly recommend that you go in depth to one of the elements already in the game, such as combat, story missions and city management before adding more elements.

Idea: 10/10. Like Skyrim: Hearthfire, if Hearthfire was the game and Skyrim the DLC. Clever combination of a city-builder and an RPG, top-notch gameplay!
Execution: 5/10. Needs more optimisation, less creepy-looking faces, and a king needs a place to store his belongings that will end up flooding his inventory before you even get out of the first cave. Early access is early access, so I'm giving them credit for what they've done, but more work is strongly necessary.

Legends of Elleria is a RPG/RTS game where you play as the king who has fled to the mythical land of Ellaria to build his new kingdom there.

The game is rough and not yet polished but its already fun and ive had alot of fun doing the quest and exploring the world and fighting the different enemies, dying to different enemies and coming back with a hand full of milita who then die because ive put them up to fight with armored northlanders.

The dev team is really in contact with the players ive had loads of questions and they still dont hate me ( i wouldve hated myself if i had to answer all my questions) ive reported a couple of bugs with the ingame bug reporter but i also send them more information and more pictures about the bugs and they're already working on it. Its good that the dev team is so open for suggestions and always there to answer questions and sometimes even a little bit of criticism.

Overall ive had a good times exploring Ellaria. hacking, slashing and shooting through hordes of goblins and other enemies you can find and the most fun part is obliterating them with fire balls or all the other spells you can learn and use.

for now there is enough variation in weapons and the studio already announced that we can expect a large amount of deadly weapons such as axes, swords, longswords, maces and new shields.

They're working on siege weapons at the moment and i think the result will be very cool thinking about what siegeweapons can mean for this game.

I bought the game ive done all the missions and i still wanna go back and just take some goblins out with the spells ive learned in the tombs. The game has real potential everybody who loves RTS and RPG games should certainly give this game a try.

and if you think that 17 euro's is a bit too much i also thought that when i was thinking about buying it, but supporting this friendly studio and playing the game now is really worth it and because its a Early Acces your money will get worth with every update they release.

I have no regrets buying it and i recommend it, if you dont like dealing with bugs (which there are ofcourse) you can just wait a little bit longer and play the game when the game is more optimized.

Have fun in Ellaria.

If I could theory craft the perfect game, one of my top suggestions would be what this game has the potential to become; a first person RPG, open world sandbox building, real time strategy mass combat game. At this early stage of the alpha, the first elements of all of this is present. You have a character you control, the king/queen of your domain. You build buildings to develop your village and add capacity to it. Ultimately you build soldiers and archers with which to deal with enemy concentrations and villages, and go into battle with them.

During all of this your character also has quests/missions to do, dungeons and caves to explore, loot to find. This is not just about building the village, it's about building your character. So far as I write this review, there is not a whole lot of things to do. Most players run out of things to do after ten or twelve hours. For the price though, I've gotten a lot less play out of games I've payed a lot more for, because they did not interest me as much.

This game has ENORMOUS potential, and what is in the game so far bodes well. This is not a half assed project. If you like the idea of this sort of game, please consider supporting it's development.

Do you like M&B? Kenshi? You will love this game!

Even at it's state it is playable. Clunky at times but you will see that it's a good game WHEN finished.

4 hours in to game and I already establish a village/cleared a dungeon that looks like a castle maze. completed 5 quest. created a 10 man army.

The developer and moderators are very kind and approachable. They even have a discord server!

If you like RTS/Base Building/RPG (will be implemented)/Mediaval/Fantasy Sim this would be the best for you.


SUGGESTION

regarding quick save/quick load would be good

ability to remove yourself if you go stuck. (reloading should not be the solution)

add female villager

variation of models

variation of animation

ragdoll improvement

Map

Defensive/Offensive Stance in battle

Parry/Riposte

More Spells

More Weapons

Random events (chance that you get invaded)

Walls + Guards

Static positioning of Guards

Children Npc (make unkillable to avoid violation)

Terrain Smoothing

Texture of your character. (add blemishes, the current model looks silky smooth. looks like anime)

also ability to destroy building would be nice heheh

Intriguing:
12 hours to complete all existing quests and build up village to current max. I like the idea and see the potential of what the dev's are trying to accomplish. A playable framework that is entertaining and captures your attention enough to feel disappointed when you realize there's nothing left to do until the next update.

Looking forward to seeing how well this game evolves.