“Ether are those colored spheres that you collect when you fight enemies, for example you need 10 red to create a healing potion, five yellow to throw a stun grenade and so forth and so on, so its really an economy of the items using those spheres.” “Everytime you want to use an item, whether it is a healing potion, grenade or something like that you basically consume ether,” Lepierre said.
Developers said that even the bosses themselves are unique puzzles to solve. The gameplay is a fantastic blend of puzzles, platforming and combat where your success depends on the dynamic crafting system in the game utilizing Ether, earned from winning fights and exploration. “We really wanted something more symphonic like an older RPG game.” “As fans of role-playing games for a long time, when we were looking for the soundtrack of the game we didn’t want a soundtrack that is more ambient,” Grégoire said. The soundtrack to the game is composed by musician William Gough.
This past year there were quite a lot of action adventure games that featured pixel art but we didn’t want that, we wanted high resolution graphics so this is why we went with that art style.”īellavance was inspired by the Brothers Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm, who collected and published folklore tales during the early 20th century. It’s like a fairy tale, we wanted it to have strong colors … but we didn’t want dark tones in the art because we wanted to make a game for everybody. “She went with the paper-cut that looks like an illustration book, it even has that sort of old European folklore look. “On this title we had one artist on lead that did all of the art, Véronique Bellavance.” Grégoire said. The world of Arkanys built by the team at Lucid Dreams is enchanting and the art style truly feels like something out of a fairy tale, reminiscent of the beautiful art of Child of Light that left a lasting impression on me following its 2014 release. “For me and Francis, when we were looking to create our first game … it would be a good idea to just go ahead and create the game in that. “It all started with a Dungeons and Dragons Campaign where we created multiple creatures and people,” Maxime Gregoire said, noting that the original campaign is over 20 years old. Legends of Ethereal is a really clever game, it’s really fun and you have tons of content to see but everything is built for a reason, so there are no monsters there to just be there, everything has a reason and everything is really thought out.”ĭevelopers have been releasing information about the world of Arkanys, an ecologically diverse stretch of land, renowned both for its beauty and wealth of natural resources, divided into six major regions: Capital city Ashantra, Otlesko, Ambess, Urphé, Yatipha and the coasts of Enrich Malar Tock. Since we wanted our first game to be produced by a small team, because me and Max basically financed everything, we had to be really careful about what we did. ” … Everyone can come up with a good idea, but when you try to realize this idea sometimes it gets really really difficult so you have to be really careful about the choice you make: Will you multiplayer? Will you have a branching story line? All of those questions have a big impact on the production workflow, on the tools you need to develop, the size of the team you need to produce the game. “I think one of the big advantage to working for a long time before creating your own studio is you have a really good idea about the challenges you will face when you do a project,” Lapierre said. Lapierre’s credits include Spore Hero, Age of Empires Online, Far Cry 4, and Far Cry 5. Grégoire worked on Crystal Dynamic’s Tomb Raider, Thief, Lara Croft & the Temple of Osiris, Life is Strange, Just Cause 3 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. “This was how we met, … it was about how we loved games and how we wanted to do our own stuff.” “We’ve been mainly doing triple A before going indie, but like we said it was a dream that we had,” Grégoire said. Legends of Ethernal is a 2D action-adventure game being developed by a three-person team at Lucid Dreams Studio.Ĭo-founders Maxime Grégoire and Francis Lapierre met and became friends in college before starting careers in the video game industry. I got the chance to sit (virtually) with developers to watch a demo of Legends of Ethernal this morning, traveling to the world of Arkanys and getting a look at protagonist Wilfred as he fights his way through the Old Watchtower on his journey to find his parents.