[UPDATE - January 14, 2026] Loric Games has now confirmed a new launch date: January 27, 2026. Check all the details in the news story.
[ORIGINAL STORY] Independent developer Loric Games announced the last-minute delay of the early access debut of its upcoming survival roleplaying game, Echoes of Elysium. The game was supposed to launch today, but the developers ultimately decided it was not ready and decided to postpone the debut to next month so that they may fix the 'stubborn bugs'.
In a video announcement, Loric Games CEO Brian Johnson stated:
We've built something genuinely awesome and unique, and we don't want to spoil that with a couple of stupid crash bugs. We're incredibly proud of what we've created, and even more excited to keep building on it with our community. I want to first thank the entire Loric team for the insanely hard work everyone has put in. I also want to thank our community, creators, press, and testers for all the support so far. It's not just us over here grinding—it's an entire community helping bring this game to life. We have big plans for this game. Please be patient with us as we continue to pour our heart and soul into this world.
We were invited to a remote press presentation ahead of the originally planned December 4 debut, where we learned more about the game. Echoes of Elysium centers on customizable airships, which are vital for exploration, combat, and resource harvesting as players navigate the bright, colorful world made of floating islands that the developers have consciously crafted to move away from the dark, dreary survival game tropes.
The game takes place in the titular Elysium, a shattered paradise in the heavens of mythic Greece, filled with soul‑powered clockwork beasts and a hostile faction known as the Heron Armada. The player character is a hero guided by the goddess Lethe, tasked with uncovering Elysium's past and resisting the Armada in an open‑world, story‑driven sandbox that is procedurally generated. Upcoming biomes include storm-heavy cloud areas with 3D mesh clouds and caves, allowing varied exploration.
Airship construction is fully modular. Players design layouts, place functional modules, weapons, engines, sails, and defenses, then pilot the ship in real time. It is possible to eventually field a small fleet rather than just a single vessel. Combat pits players against waves of flying mechanical enemies, fortified sky‑towers, and Heron warships, with upgrades and new parts needed to survive greater threats. The airships can be augmented through craftable statues, granting abilities like stealth or rapid transition between regions. They can suffer damage and be repaired or destroyed. Beware that friendly fire is enabled.
Combat isn't limited to the airship. Loric Games plans to offer a mix of ground-based and ship-based combat, with the goal of achieving roughly equal emphasis. Players can also customize their characters with archetypes such as warriors, pilots, and engineers, each impacting the gameplay style.
The core gameplay loop combines elements of survival and RPG systems. Players gather resources on islands, craft tools, weapons, armor, and ship components, and use them to push deeper into more dangerous biomes. But progression also comes from leveling the character, unlocking abilities, and upgrading gear. Echoes of Elysium supports solo play or online co‑op for up to six players, and all major activities, such as exploration, building, boss fights, and resource runs, are designed to scale and feel better with a crew sharing roles aboard one or more ships.
Beyond the airship, the game also features fun glider-empowered traversal. The developers claimed that the community's input was crucial to making it feel smooth and dynamic. Following the early access debut, Loric plans to introduce ranged weapons, grappling hooks for ship-to-ship combat, enhanced shipbuilding, and new biomes. Improvements to progression systems, character customization, and ship combat mechanics are also planned, not to mention more modes. Offline support may be added based on feedback, but the team believes that multiplayer co-op is where their game shines best.
Following the presentation, we were able to ask a couple of questions to CEO Brian Johnson. For a hands-on preview of Echoes of Elysium, check out David's earlier article.
Several people at Loric Games are MMO veterans. Is there anything that you're able to use from your experience in that genre in Echoes of Elysium, even though it is a somewhat different genre?
Brian Johnson: You're right. The studio was founded by ex Mythic Entertainment folks, myself included. And then we've also added a fair number of people from Bethesda. I think actually the origins about why we chose to build a co-op game instead of a giant MMO kind of stems from COVID. We have people who have worked on games like Worm Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic and Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76. The challenge we came up with is that it became this, like, forever dream that we kept chasing. How many people can we jam into a region? And so we just kept doing that and it was fun. There's some definite technical challenges to it. But when I played Valheim with a couple of my friends during COVID, I remembered what I loved about playing online games.
I liked playing with my small group of friends. I liked playing in a world that I owned. Almost going back to when we used to play Quake a long time ago and we'd host servers and play people would join those. So, that was what drove us forward. Then we thought to ourselves, well, what can we use from our MMO days that really drives that and and what can we borrow from it?
One of the big things you're going to see is our content pipeline. In MMOs, doing regular updates is an important part of the experience and getting content to the game and making that content systemic in some cases. That's very much where we're going to be bringing to life here. So, we started with a platform first. We're a venture-backed game studio. So, we've been really focused on developing a platform that allows us to bring a lot of both narrative content, creative content, and new systems online rapidly post early access as we learn what our players do and don't want in the game.
Is there some sort of endgame that you may be adding to Echoes of Elysium?
Brian Johnson: Man, this is a funny thing. The answer is absolutely, and that might come in the form of PVP. um that might come in less of forms, but we do very much want to get to a place where you're in this sandbox, you're surviving your friends, and you could sort of continue to create the world and change the world the way you want to. We've even experimented with being able to use harpoon weapons to drag other ships, even islands around, and we're really excited about exploring that and seeing where it takes us.
Thank you for your time.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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