Open Letter to the Purchasers of Trials of Ascension: Exile

Hi All, I’m Parthuin, the owner of Dragonfire Entertainment and the new holder of the Trials of Ascension intellectual property rights. I’ve written, re-written and written again this letter and after a lot of thought, I decided it’s best to be honest and somewhat blunt.

Over the past two decades, Trials of Ascension has changed from an idea to a game in development, then that development was canceled. The project was resurrected, altered, compromised and yet again canceled. Reasons for those changes and eventual demise of the original Trials of Ascension are many and beyond the scope of intent for this letter with the initial founders of the project selling the IP to me with heavy hearts.

With that short history and explanation, I want to rip the band-aid off about Exile. The development of the game will resume at some point if there is sufficient demand. Those of you who bought the game are rightfully disappointed, upset, angry or a combination of. I do WANT to continue the development of Exile in earnest for all of you, to a point the game is as close to bug-free and stable as possible, however, I cannot say when that time will be. It may be in a week, month, or 6 months, but I don’t want to make promises I cannot keep, so I will not say the game will never be developed again, but for now, my attention is best utilized elsewhere. However, some internal testing has taken place and it isn't totally out of the question that the servers themselves for Exile may come back up and those that purchased it will be able to play again. This isn't guaranteed, so again, I won't promise that Exile will come back up, but it's a possibility in the future. If it does come up in the future though then the revenue from Exile will be used to further the development of Trials of Ascension.

All is not lost, though! I didn’t acquire the rights to Trials of Ascension to sit by and do nothing, quite the contrary. We have decided to focus on some of the original intentions set for the game, a multiplayer game with 3 initial races that all play very differently in a world full of lore crafted over many years by some very creative people. Some of those who crafted the lore were even fans of the game spanning back over those two decades. It wouldn’t be moral to scrap all of the love and dedication to start fresh with only my own ideas, because I’m a fan too! In fact, Trials of Ascension is already in a state of a late prototype with an early Alpha just around the corner!

The reason we were able to get a working prototype so quickly is that the original game we at Dragonfire Entertainment started on, an ambitious multiplayer game called Dragons of Ramrys, was halted when we learned that ToA was in trouble so we could figure out how to help. Some of the underlying framework and great knowledge gained from that initial project are instead being used to bring TerVarus to life. I’m a college-educated programmer working full time on ToA, in-excess 12 hours a day at times. We have a superbly talented animator and 3D artist, an awesome web developer, a project manager who is also a professional QA who used to work for Apple, Inc. and a video editor on board, though all part-time and some working pro-bono for now.

We want to save Trials of Ascension and Exile, we welcome you to be a part of the journey with us.

So, for those that would prefer the TL;DR version.

Trials of Ascension: Exile development is on hiatus with an unknown schedule to re-start development so we can work on Trials of Ascension closer to its original vision.

For more information, check out the revamped website: https://trialsofascension.com/