I don't usually post much news from the Codex but they have a more detailed report about the canceled game Chaos Chronicles has been renamed to Century of Chaos.

It's been over a year since the development of Chaos Chronicles, the promising-looking isometric tactical RPG from the now-defunct German developer Coreplay, came to what appeared to be a sad conclusion, as documented here on the Codex in a series of news posts and interviews. Since then we've heard nothing about the game's fate from its publisher, bitComposer, and after the removal of its store page from Steam it was assumed to be permanently dead, although it was never officially cancelled.

It now appears, however, that Chaos Chronicles might not be gone for good. You see, when a game is taken off of Steam, its community page always remains behind, and it remains registered in Steam's database, which is publicly browsable on the outstanding SteamDB site. Yesterday, eagle-eyed Codexer Sinatar noticed that Chaos Chronicles' entry in the database had been surreptitiously renamed to Century of Chaos, as was its community page.

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What could this mean? Some people suggested that bitComposer might simply be reusing Chaos Chronicles' entry on Steam for a different game, but the similarity of the names, plus the fact that they had absolutely no reason not to create a new one, makes that highly unlikely. No, in all likelihood, bitComposer have rebooted or are attempting to reboot the development of Chaos Chronicles, under a different developer. Who that developer is - and whether they can even pull this off - remains to be seen.

In related news, the people behind Coreplay, including the Codex's own Peter "HobGoblin42" Ohlmann, have reorganized under a new studio - Grimlore Games, a subsidiary of the Austrian publisher Nordic Games. Their first game will be Spellforce 3, a sequel to the Spellforce RTS series originally created by Phenomic Games, another German developer that was later swallowed up and destroyed by Electronic Arts, after being forced to create F2P browser games for a few years.

If you need more proof that Chaos Chronicles is cancelled the game website has finally been shutdown. They have one last message though.

The song is ended, but the melody lingers on...

Thank you dominioniian for the link.

In response of the RPG Codex interview with bitComposer Coreplay has issued a counter statement on The Games Inquirer.

In bitComposer’s recent statements they mentioned a meeting on July 24 2013. Before this meeting took place, bitComposer had already declined to sign any agreement in this meeting. But what is the point of negotiations if one party has no intention of reaching an agreement? As we did not want to experience a repetition of the lengthy and fruitless negotiations of May 31 2013 without any outcome, we did not attend the meeting.

After all the trouble, we have experienced during the last eight months, we firmly believe that this publisher is entirely unwilling to settle the conflict. Although bitComposer has repeatedly claimed that it is interested in a solution, it has never followed this up with deeds. In particular, as opposed to Coreplay, bitComposer has not presented any single contractual proposal since its withdrawal of the injunction.

Their strategy is quite clear to us: bitComposer assumes that we will finish developing the game with large sums of borrowed money, whereas bitComposer incurs no further expense. BitComposer would then prevent the marketing of the completed game by Coreplay or a third party on the grounds that this would violate bitComposer’s alleged rights to the game. In this way bitComposer would be able to force us to sell them the game cheaply and under heavy losses. This is why we were not able to borrow further money in order to continue developing ‘Chaos Chronicles’.

As developers and avid RPG fans, we are deeply disappointed that bitComposer has simply destroyed our possibility of finishing such a promising and ambitious RPG and thereby ruined our financial efforts and our creative work, which was carried out with such great enthusiasm and passion.

But of course, everyone can form their own opinion about how strong bitComposer’s aim is to publish quality games and how fair and cooperative they are.

Coreplay GmbH, 11th August 2013

Credit and thanks for the newsbit goes to GamesInquirer.

RPGCodex has a exclusive interview with bitComposer's Board of Director Wolfgang Duhr about the legal problems of Chaos Chronicles.

Coreplay have stated that the dispute between yourself and them started in September 2012, when bitComposer failed to pay on an agreed milestone. Is this accurate? If so, then presumably you were upset or disappointed in how development had progressed - are you able to tell us anything about that particular milestone and the relationship between BitComposer and Coreplay at the time?

WD: The dispute started at the beginning of December 2012, when a Coreplay lawyer and investor presented a completely new contract, which was quite different from the original terms to which we had agreed. While Coreplay and their investors were ready to increase the budget from their side, they were not able to present a new milestone and budget plan showing the additional features they wanted to include. On the other hand, Coreplay did not match the originally scheduled milestones, and because of this uncertainty, we were not able to continue from our side – never mind the fact that such a change would have to be approved by the FFF Bayern. At that time, the Goldmaster was planned for January 2013, but the complete project was already behind schedule.​

Visit RPGCodex for the complete interview, and thanks go to Grunker for sharing the link.

A couple of days ago we've posted bitComposer's statement on the Chaos Chronicles situation. We still owe you Coreplay's answer, which was posted a few hours later in the RPGCodex forum:

 "The first casualty of War is Truth"

During a 5 hours meeting, we've discussed and negotiated every detail of a final agreement between bitComposer and Coreplay for realizing a completion of Chaos Chronicles.
We wrote all those terms and conditions into a contract and at the end of this meeting day, both parties agreed to those terms.
Unfortunately (and surprisingly) bitComposer rejected to sign this agreement on this day because they still wanted to clarify an open issue regarding the tax. But before leaving our office, they've promised us to check this issue as soon as possible to make a final signment possible in the next days.

This was two month ago and we haven't heard back from them since then.

In their recent statement to the petition, they mentioned a meeting last week (24th July). But they did not mention the fact that they already announced not to sign anything in that meeting. That's why we haven't attend it, because we don't have time for this 'play for time' bullshit anymore. [...]

 Sounds like Chaos Chronicles is dead at this point.

Publisher bitComposer sent a statement to The Games Inquirer in response to the petition started a couple of days ago. As expected the situation seems quite complicated:

Statement on the situation of Chaos Chronicles

Due to wide ranging speculation concerning Chaos Chronicles, we have decided to issue a statement. For legal reasons, we cannot go into all the details. However, we would like to describe the current situation as best we can within the given limits:

Chaos Chronicles is a promising project for Coreplay as well as for bitComposer. The current dispute between the two companies has NOTHING to do with the actual developer team or with the project itself. Seeing as the development of the game is already at such an advanced stage, bitComposer would still like to complete and market Chaos Chronicles with the developer team from Coreplay. In September 2012, one of the founders and managing partners of Coreplay left the company—and this was a real surprise for us. Shortly thereafter, the former managing partner’s shares were taken over by a lawyer and an investor. [...]

As most of you know news has been lacking for Chaos Chronicles. This is not good as the release should of been this summer. The reason for this I'm sorry to say is the game appears to be on hold.

The game is having legal trouble with the publisher bitComposer according to the official forums on RPGCodex a developer posted the following.

I don't want to keep you guys from writing those excellent fiction, but the current unsettled situation with Chaos Chronicles is solely based on a conflict between us and bitcomposer.

At the current state the completion and release of the game is uncertain since our last attempt to find some agreement failed due the disappointment that we haven't heard back from bitcomposer after holding a long (and constructive) meeting.

Obviously, the game won't be released in this summer because bitcomposer stopped the development earlier this year through an legal injunction(which has been recalled later). The next few weeks will finally decide if the game will see the day of light or not.

Update: A fan petition is avaiable here to help raise awareness to bitComposer. It needs 900 signatures. I will leave this post on the frontpage for a while. So spread the word to every site that you can.

In thir blog for Chaos Chronicles the devs continue the explanation of the combat system with the expectations for a turn-based combat system. Here is a bit from that article:

When we started out working on the Chaos Chronicles combat system we had a lot to do to lay the basic foundations. We had to get our character animation system running and implement stuff like combat logic, hexboard generation from physics, or hexboard queries for paths and floodings at runtime.

That left little time to care about something as high level as AI (Artificial Intelligence). As a consequence our first prototype for AI ‘grew’ with time. At first, all it could do were melee attacks. Then we added ranged attacks. Then we implemented an enemy spell AI for intelligent placing of area spells (trying to maximize hits on enemies and minimize hits on allies). Finally we included rather specific routines (like fleeing) for characters that suffered from spells like fear. We realized that AI has to be able to deal with script spells that are loaded at runtime (a feature that could be interesting for future modifications). To allow for that we coded routines that simulate spell executions and judge their effects in a more general way.

Thus our prototype grew and grew until we were sure that we covered every capability that could possibly be required. Then we started to build it from scratch to make it more flexible and debugable. And now we feel like we can finally talk about AI.

The headline for this article is also the paradigm we had in mind for development: What do we expect from a turn based AI? Well, technically, we expect a lot! A demon wizard that fails to choose his fireball spell over a magic missile, or who fails to place the fireball in a way that maximizes damage on the player party is a no-go. An assassin who simply attacks her closest target instead of trying to get your wizard in the back is not only little immersive – it also obliterates strategic bottlenecks like doors.  And a human NPC ally that is not able to plan her path avoiding enemy attacks of opportunity is an annoyance. So when we talk about expectations from a ‘technical’ point of view, one can say that we expect ‘a lot’. A good (OGC 3.5) AI has to be able to perform a lot of intelligent choices for enemies that we expect to behave intelligent.

On the Chaos Chronicles site a bit of information on the playable character races and classes is provided.

As some of you may have already noticed, we haven’t posted many news here lately due to the tons of work we’ve poured into developing the game this month and the time this took. We promise to deliver a new major blogpost next week, but in the meantime please meet the first representatives of all playable character races in Chaos Chronicles (click image to enlarge):

 

The ingame character creation will offer you the complete range of classical RPG races: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, Half-Elves and even Half-Orcs.

Furthermore, we are pleased to confirm the following playable character classes: Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Barbarian, Wizard, Ranger and Paladin. We hope you enjoy this little piece of information and, as always, please feel free to leave a comment below!

The Chaos Chronicles site brings us more information about the dialogue system that is being used in the game.

Over the past year, we have been working on a reliable engine, the OGL 3.5e rules implementation, hundreds of effects and thousands of assets for different scenarios which our level designers have put together to beautiful places that could be called ‘narrative’ on their very own.
Professional authors developed a world and story that are deeper than anything we (being non-professional in that area) could have come up with on our own. And now it’s finally time to sew all of this together by using the mechanism that beats as the heart of most RPGs: dialogue trees.
We are aware that dialogue trees have their shortcomings and there’s probably not a player out there who felt that any game *always* provided all the answers he or she would have come up with. But the sheer narrational potential of this mechanism prevented us from ever raising concerns about their final application in the game.
Over the last weeks we completed our own dialogue system that includes a powerful and comfortable tree editor to provide our designers with a tool to quickly create and modify dialogues for the game.

 

Six new screenshots have been made available for Chaos Chronicles, which can be viewed in our gallery.

Gamers.de sends word of their German-language preview of Chaos Chronicles. Those of us linguistically challenged can try the Google translation.

In their next update on the combat system of Chaos Chronicles the combination of both a turn-based combat system and a real-time system is discussed.

There used to be a time when pretty much every role-playing and strategy game out there was turn-based. That was partially due to technological restrictions but also due to the fact that these games were derived from pen & paper rpgs and board games which are both usually ‘turn-based’.

In the early nineties, Dune created the RTS genre (at least on the PC, because Herzog Zwei was Sega exklusive) or, as some would say, changed strategy games to be real-time instead of turn-based. At the same time games like Ultima Underworld did the same for the RPG genre. In both genres the change usually implied the change from boards to analogous movement. And interestingly, in the RPG genre, it also implied a change from character parties towards single character games.

Yes, Dungeon Master and its imitators, i.e. ‘the subgenre of dungeon crawlers’ (revived by the great Grimrock) had a little headstart compared to the rest of the RPG genre and, yes, real-time-with-pause-RPGs revived character parties, but that didn’t change what happened next: With real time combat being new and exciting and turn-based being (or being said to be) old and boring developers ceased to make turn-based games. Not because all devs were morons but rather simply because no one – including gamers – was interested in turn-based games any more at that time. But even if we (and hopefully you RPG vets out there) are eager to see turn-based combat revived, we have also gotten used to the amenities of real-time, regarding, e.g., the exploration of the game world. For us that meant that we would have to feature both real-time and grid movement.

In the second part of the sound design article of Chaos Chronciles they talk about how music can influence a game.

You know, the first real cRPGs had their focus not on the graphics. Graphics weren’t as good as these days of course. That wasn’t possible due to the hardware-limitations. People had to use the music, they had to use sound effects to create atmosphere. Nowadays you use some super hyper graphics, put in some epic music and think “well, that’s atmosphere!”. And in this case you couldn’t be more wrong.

Music is a very subliminal way to manipulate the mood of the player. Especially in videogames it can affect the mood in so many ways.  And that’s why we not only have a look at the graphics but also on the music (and on the sound effects, as you already know). We’ve given and we will give a lot of attention to the creation of the music for Chaos Chronicles.

Currently we are working on the different combat themes. You’re eyes aren’t foolin’ you: To achieve a deep atmosphere here we decided to not only have one, but several themes. We had the feeling that the players feeling should differ if he (or she) is fighting against different types of opponents. So we made the decision to go for unique themes for each type of enemy

Chaos Chronicles' first trailer has just been released showing some work in progress.

As promised, we just released the first Trailer of Chaos Chronicles. Yes, it still does show a work in progress stadium, but we didn’t want to postpone the video again. The old grid is still shown in some scenes but we still hope that you like it!

And with the first trailer being available now we’d also like to confirm that Chaos Chronicles has been approved by Steam. So yes, the game will be available there once it’s ready. The product page itself should be available very soon however. And yes, we’d also like to confirm that we are in discussions with several other digital platforms as well.

Please keep in mind that all materials shown in the trailer are still work in progress.

StraySheep informed us that the Chaos Chronicles devs have uploaded 7 new screenshots, mention an interview at RPGFrance and let us know the following:

Well. We’d like to announce today that there won’t be new screenshots in December. We’d also like to announce the reason for that. We promised a trailer several times before. And now we can officially say that the trailer indeed isn’t far away anymore. Instead of static screenshots you’ll see “Chaos Chronicles” in movement for the first time in December. And not at the end of December but much, much earlier. It will, of course, contain a lot of WiP-material. A short example: If you have read our blog for quite a while you’ll notice the old grid here and there. With the release of the trailer another small announcement will be made – just as a little hint.

  

Over at the Chaos Chronicles site some insights into the sound design are given and how sound design is important in many ways.

It’s an obvious thing: Atmosphere is not only created by graphics or by gameplay but by so many factors, it’s hard to even count them. Atmosphere is what you have if you put everything together and everything fits. And one of the most important things to create a deep atmosphere is the sound design.  Think about it: What would an RPG be without epic combat themes, an epic main theme? But not only the music is of importance. The details make the difference.

But what are details? Let’s talk about one. If you look back at games like the Realms of Arkania series you’ll find a lot of details which nowadays aren’t used anymore, which is a shame. For example have look at the inventory. When you did put some new leather gloves to one of your characters a little sound appeared. Over the years the sound design in this case has changed: What happens these days when you put on some new clothes? Right. A little bling bling sound can be heard. In some cases it’s more atmospheric. But often it’s just a non-saying something. That isn’t bad at all, but it doesn’t create atmosphere. Back in the days you had different sounds. Not for each item, but for different item-classes. For swords, for leather gloves, for steel gloves, for helmets. You had little sounds which told you: Alright, you just put on a heavy armor. And you knew it just by the sound.

And that’s exactly what we want to achieve in Chaos Chronicles. Sure, not every item will have it’s own sound (if we did that we could ship the game on several Blu-Ray discs just because of the massive number of sounds), but there will be a lot of small sounds for several item-classes. If you change from a dagger to a heavy sword, you’ll hear a steel-sound, the leather gloves will lead to a different sound and so on and so on.

Many people don’t realize how much impact such a little detail has on the atmosphere but once you’ve tried it, you’ll feel kinda weird if you play a modern RPG where this little detail is missing. Cause you’ll expect it to be there. We even didn’t believe our own ears and that it made such a difference. But it did. And it will.

Of course, it’s a bad attitude to talk about sound design and not showing off anything of it.  So we decided to upload two example sounds. Both are for some boots, but each is of different kind of boots. One sound is for light ones the other is used for heavy boots. 

Check out the article for the sound files.

Thanks StraySheep.

A total of 5 new screenshots are available at the Chaos Chronicles web site.

Thanks Michael.

Four new screenshots of Chaos Chronicles are available for your viewing pleasure at the official Chaos Chronicles site.

An interview for this turnbased crpg game can be found at Gamers.de - English translation starts on page 5.   A quote about the story Gamers.de:

Could you tell us something about the story? Are there already any plans for a continuation of the story? Coreplay: You really don´t have many information’s about the world at the start of the game. The players will return to an old kingdom, which was overrun by evil powers centuries ago. Besides a mysterious Order, many adventurers and explorers are drawn to this realm.

A quote on NPCs:

Gamers.de: You mentioned Minsk from “Baldur´s Gate” on your blog. Will “Chaos Chronicles” feature such memorable Characters as well? I mean, will there be recruitable Characters with an own personality and back story? Or will it be more like nameless and swappable mercenaries similar to the “X-Com” Soldiers? Coreplay: The player will be able to recruit one more NPC besides his own heroes. These NPCs have their own agenda and follow their own goals. But you won’t have absolute access over these like in BG.

A quote on multiplayer

Gamers.de: It is well known that “Chaos Chronicles” will feature a multiplayer-mode. How will this mode play out? Will all 5 players be able to choose quest answers, maybe through an election? Or will a group leader be responsible for the decisions? Coreplay: Every player will control one or more characters. Regarding quest- and group decisions, we are still looking for the best possible and satisfying solution at the moment.

The Codex has an interview with Peter Ohlmann, Technical Director at Coreplay, to discuss their turn-based fantasy RPG, Chaos Chronicles. An early question:

RPG Codex: With your previous game, Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (JA:BIA), you decided to ditch turn-based combat mid-development in an attempt to make the game... more dynamic. This begs the question: how can fans of turn-based combat be assured you will not decide to suddenly ditch turn-based combat with Chaos Chronicles?

PO: This statement isn’t 100% correct, because JA:BIA wasn’t planned as a turn-based game. And as a contractor we weren’t involved in those kind of decisions anyway. Our company was hired for this production and there have been serious discussions about this topic on both sides. For further details, please ask the publisher of JA:BIA. We are pleased with the introduced Plan&Go combat system, although we can fully understand those angry fans who expected the original turn-based mode of Jagged Alliance 2.

But ‘Chaos Chronicles’ is a different story. It’s our concept, our game and we planned to use turn-based combat from the beginning of the concept phase. In contrast to our previous production, we have full control about any creative decision in CC. By the way, we wrote about this particular topic on our development blog lately.

An Interview in French and English with the producer of Chaos Chronicles can be found at Dagon's Lair.

Can you elaborate about world interaction? Will the player be able to interact with some world’s objects ? Is it more like Fallout or Dragon Age where there are only some items which can be highlited to interact with ? Is it more like the old Divine Divinity where every single object can be manipulated ? Do NPCs have an agenda?

When we talk about Chaos Chronicles then we don’t compare it to Fallout or Dragon Age. The game is different. There are lot of objects you can interact with. This is mainly story-related. You can click on a lot of items but you cannot move each. In a puzzle for example you have to move statues. That would be movement with objects. But there is more interaction everywhere. There are so many objects which have interesting information for the player. Even a pumpkin can be a spot of interest. If you click on the pumpkin I have in my mind then a short text occurs which tells you that the pumpkin must be 200 years old but still looks fine. This seems to be a bit strange if you think about it but it still is part of the story. Nothing you’d need, but still interesting to know. This way we hide a lot of little stories in the game which the player – if he wants to – can follow.

Remember Chaos Chronicles? The turn-based, fantasy CRPG from Coreplay (Jagged Alliance: Back in Action)? They sent word over of their official blog, which we'd overlooked before. The latest entry talks about the attraction of world maps:

There is this another pen&paper roleplaying system beside D&D most of us at Coreplay spent time with in the 90s: Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye) which most gamers outside of Germany may actually know mostly for the computer games based on it. The first trilogy of DSA computer games (that were heavily influenced by the Gold Box games from SSI) were released as Realms of Arkania in English. The first of them called Blade of Destiny (Die Schicksalsklinge) was first released in 1992 (and then in the US in 1993) for Amiga and PC. One thing that might be worth noting for you CRPG addicts is that the game was designed by Guido Henkel who also produced probably one of the best CRPGs of all time: Planescape: Torment.

What was cool about the game was that it was also very open in its design. You had to find a legendary sword and to find that sword you had to put together a map that would reveal its location on the world map. The map pieces were randomized so you might find one trading with a merchant on the road or as a reward for solving a quest that might otherwise only reward you with some gold.

This design didn’t only give the game a lot of replay value it also made travelling the world a big part of the game. Quests would often lead you form one city to another and you would have to travel for several days and set up camp for the night on your journey.

Most of the other games we mentioned before have similar elements. We did highlight Ultima for the exploration of Britannia alone, remember? And our fondest memories of Phantasie include the random encounters that would make each journey an adventure. And remember that first time in Pool of Radiance you started moving that little horse around? Suddenly everything seemed possible!

bitComposer announces a new fantasy turn-based top-down RPG from Coreplay (Jagged Alliance: Back in Action):

Chaos Chronicles leads PC gamers into a lost empire full of legends, thrilling adventures, and dangerous opponents. Players can explore numerous ancient ruins, mystical places, and mysterious dungeons alone or in a group of up to five players. Chaos Chronicles unites the typical characteristics of classic turn-based role-playing games with modern graphics and a gripping atmosphere. The sophisticated gameplay will captivate veterans of the genre as well as newcomers.

Over 200 years ago the flourishing kingdoms of elves, dwarves and mankind were consumed by chaos. Undead hordes lead by archwizards of the dark arts overran the land. Only few were able to escape. The survivors build their new homes on small, secluded islands off shore. A few years ago the Order of the Holy Flame sent its knights to lead an expedition to the mainland. 

Even though the old cities lie in ruins and orcs, goblins and other creatures of evil roam the land there seems to be hope for a return to the land of their ancestors. The big harbor town Rethgard has been purged of the undead and the inner city has been fortified to stand ground against any kind of attack. Driven by their love for adventure the player’s party enters a boat in order to take part in rebuilding the kingdom.

There seems to be an empty website here (waiting for Gamescom?) and Blue's has some screens.