Echoes of Elysium Combines Final Fantasy Airships With the Co-Op Chaos of Sea of Thieves
A promising concept.
Anyone who’s played a classic Final Fantasy game knows that one of the formative moments of those games was getting your airship — when your whole world opens up. It’s an entrancing feeling of freedom that almost no other game can match. But despite how memorable those airship moments are, it’s bizarre to think that no one's ever made a game that revolves around that idea — a game all about the freedom of airships. Echoes of Elysium hopes to change that, translating the emergent, and delightfully fun, chaos of Sea of Thieves into the sky.
Echoes of Elysium is the first title from Loric Games, a studio founded by veterans from Mythic Entertainment, the studio best known for the Dark Age of Camelot MMORPG franchise. While Echoes of Elysium isn’t an MMO, it does have a lot of the genre’s DNA, like a lot of survival games. Lead producer Ray Soto tells Inverse that Final Fantasy was a key inspiration in forming the idea of exploration with airships, while survival games like Sea of Thieves were the core inspiration for gameplay.
The world of Echoes of Elysium is heavily inspired by Greek Mythology, where mythological beings and wondrous technology coexist. One of the major elements of the story is actually based on a real historical figure, simply known as The Hero of Alexandria. This brilliant inventor is believed to be the creator of the first automaton, and Echoes of Elysium runs with that idea by making the Hero a legendary creator who’s gone mad with power, filling the world with dangerous steam-powered machines.
The entire gameplay loop revolves around that idea of building your own airship, and using it to explore a procedurally generated world that’s also touched up with hand-crafted narrative bits.
You start with an extremely basic airship, and from there have to gather materials to expand it, outfit it with weapons, create crafting stations, and produce fuel. Those aspects then let you explore further into the world, reaching new islands with settlements, treasures, valuable resources, and more. Along the way, you’ll have to contend with enemy ships, soulless clockwork enemies, wildlife, and more.
As you travel around the world, you’ll need to use your jetpack to gather supplies and land on islands.
That all sounds pretty typical to the survival experience but the airship element is really what gives Echoes of Elysium that unique spark. And the studio knew it was what the game would need to lean into the most.
“As we started to tap into the airship side of things, it has evolved to be quite different. We started off having a very linear path, discovering schematics, using them as blueprints, and building tiers above the airship,” Soto says, “But that wasn’t compelling for us. Our art director [Ilya Nazarov], who worked on Fallout 76, had an idea of — what if we could just build our own airships?”
Soto says that at this point, the team built a functional prototype within a week, and found that everyone was having so much fun designing their own airships and seeing others — and at that point, it became a major focus.
And that really is the distinguishing factor in Echoes of Elysium. Your airship isn’t just a static home base or vessel you use, it’s an ever-changing and evolving mechanic that you can craft in your own vision. If you want to build an ungodly abomination of a vehicle with haphazard platforms with no rails, go for it. If you want a beautiful flying boat that has that perfect rounded architecture, you can do that too. In fact, Loric Games has already released an Airship Builder tool on Steam, giving players the chance to see the diversity in ways you can build your vehicle, before the game launches in Early Access later this year.
The building system in Echoes of Elysium offers a lot of freedom, even if you want to get weird with it.
As you travel you can use your jetpack to collect resources that are falling through the sky. But later on you can build grapple guns on your ship, letting a player nab those resources without ever leaving the safety of the ship. Or you can grapple onto land, pulling your ship closer if you’re having trouble navigating.
In Sea of Thieves, your ship is a vessel that links together your adventures with friends — taking you to new islands and letting you combat other ships. But in Echoes of Elysium, your vessel becomes a core part of the experience, it’s practically a character in and of itself. And the way that you enhance and take care of it can drastically impact your experience. Of course, this can also lead to some fun emergent moments. At one point during my hands-on demo, I piloted the ship over to an island and thought I had stopped the engines as I jumped off. Unfortunately, I had accidentally sent the ship in reverse, leaving my partner to scramble for the wheel as our ship careened through the sky.
While Echoes of Elysium’s core idea holds a lot of promise, the most vital piece of a survival game like this is longevity — whether players find enough content and variety to stick with an experience.
“You can see that we’ve drawn inspiration from the games we love. So as we started development, we’re very cognisant of the fact that we don’t want to be the same experience. We don’t want you to feel like you’ve done everything in two hours, and what else is there,” Soto says, “As we’re thinking about progression, we’ve included a light narrative touch that encourages players to learn more, to explore and discover. At the same time, our game is an evolving puzzle, and airships are your tools.”
Even though the emphasis is on exploration, you’ll need to outfit your ship for combat.
Soto emphasizes that the airships, and the enhancements you can give them, are a core part of the progression loop — with new obstacles forcing you to think about your ship’s design. But there’s another piece to the game and it's airships as well.
“It’s not just about thinking how we can differentiate ourselves, but also about building community. We want people to be excited about what they can accomplish with friends and share their creations online,” Soto says, “ Launching in early access, the game is going to continue moving forward. It’s about building that community and having them be part of the process as well.”
It’s fair to say that survival games are one of the most oversaturated markets in gaming currently, with dozens of choices available to players on all platforms — just look at the Survival tag on Steam. And while Echoes of Elysium will certainly have a lot to prove, the idea at its core genuinely feels like a unique spark. It’s the kind of game you play, and wonder why we don’t have a half dozen airship games already.
