Eldegarde Plans a Comeback With a Peer-to-Peer Server

Eldegarde was supposed to be finished.

In March, Notorious Studios confirmed that its mini-MMO was being sunset. The reason was simple: the game had not done well enough to keep the developer going over the long term. For a small online title, that is usually where the story ends. The servers go dark, the Discord goes quiet, and the community moves on to whatever comes next.

Seven months later, that ending looks less final. Notorious CEO Chris Kaleiki has posted an announcement on the game's Discord saying that Eldegarde may come back online. The plan involves a smaller team, a different technical setup and a much less ambitious business model.

What Kaleiki actually said

The core message is optimistic, if carefully worded. "The good news is that it looks like there will be a future for the game and IP going forward, with me and some of the team involved," Kaleiki wrote.

He also set out a concrete goal. "The goal will be to put Eldegarde back online with a P2P server as soon as possible, and we believe that if things go well we can do this in the next few months, at least a private beta with the community."

That sentence carries a lot of hedging. "If things go well." "In the next few months." "At least a private beta." None of that adds up to a release date, and it is not meant to. What it gives fans is a direction: a peer-to-peer version of the game, tested first by the existing community before anything wider happens.

For readers less familiar with the term, P2P (peer-to-peer) networking generally means players connect to each other directly rather than through a central server run by the developer. For a studio that could no longer afford to keep the game running the traditional way, it is easy to see the appeal.

The catches

Kaleiki did not pretend the road back is smooth. He said the process of bringing back the game and the IP is "taking a while," and he gave no specific timeline for when that process will be complete. So the "next few months" target depends on work that is still not finished.

The second caveat may matter more to some players. Kaleiki said the remaining team will rely on "the help of AI to help in development." Generative AI in game development is still a touchy subject, and the industry is having that argument right now. Our recent roundup of gen AI controversies shows how quickly these decisions can turn into public fights between studios and their players.

Kaleiki presents the AI angle as part of a broader shift in thinking. A smaller Notorious, in his view, no longer has to approach Eldegarde with a "breakout or bust" mentality. Rather than betting everything on a big launch, the studio can grow the game and its IP slowly over time.

More details have been promised for a later date. For now, that is everything on the table.

A familiar pattern

Eldegarde would not be the first online game to get a second life after its original plan fell apart. Earlier this month, OrbusVR came back as two free community editions, and Pirates of the Burning Sea resurfaced with a Steam page. Each case is different, but they share a theme: shutting down is no longer always the last word for an online game with a loyal audience.

Eldegarde did have fans. Massively Overpowered's Sam was among those who enjoyed it, and anyone who spent time in the game will probably be glad to hear it might return, even in a reduced form.

Our Take

This is good news with an asterisk attached. A peer-to-peer relaunch suggests Notorious is trying to strip out the running costs that made the original version unsustainable, which is a sensible move for a studio that has already been through one shutdown. It also lowers the stakes. A game that does not need to break out can afford to be small, and small games tend to live or die by how much their community cares.

The open questions are the important ones, though. Nobody outside the studio knows yet what "taking a while" means in practice, how much of the old game will survive the move to P2P, or how players will react to AI playing a part in development. Those answers will shape whether this is a real revival or just a holding pattern.

It is worth watching whether the private beta actually arrives in the "next few months" window, and how Notorious explains its use of AI when the promised details land. If the studio is open on both fronts, Eldegarde could become a useful example of how a small MMO survives after its first plan fails. If not, fans may be waiting a lot longer than they hope.