It's gooooood to be back! Some of you may have heard rumors going around regarding the future of Crystal Maidens. This post will hopefully answer your questions.
What happened
The Crystal Maidens team was unfortunately let go for valid financial reasons months ago. I hope you'll all be happy to know that every member of the old team has found a new home in various companies throughout Montreal. However, as a result of that decision, Mindgeek was left with no choice but to sunset the game.
Harley, Rouncat and Speeder saw the interest people still had in the game and we offered Mindgeek to run the game on our own time. They agreed and after some back and forth over the details, I am now finally in a position to announce that Crystal Maidens WILL be back!
The Future
The new Crystal Maidens team is now mostly in charge of every development and release decision as well as responsible for the cost of servers, art, writing and everything else in between. As such, we have made the very important decision to re-release the game in a clean state. What this means:
- Everyone will start from scratch (think of it like a new season in an ARPG)
- A set number of maidens will be available at the start.
- A set number of items will be available at the start.
- All features that have been released over the years will be available immediately (World Boss, Boss Campaign, Crafting, Masteries, etc)
- Events will be released on a regular schedule once again. This is where a lot of the existing content from the original CM will be available.
This was a difficult decision to make, but it will guarantee our ability to release content for years to come and allow us to add actually NEW content sporadically, whenever we can afford to do so.
When & Where?!?
Currently, we are trying to gather the assets and code necessary to run the game on our own servers. This is a lengthy process. We plan to change the server structure to match the expected player base which will likely help make the game run a lot smoother.
We plan to be back on Nutaku, Steam and Android. It is possible we may no longer support the downloadable client. This is to be determined still.
While in a perfect world, we'd love to be live once again around Christmas, there are no guarantees since we now only have 1 dev using his spare time to get the entire game up and running again. As we move closer to an official release date, we'll keep everyone informed!
Conclusion
We sincerely hope you'll join us on this new adventure with the rebranded Crystal Maidens: Unleashed! A project that once was a mainstream SFW game...that turned into a casual NSFW game...that turned into a midcore RPG people have grown to love. Roundcat, Speeder and Harley are very excited to bring this game back to you. We plan to make use of our dedicated community to work on improvements that YOU want to see in the game and hopefully keep going for years!
For all important updates, be sure to join the discord channel here: https://discord.gg/PcYBMbJp5C
The new Steam page will be created in the coming weeks. For our Steam players, be sure to put it in your wishlist once it's out!
See you soon!