Questions, answered plainly.

A dark fantasy MMORPG for PC, set in the world of Ethea. You build your own class by investing across eight of them, compose every spell from four elements, and live a story that is itself the main source of your power. It begins with one missing person and ends up somewhere considerably larger.

Aim and cast. Combat is real-time and aimed — the camera is your crosshair, projectiles fly where you point them, and you can miss. Before a fight you compose your spells by binding elements to them; during it you decide when to spend on a big three-element finisher and when to fall back on cheap single-element casts. There is no block, parry, or dodge button anywhere in the game: you survive through positioning, what you built, and the wards your own casting generates.

No date, and we will not invent one. The roadmap is published as rings rather than dates — you can see which ring the game is in at any time. The first public checkpoint is the Prologue, a Mage-and-Fire vertical slice. Newsletter subscribers hear first.

PC, distributed via Steam. No console or mobile plans at this stage.

Both work. The open world, the story and ordinary hunting are all playable alone. Instanced content is built for parties of five — one tank, one healer, three damage — and scales up in multiples of that shape. Because you invest class points rather than picking a single class, a solo player can build toward self-sufficiency instead of being locked out by their character sheet.

Yes, and it sits on its own reward track deliberately, so that progressing in PvP never means falling behind in PvE or the reverse. It is not the centre of the game — Timefather is built around cooperative content and a shared story — but it exists and it rewards you properly for playing it.

It is designed not to. Your first runs of each cycle carry the Timefather's Favour and pay in full — the first dungeons of a day, the first world bosses of a week — and the whole blessed set is sized to fit in about two hours. Past that, rewards continue at a reduced rate. Nothing ever locks you out, there is no daily chore list, and hunting, crafting, gathering, trading and helping other players are never rationed at all. Play as long as you like; you are simply never punished for playing less.

No. Gear in Timefather never increases raw damage or healing — not on any piece, not from any affix, not from a set bonus, because there are no set bonuses. What gear gives you is sustain, resilience and amplification: deeper resource pools, better resistances, harder crits. Your damage comes from your level, your story progress, your class investment and your elements. This is a fixed rule the rest of the game is built on, not a balance pass we might reverse.

Eight — Warrior, Paladin, Druid, Tracker, Ranger, Priest, Mage, Warlock. Each has a fixed attribute distribution across Strength, Intelligence and Dexterity. You do not pick one and serve it: you invest Class Points across one or more, and every documented pairing is a third named thing with its own passive. There is no primary and secondary — a half-and-half build is its own identity, not a main class with a hobby.

Every spell is composed by binding one, two or three of the four elements to it — Fire, Water, Wind, Earth. Elements do not recolour the spell, they fuse into a different one: Energy Ball with Fire and Water becomes Steam Burst, which strips magic resistance; with Water and Earth it becomes Piercing Beam and runs through a whole line of enemies. More elements means more damage, bigger effects, and a survival ward on you — paid for with a steeper resource cost and a longer cooldown, so a three-element cast is something you earn the moment for rather than spam. All four elements deal the same damage at a given count; what changes is what they do.

Yes, and elemental affinity costs nothing to redistribute at any safe location. The whole system is built to let you lean hard into something without locking yourself into it — the failure mode we designed against is the build you cannot undo.

Not in the magic system. The Conclave's classical taxonomy has four seats — Fire, Water, Wind, Earth. The city of Xylos claims a fifth in its public life; the spell system does not recognise it. That gap is intentional and drives some of Ethea's politics.

Not announced. We would rather say nothing than announce a model now and change it later — and we are not going to ask anyone for money before there is a game worth paying for. When it is decided you will read it here and in the devlog first.

Assume yes for early rings. Pre-release testing exists to break things, and characters made during it are made to be broken. Any ring where progress carries forward will say so explicitly, up front, before you roll a character.

Subscribe to the newsletter — keys go out first-received, first-served as each testing ring opens. The devlog and community pages announce when a ring is about to ship.

Not formally. We are a small studio running the project out of Laragod. If you specialise in something we clearly need — networking at scale, combat feel, community management — use the Contact page and say so. Every message goes to a human.

Yes, once there is anything to cover. The Press kit has a logo bundle and, when it exists, a screenshot pack. For early coverage or a feature, email press@timefather.game and we will prioritise the reply.