Nope, not being worked on right now. Those, like anything else macrogame-related, are all Keith's things. And right now he's working 100% time on multiplayer, which pretty much means there's no short-term progress on macrogame stuff in general, the strategic layer, the citybuilding, the memory crystals, crests, or anything of that nature.
All of that stuff is pretty much on hold until multiplayer gets finished up, and then I think the first thing on his list is the crests. After that I think the next thing is the new "personas" concept, which you'll really like a lot given your expressed interests in the story bits of the game. I think that most of the memory crystal stuff would be folded into the personas work, but that's ultimately up to how Keith schedules his part of things there.
Now, what I'm referring to is basically "concrete work." I.e., implementation. There's been a lot of design work going on with many of these elements since beta started, and in particular the addition of the personas concept really reinvents what we'd been planning to do with memory crystals in a really positive way. It just ties things together better all around. Anyway, so from a design standpoint this break from the macrogame implementation work has been really positive, I think; a lot of cool things have come together that might not have if we'd still been working in that area on a daily basis.
In terms of an ETA on implementation on more story bits... well, a lot of that really depends on how the multiplayer stuff goes. Some aspects of multiplayer are winding down, but this is one of those areas where basically we have our design done, and then it's a matter of getting all the code to conform to that deisgn and all the bugs out. That's one of those things where we aren't really done until we can test and not run into bugs in MP, and right now that's mostly the case with a single client and a server, and not yet the case with two clients and a server. Though it gets closer every weekday.
Anyway, once Keith gets through with the MP implementation so that he's satisfied with it on his machine alone, then we'll go to internal testing and see if we can find any new ways to break it with more than just his local setup. Then if that works out, we'll make a way so that players on the forums can "opt in" to using alpha MP features if they want to, and we'll see how badly they break it and how long it takes to get all that stuff fixed up. During that time, hopefully Keith won't have to be 100% devoted to MP stuff, and I think that the crests work is far enough along that it won't be more than a couple of days worth of work at this point to get the basics in there. Then I'm really not sure how long personas and their related stuff will take, but I imagine that it will be an ongoing sort of project because there's a lot to it.
So... in terms of an ETA I really don't have a good idea on that at the moment. MP could take another solid month for all we know, but my hope is that it's really more like just another couple of weeks. Fingers crossed!
