Work on the first elemental island is progressing pretty well. Today I wanted to talk about the design idea and what you can expect from the first iteration of our first open world area. On each corner of the main island there are mysterious broken shores that are linked to the new elemental islands, below is a glimpse of what the portal will look like to the fire island once it has been restored and activated. The portal will require an amount of resources, I haven't decided what tier yet, but probably T3 stone. In addition the final T3 boss in the starter dungeon will drop elemental shards that are needed to restore the fire crystal and activate the portal.
This is a WIP sketch of the fire island as its being worked on now below. This island will be roughly three times as large as the main town island and may be smaller or larger in the final version but this is the idea so far. There will be enemy camps you have to fight through with a mini-boss on each smaller island, with some rewards chests and resource nodes scattered around the island. The final end point will eventually have a dungeon where you fight to free the elemental of his corruption. (Not available on island release, will be an update after the island is released).
The update is going to come in three waves, with the first update targeted for release at the end of the month, with the following 2 updates coming the month after.

• Fire Island Update 1: Includes complete island with 3 sub sections, enemies, mini-bosses, rewards, and resource nods.
• Fire Island Update 2: Initial version of the Fire Elemental Dungeon
• Fire Island Update 3: Final Fire Elemental Boss enabled.