Shroud of the Avatar - Free to play
 

Rock Paper Shotgun reports that Shroud of the Avatar is now a free-to-play game:

Thanks henriquejr!



More information.

In before… Erm… Well…

I know nothing about this game, can anyone fill me in? Is it WoW killer? :D

It's an example how to make a mediocre game out of a multi-million Kickstarter project.

They should have figured out how to go 'fun to play' instead.

I predict shutdown in about a year. What a debacle.

This single experience backing this kickstarter is making me question whether or not I'll back another crowd funded game ever again. I backed it for the single player Ultima experience. I got a boring mmo obsessing on RMT and housing. Now, it's free. Whatever… such a total disaster…

In total they raised $12,865,148 (Kickstarter + their website). Imagine how many actually good games could have been made with that.

Ah yes the game that scammed backers, and sold everything as a paid addon. I can't believe they actually made people pay just to post on the websites forum also.
Based on past kickstarters two Unity RPG game at best.

OMG What? Is that true?

This is the only game I backed on KS that I regret backing and that includes developers that failed to actualy release a game. It makes me reevaluate any game asking for backing by a big name creator.

It stands out to me as a cautionary tale. Never did it stop me from pledging to other projects, but I do take a much harder look nowadays.

Did they ever crank out a single player version of this game?

Response taken from a comment on the linked article point to yes.
Link - https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/fo…ctions.145349/

Not surprising. Out of morbid curiosity I've checked the forums on Steam a few times since it launched. The forums nearly always have a fedw "where is everyone?" threads and the same helpful person replying trying to talk it up.

They turned off numbers in game at some stage, never saw it about 300 though, yes I know steam isn't the only way to connect, but still, unimpressive - NWN:EE came out at the same time, has it's own client outside steam, and i always had more.

I've had experience with Ultima titles going back to the 80's but I've never been a huge fan so I (thankfully) didn't get on the KS bandwagon. Still is sad to see such an ignominious end to something that's been so much of an CRPG staple for so long.

P.T. Barnum was right, there's one born every minute!! :)

I reported last week that it was discovered that Richard Garriot dropped CEO from his official list of titles. This is on the heals of removing someone earlier in the year as well.

Garriot's official explanation is that he assumed the title a few years ago because he thought one was required, but since it was discovered this was not true, they dropped all officer titles from the company.

Scam of the Avatar.
Most fitting title I've ever seen :)
Never touching anything associated or affiliated with Richard Garriot, Chris Spears, or Starr Long. Truly the idiot version of three stooges in the development world.

Scam of the decade free to play: now with more microtransactions edition.

What's funny is that when I called this game a scam 3.5 years ago, the statement was so controversial, even on RPGWatch, that my reply (and its replies) got split into its own thread:
https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27995

And some nut on YouTube even made a video in response to my reply:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT2AcxZnW6g
(See 0:56 for my post)

Honest question: is the game worth playing (single playing, I mean) now that it's free?

I played about an hour before I uninstalled. I couldn't get past the terrible graphics and performance. I like some things they've done, such as the old keyword system for talking to NPCs, but its such a clunky mess that it's not enjoyable to play.

(I get about 29-60 fps with a 1070. Probably around 35fps average.)

Move along, nothing to see here, never were really… It saddens me to see Richard Garriot sell his own "blood" ;) for some more bucks… It's depressing..

Depends who you ask. Its "free" so you could do the story. Except they admitted themselves the story is a broken mess of bugs and incomplete quests that are tracked very poorly through a journal system.

Recent changes also removed some single player components. So if you are in a town, or residence, or seige event, or overland map.. it forces you into mmo mode "to make the world feel more populated." I'm sure it would still work though if you denied the program access to the network.

Don't know whether to laugh (because people don't want to play this game even if it's free) or cry (because this scam was so successful). Actually backed it it ages ago (the lesson I learned there was worth the $40 I paid) and tried it a couple times over the years but just never got into it. It just felt so… meh. The graphics all have this Unity store assets look to them, the world is empty, and it just didn't really do anything to grab and hold my attention, nevermind actually doing anything well. I'll be glad to see this sorry excuse for a game die. Hopefully afterwards Richard Garriot will just leave game development. After a mess like this I certainly won't be giving any money to anything with his name attached to it.

For the sake of my Ultima memories, I tried it. There were some good ideas (skill, exp) so why not? I refunded it one hour after.
Admitedly, it was before going free so I do not know about the current changes.

It is not actually than the graphics are outdated, they are just plain ugly and totally inefficient to convey visual informations you need. I was about to detail but why? Everything is a mess. The UI is a monster by itself. An Elite one.

And it is just not fun. Not at all.

When will it go "Pay us to play?". Hmm.

Ism't that's the case with any game you buy?

pibbur

EDIT: Bah, I misunderstood who "us" were.

pibbur who facepalms himself and maybe should delete this post.

WTF What? Jesus, what the hell was going on during this kickstarter, apparently I was MIA to a lot of insanity… paid forum participation, selling of blood… holy crap.

He actually sold the blood after the Kickstarter, just like he did fundraisers and what not. I'd love to see a documentary of the making of this game. Obviously they tried for a long time to make this project work and obviously it utterly failed. Did they not have a team with enough talent? Did they try to do too much? What happened? I'd think it would really be interesting to find out.

I believe maybe a lot of alcohol and perhaps some drugs were used a bit too liberally by the people that thought they might actually create a game. I for one will never give another penny of my cash to Garriot or any product that he might ever be associated with.

Like others here, I was a huge fan of the Ultima series. I still have great fondness for those games… even backing the kickstarter for a book on the history of Ultima… even though I already have several books from the past on the same subject.

I was a $300 kickstarter backer from SotA. I didn't follow the development at all after it became obvious that a single player U7 style experience was taking a big back seat to a UO style experience, which was early on.


About a month ago I download SotA, played about 45 minutes, then uninstalled it. I've been gaming long enough to recognize a turd when I see one, I don't need to spend tens of hours figuring it out.

It seems that in later life Garriott is failing proportionally to his success during his younger years. It's a real shame too, because almost no one, not even Garriott, seems to have the ability to re-create that Ultima magic on modern technology. The D:OS games come pretty close though.

I'm convinced now that anyone that says "shroud of the avatar" and "single player" in the same sentence are simply not going to allow me to cross that bridge.

--

RG has had his estate up for sale for awhile. I'm convinced he is bringing in enough revenue to keep up the maintenance. He certainly wouldn't sell it to Kurt Schilling this mess.

I can't believe its still going.

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On the no officers bit I'll say it. They dropped their titles to avoid liability when the inevitable bankruptcy and lawsuits happen.
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Should we also point out this is not the first time he overextended himself? I think he's only not delivered in two or three cases though (Ultima 8.5, Worlds of Ultima King Arthur, and Ultima 9 v.1)

The thing is, a lot of people would be happy if it was a UO-style experience, but it fails at being even a mediocre MMORPG and has very, very little in common with UO. It seems like fans of classic games like the Ultima series and other CRPGs need to look toward indie developers that love/d those games just as much and are looking to create similar titles, because the owners of those IPs are either doing a shitty job with them or they aren't doing anything with them at all.

I've seen quite a few independent companies crank out some decent games, and they had only a portion of the funds that Garriot and company had to spend/waste. I've got nothing but praise for the majority of indie games that I've bought and played lately.

I wonder if Garriot and his friends understand modern technology and what it can do. I think they might have not kept up. I'm older and think I understand technology pretty well, but my daughter knows about a lot of things that I don't. Its one thing to be full of ideas, like Garriot and Molyneux seem to be, but you need someone to understand what can and can't be implemented and be able to do it well, and these guys seem to hire teams of people who aren't capable of doing what they want/ promise.

Yeah, we can’t have people derailing news threads with visionary opinions :D
And quite a number of people in that thread have indeed seen the light by now, especially @rune_74, who did a 180 on this one.

Hopefully Underworld Ascendant saves the setting, because SotA has done a good job of pooping all over it.

I don't have much faith in UA either. It looks pretty lame to be honest. Hope to be pleasantly surprised.

I don't know - it looked like Tabula Rasa had some pretty modern technology but just wasn't that interesting or different from what was already out there.

However, if what you say is true we've seen quite a bit of irony in modern version of these old timey games - Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, and this Ultima clone were all very cutting edge and pushed the boundaries of what PC's could do at the time, inventing methods and techniques thought impossible when dealing with that little memory, and virtual memory being non-existent (thank God!).

But Garriot himself has often got himself in that trap - U6, U7, UU, UO pushed the boundaries so much they were unplayable on most machines, sometimes for years. U9 wasn't even playable.

What really did him in this time is focussing too much on monetizing. I don't think that the graphics are all that bad (I was expecting something Facebook like) its just a disorganized mess from the little I played of it.

I think you banged the nail on the head there. Garriot might have vision but did't have skills to implement it. People he hired might have the the skills but didn't have the vision.

Latest news? Apparently the dev team has closed their office and since then developers have been working from their homes.

Source: https://matzavreview.com/2019/03/06/…-a-good-thing/