Shroud of the Avatar - Release #5

This weekend you can play release 5 of Shroud of the Avatar. It has a range of new things available, so if you are a backer at a high enough level or have weekend passes you could have a go at it.

[quote] <ul> Combat and Magic Skills: Finally you will no longer be confined to auto attack now that a wide array of combat and magic skills will be at your disposal. To let you test out a wide variety of these skills we will give you a bunch of skill points to allocate up and down as you wish.
35 (of 171) Skills: Here is the skill list for R5. Most of these are in a very simple first state so some of them are missing secondary effects, like movement (Trip, Tumble, etc.), speed (Ice Fist), etc.
- Blades:
- Thrust
- Double Thrust ("double swipe")
- Whirling Blades
- Bludgeon:
- Crushing Blow
- Knockback
- Heavy Armor:
- Defensive Stance
- Inner Strength
- Light Armor:
- Dodge
- Tumble
- Medium Armor:
- Glancing Blow
- Trip
- Polearms:
- Push
- Puncture
- Ranged:
- Aimed Shot
- Disabling Shot
- Piercing Shot
- Shield:
- Deflect
- Shield Bash
- Air:
- Gust
- Discharge
- Lightning Death:
- Death Touch
- Death Ray
- Corpse Explosion
- Earth:
- Stone Fist
- Root
- Fire:
- Flame Fist
- Fireball
- Life:
- Heal Self
- Healing Ray
- Purify
- Resurrection
- Sun:
- Light
- Searing Ray
- Water:
- Ice - Fist Linear Lighting Model: As part of an ongoing effort to improve our visuals we have have switched from gamma lighting to linear lighting. This makes a lot of the details in our textures more visible but it has required us to touch every shader, texture, lighting setting, etc. in the game. Note that this is still a work in progress.
Add On Store Conversion (Website): Our backers now have the ability to convert their add on store purchases into credits that can either be applied to their pledge or used for other add on purchases (this feature available on website only).
Weekend Access Keys (Login): We added functionality to support weekend access to potential backers
Journal: Results of conversations with the characters in our world will now appear in your Journal. This should aid questing tremendously without going as far as exclamation points overhead.
Crafting: We have increased the number of starting recipes to give players a wider array of recipes so that discovery can be more intuitive.
Compass: Navigating through our scenes can be quite challenging so we have added an on screen compass to help guide you around .
Overland Map Polish: We continued iterating on the overland map. We added panning and zooming, animating objects (waves, windmills, etc.) and visibility of your party members.
Combat Floaties: For those of you craving more information about what exactly is happening in combat we have added combat numbers that appear overhead during combat if you have Names Overhead toggled (via the N key).
Health Bars: Discerning status from the health dot alongside the name in R4 did not work for many of you so we have moved to a more traditional health bar.
New Creatures:
- Chest Mimic
- Skeleton Archer
- Satyr Mage
- Satyr Archer Traditional Combat Shortcut Bar: While we are still heavily committed to card style combat we quickly realized when playtesting this very early version that we don’t yet have enough supporting features (deck building, skill locking, etc) in place to make it fun.
AFK Mode: When you type /afk or you are idle for a while your character will sit on the ground and [AFK] will be appended to the character name
[i] New Vale Scenes: We shifted focus to more Vale scenes so we could create a more complete area of the game (replacing placeholder maps) versus proceeding to the main map. Player Housing: We have added 12 …More information.

Has anyone played any version of this game? What I've read makes me very sceptical, though I principly would be interested if it has a sold single player campaign.

sounds like its turning into a game now and not a half ass tech demo.

My only interest in this is in the SP version, so I think I won't be playing it for a long long time.

Originally Posted by Carnifex
My only interest in this is in the SP version, so I think I won't be playing it for a long long time.

Same for me. Backed it for that reason only, but will have to see if I feel committed enough to play it when there is a SP version.

Originally Posted by cptbarkey
sounds like its turning into a game now and not a half ass tech demo.

Indeed! You will have to wait longer though before it's actually a game. Even with this fifth Pre-Alpha release, it's still a tech demo. There isn't even a full game loop yet, and the devs have admitted as much.

If you take it for what it is still -- a tech demo of the core game systems in their very early prototypes, then you can still have some fun with it. If you're expecting a more polished Alpha, that is still many months away.

This is the second play weekend I've been able to play through. This time things are much stronger than the last one due to attack skills being in the game. Although the full off-line version of the game is not released yet, you can play in single player online (SPO) and not have to deal with most (but not all) of the online features. It appears from what I played SPO, player housing works similar to if you are fully online (you can see others own a house), but as my understanding you only see your friends (haven't tested this yet). The game is still rough and needs a lot of work. I killed a wolf yesterday, and after looting his corpse got up with zero Hp and started walking around.

I have no friends, so I should be safe seeing only my own house in SP(O).

But: Ultima's strengths for me always lay in its quality of worldbuilding and world "simulation" (npc schedules, mainly, and interactivity, which I believe is covered already by crafting). What is there in the game of these, so far?

Shroud goes back to the old school of using text to interact with NPC for quests, which seems to work well in keeping me interested in what is going on. The journal is working in this release making keeping track of things much easier. I have yet to notice NPC schedules, but they may be in the works down the line. The world building is still/interactivity is a work in progress, I haven't noticed any details that would turn my head. I have yet to get to know any NPC very well: there are a few nice touches of personality, such as the odd responsive you get when telling Guard Michael where you are from. Crafting seems interesting, but there is so much I haven't figured out about it, I can't comment on. I wanted to try farming today but I spend too much time getting the wife into the basics of it.

The only Ultima games I have played are UO and Underworld, so I can't comment on how this compares to the main line of games.

Thanks for the insights - I like what you say about the NPCs, but I still need to hear more about their plans and progress re: world building/interactivity/schedules before I may get into that.