Shroud of the Avatar - Update of the Avatar #71

Myrthos

Cave Canem
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This weeks update of the Avatar tries to cover many things, such as:

  • Release 5 Perspectives & Release 6 Revisions
  • Benefactor Baron City Home
  • Founder Teachable Emotes
  • Recruit-A-Friend Emote
  • Dev+ Crafting Table Unity Asset Pack
  • Castle Stone Arena Basement
  • Rustic 2-Story with Loft Village Home
  • Wood & Plaster 3-Story Village Home
  • Blade of the Avatar Novel: Chapter 20
  • Alienware $20 Pledge Upgrade Coupons
  • Upcoming Events
Here is part of the Release 5 perspectives:

From Lord British:

We made it! The team was scrambling till the 11:59th hour, and the last few bits made it in during our live patches, but it all worked out! Release 5 went very well.

Once this gem in the rough was in YOUR hands though, you did some MIGHTY impressive things with it. We turned on persistent housing that would not roll-over every hour and added quite a few new player towns, and you ran with it! The RP’ers and homesteaders could finally begin to dig in, and what they created was outstanding! We even saw the 1st player town, Pax Lair, which was also the 1st player town in Ultima Online…

[Read the full post in their forums]


From Chris Spears:

Because of the timing many of the most visible elements the players were in a very unpolished state for this release. In fact, even just two days before we went live the game was in a completely unplayable state. Combat didn’t work at all, AI’s weren’t working, switching maps would crash 100% of the time, other players couldn’t see objects placed on lots, all the scenes were either too bright or so dark you couldn’t see anything, and conversations weren’t working at all. So while the release was really rough for this release, I have to admit that internally we were high fiving each other that it was not MUCH worse.

…on the positive side of player facing stuff, a LOT of good changes were made to help us improve the visuals going forward. The largest was switching from gamma to linear lighting model.

Now for the less obvious stuff that is even more exciting…

[Read the full post in their forums]



From Starr Long:

Greetings Avatars,

Thank you everyone for another successful release. Once again you have proved what an amazing community you are and how we are on track to making the greatest crowd funded and crowd sourced RPG ever! At this point, some of you might be saying, “You call that successful? What release were you playing? Can we get that one please?”

It is important to understand what we define as success with these releases. For us the definition of success is clear:

  • Create and test new content / features as they are made
  • Keep team in the discipline of shipping content every month
  • Engaging our backers to provide feedback on direction and improvements of the game
  • Keeping the game playable for at least 90% of our backers
By those definitions we feel Release 5 was a resounding success. However we feel like the overall quality and polish of the game has decreased in many areas. Additionally we feel like we need to apply a more concerted effort on upgrading the visuals and user interface of the game. For those reasons we are in the process of rethinking our current release schedule and in particular we are going to refocus Release 6 on more polish and less content. We feel that about once per quarter we should have one of these polish releases to keep the quality of the game up to ours, and your, standards.

At this point many of you might be saying “Several systems have been pushed for more than one release now. How are all these changes affecting the sta...More information.
 
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Is anyone on here still following this game?
 
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Na my wife and I bought a new house a few years ago. I don't always have the time needed to stay on top of the upkeep of a real home so ……

This being said if the game turns out to be something a few months after it is released I might thinking about supporting the once great LB and buying it.
 
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The campaign is quite bizarre, or at least the news bits are. I think the real garriot was abducted by an alien when he went up to space.

But seriously, Hey Rune where are you to defend this real estate simulator? Ha
 
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The campaign is quite bizarre, or at least the news bits are. I think the real garriot was abducted by an alien when he went up to space.

Not sure if this is Sad on my part or Sad on Garriot's part, most likely a bit of both.

But U4 had such an impact on me as a 15 year old boy I have the 8 virtues tattooed(Japanese character's) on my legs(when I was 19).

I don't know what goes through his head these days nor is it any of my business as I can choice where my money is spent. Though I do believe if he was to a single player game with base on what I know he was able to do a lot more people would be all over it.

I understand people want to be social or part of this global social world. Myself I just want a game where I can lose myself completely for a set amount of time and not deal with anything that is real. As in interaction with real people…..

Edit note…CelticFrost is the name I used in U3 when I was in grade 9 in the very early 80's.
 
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I got spoiled by Larian's informative organized updates. SotA updates make my head spin. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll like the finished single player campaign. But mostly ignoring the development process as everything is way too long winded for me. Not that that's bad, just not for me.
 
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I got spoiled by Larian's informative organized updates. SotA updates make my head spin. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll like the finished single player campaign. But mostly ignoring the development process as everything is way too long winded for me. Not that that's bad, just not for me.

Seriously though - Larian could make a killing contracting their community managment/PR team to other devs. Of the Kickstarter's I've been involved with, they have had the best post-campaign communication by far.
 
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