Shroud of the Avatar - Update of the Avatar #71

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 stated goal of an October release?” Well thank you for the tough question. I have a mantra about ship dates: “No one remembers when you shipped but they always remember how you shipped.” With that in mind you should rest assured that we will launch when you tell us the product is ready. That might mean October is not feasible, but let’s focus on making the right product, not the when product.