Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott Announces Shroud Of The Avatar

Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott Announces Shroud Of The Avatar

Richard Garriott, legendary PC game designer and creator of the Ultima series yesterday announced his plans to reinvent the fantasy RPG genre with his unveiling of Shroud Of The Avatar.

Unveiled as the first installment of Richard’s new vision, SotA represents a ‘reinvention’ of the classic, fantasy RPG which the man practically created. A fantasy role-playing game that will focus more on player choices and discovery than on level grinding.

Beginning with a now apparently compulsory Kickstarter campaign, backers will have the usual choice of reward levels allowing them to feel significantly more generous than their friends. You can find further information over here at Kickstarter.

“Shroud of the Avatar will include what I think are the keys to an ultimate role-playing experience,” says Garriott. “These important tenets include things like a fully interactive virtual world, deep original fiction with ethical parables such that players’ choices are relevant, cultural histories and fully developed alternative languages and text. Also we want our players to have physical game components like cloth maps, fictional manuals and trinkets. These are all things that people came to expect in my earlier works and we plan on bringing them all back to create Shroud of the Avatar.”

skullery
That’s a nice skullery you’ve got there.

Those of you with internet connections as reliable as mine will be pleased to hear that Garriott has stated that Shroud Of The Avatar will allow for both multiplayer and off-line single player play, a rarity in this day of DLC, DRM and other  acronyms loved more by publishers than gamers.

As a long-standing fan of the Ultima series, I’m more than a little excited to hear Lord British is returning to his roots, but hopefully this one’ll turn out a little better than Ultima IX. Needless to say, I’ll be watching with interest.

RoosterTeeth were lucky enough to catch an interview with the man himself, which you can catch a recording of here. Early footage of the game is also included, so it’s worth a watch for anyone remotely interested.

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