Category: Shroud of the Avatar News

Richard Garriott’s official profile on the Shroud of the Avatar site now omits the title CEO, something that has been part of the description since the game’s pages were first published. SEC filings name Garriott as CEO, though Delaware, where the original corporation paperwork was filed, does require an executive officer, not specifically a “CEO”. At the moment, Garriott’s profile only lists him as Creative Director and Founder.

The latest Shroud of the Avatar newsletter is live on the game’s official site. This time, the letter is anchored by the news that Player Made Dungeons will be arriving in-game as early as Q4 2018. The team is targeting that span of time and, until then, several placeholder, or “example”, dungeons are in the game. When Player Made Dungeons go live later this year, these example dungeons will leave the game.

The launch of the latest patch for Shroud of the Avatar has not come without its problems. After maintenance was complete, developers came back to the official site to announce that it would be rolling servers back to the pre-patch status in order to give it another go. As of this writing, the restart / relaunch of Update 56 is now live.

Portalarium and Travian Games have sent word that development of the “next round of episodic content” has started. Episode 2 will feature expanded stories, new lands and feature sets. While development on Episode 2 is underway, a crew will be working on polishing current content. The PR also reveals that “staff rightsizing” is underway which will lead to some developers being laid off. No further explanation was given about how many employees have been let go.

The Shroud of the Avatar team has been working hard on Release 54 and just today sent out the instructions along with a list of things players can expect to find after its deployment. The new update will be focused heavily on the team’s Top 10 Priorities including improvements to performance, the addition of new and polished scenes, better story polish and side quests, improvements to the offline companion system, new recipes in crafting and the addition of skeleton plunderers.

The Shroud of the Avatar team has published a new video featuring Nefario, “a powerful sorcerer of the Obsidian Order. He is part of a cabal of eight who are trying to fulfill the Dire Prophecies while “laying siege to the towns of Novia”. The video was released as part of the latest Shroud of the Avatar weekly newsletter.

Release 53 has been patched into Shroud of the Avatar. Players can expect a bunch of new and improved features including additional side quests, more story polish, more loot (decorations, player-crafted gear, etc.), new scenes as well as bug fixes, performance optimizations, UI polish and more localized content.

The Shroud of the Avatar team has announced that it has deployed an early version of Release 53 to the QA server for players to try out. This build provides some tweaks and updates to a number of systems including rebuilds of several locations, the LFG tool, loot improvements, side quests, heraldry and many others.

The latest Shroud of the Avatar newsletter has been published, this time packed with design notes for several locations in the game including Eastmarch, Penmawr Island and Tenebris Harbor. In addition, players first starting out will begin to see worn armor dropped that fits the theme of “just starting out”.

The Shroud of the Avatar site has been updated with a forward look at the game’s Top 10 development goals, but also with a forward looking peek at what’s coming in Release 53 that is slated to go live on April 26th. Release 53 is the first post-launch update and contains both new features, polish and iterations on existing features.