Richard Garriott AKA Lord British is back with a new game called Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues and it’s been launched on Kickstarter today.
It’s back to his RPG roots with this new title and the $1,000,000 funding is off to a great start as Garriott attempts to redefine the fantasy RPG.
“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.”
“This will not be a Facebook or casual game,” said Garriott. “We think it will appeal to a multitude of audiences, but we are planning on making a game that will harken back to the same design principles that you can find in my earlier games.”
There will be stories to follow in the game, but unlike the modern MMO, you don’t have to do them, they are just part of the world, there are no hints or guides to completion, players will decide how they want to play the game.
Garriott makes some very valid points in the introduction video, the MMORPG genre has become predictable and players are no longer encouraged to really explore and create their own adventure experiences. As Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is not really an MMO, you can play it single players or with trusted friends, it’s sounds like it’s more like an expanded Ultima experience.
I wonder if he really wishes he was British?
Published: Mar 8, 2013 04:54 pm