Wow! We had another outstanding community trailer contest. All the trailers were truly fantastic and a pleasure to watch with each presenting the game in true splendor. Our team struggled mightily in narrowing down who won, as each entry was quite unique.
The winning entrees are presented today in two separate categories (Full Length and 30 Seconds):
1st Place goes to Antrax for ‘Welcome to New Britannia’:
Get ready Avatars, this is going to be quite a fun Friday livestream! We kick it off with an introduction of our new Sound Designer, showing off a surprise art piece from our Character Artist, Fletcher Kinnear, and then announcing the winners of the Community Trailer Contest!
After the contest winners are announced, Travis “Vas Corp Por” Koleski will show you his polish work on South Broken Road, a Tier 2 scene comprised of a winding road through the mountains and full of various encounters, including plunderers and undead.
For more about South Broken Road, check out Travis’s recent Dev+ blog update in the forums. Not a Dev+ member? You can either get access through Bundles in the store, or check out excerpts of his blog on any of the Weekly Updates.
The fun begins on Twitch this Friday at 4pm CT. Also join the community watching on Discord chat to ask questions about this scene:
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This week’s Player Owned Town spotlight has us traveling to Arx Draconis to visit this beautiful island town, conveniently located in central Novia. Described as a large, walled, fortress city with a castle in the middle that’s perched upon a mountain. Arx Draconis is the home of The Syndicate (www.LLTS.org).
Hundreds of members from The Syndicate visited our studio in Austin earlier this month, giving us a unique chance to talk to them about their in-game adventures! We found out that for over 21 years of its existence, The Syndicate has been featured in two books, listed in the Guinness World Record as the longest lived guild, and mentioned in SotA’s story and lore.
Read on as The Syndicate takes you on a tour of their town in Novia…
Greetings Fellow Avatars! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:
Game Development
News Announcements
Community Updates
Making of Crooked Shank
We are focusing the next few releases on building the lower tier scenes near the cities along the paths of Truth and Courage. Most of these scenes have been clones of other scenes and will now be replaced with completely original scenes. In Release 46 one of these scenes being updated will be Crooked Shank which is a mountainous area in the Verdantis region.
[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Travis “Vas Corp Por” Koleski]
Whilst looking for an elven village in Forgotten Vale, I seemed to have misread my map, and stumbled upon a quaint human settlement tucked along a bend in the road. The locals kept their neighborhood very well tended, and while not excessively talkative, they were happy to point me to locations of note within their tidy little town.
This welcoming arch marked the entrance to the main, winding avenue through what the locals dubbed ‘Crooked Shank’. There seemed to be a lot of planting and construction, and truth be told, I could not really tell how old the town was.
Read more…
Chris “Sea-Wolf” Wolf is coming back on the livestream this Friday to show you more of his latest design work! We will be kicking off the stream with Sea-Wolf driving the master build machine around the nearly complete polish work of Longfall Woods.
We are focusing the next few releases on building the lower tier scenes near the cities along the paths of Truth and Courage. Most of these scenes have been clones of other scenes and will now be replaced with completely original scenes. In Release 45 one of these scenes is Longfall Woods which is a heavily forested area near Aerie in the Longfall region.
For more about Longfall Woods, check out Sea-Wolf’s recent Dev+ blog update in the forums. Not a Dev+ member? You can either get access through Bundles in the store, or check out excerpts of his blog on any of the Weekly Updates.
The fun begins on Twitch this Friday at 4pm CT. Also join the community watching on Discord chat to ask questions about this scene:
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This week’s Player Owned Town spotlight has me, ‘Berek’ as I go by in the community, travelling to Lake Cusabo to visit this beautiful area in northern Novia.
After a hectic few weeks of work and outside activities, I realized that it’d been quite some time since I’d had a full day to relax and wind down from the travails of daily life. I made my way north from Central Brittany, past Brekken Bay, and onward toward the Serpent Spine foothills. As the road turned west, I arrived at the town of Lake Cusabo.
Upon entering the town, I was immediately greeted with the scent of fresh pine and the cool brush of a lovely breeze. Lake Cusabo sits high in the mountains, and the great majesty of the views from atop these mountains took my breath away.
Greetings Fellow Avatars! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:
The Latest Game Progress
News Announcements
Community Updates
Making of Longfall Woods
We are focusing the next few releases on building the lower tier scenes near the cities along the paths of Truth and Courage. Most of these scenes have been clones of other scenes and will now be replaced with completely original scenes. In Release 45 one of these scenes is Longfall Woods which is a heavily forested area near Aerie in the Longfall region.
[A Dev+ Forum Post by Chris “Sea Wolf” Wolf]
Hey folks, today I’ll be sharing some screenshots of Longfall Woods, which is an adventure scene near Blood River. These dark woods draw inspiration from mythical forests such as Fangorn Forest from Lord of the Rings, or The Forbidden Forest from Harry Potter. In the scene, you can find a camp of vigilantes, a spider den, some haunted ruins, and a survivalist family of elves who have been hiding from the vigilantes.
The Woods
We are excited to announce the latest test of our Free Trial system! These tests are invaluable for us in order to improve the New User Experience and the Free Trial System itself.
If you know anyone who may want to try the game for free, please send them to the Download Page.
Free Trial access during the game’s current Early Access period allows you to play the entire game in any of the Online modes with a few key differences in game play:
You can still explore hundreds of scenes, talk with thousands of players, adventure through the opening quests, and gain experience and skills as you get used to the world of New Britannia! If you wish to continue playing after the free trial concludes, you can obtain an Early Access account here.
For when you get started in the Free Trial, we would love your feedback! We have opened up of our Release Feedback Forums. If you have a constructive comment about this release that will help the game to improve, please post it there. You can also say hello in the New Player Forum!
Have fun, and thanks for checking out Shroud of the Avatar in Early Access!
** $67,500 **
Telethon Funds Raised
Greetings Avatars,
Traditionally our Telethons have been held quarterly and lasted 12 hours (and in some extreme cases 24 hours!). While these lengthy telethons allowed us to cover a very wide range of subjects, they also led to a bit of meandering at the end due to fatigue (and maybe a bit of overindulgence). Recently we had a much shorter telethon (6 hours) for Lord British’s birthday, discovering that we spent more time answering questions and remained much more focused and alert. Your response was also quite positive in both pledges and feedback after the telethon!
So, starting with Release 44, we are going to experiment with extended Postmortems that are also Mini-Telethons. This will increase the frequency of our telethons to monthly but also keep them short (4 hours). We are confident that this will both allow us to focus more time on development while at the same time provide a higher frequency of direct interaction with you, our community.
Since this is a shorter telethon we want to make sure as many people can participate in the stretch goals. We are going to extend the amount of time that your purchases can be eligible for the stretch goals to be 12 hours from 12:00 PM CDT to Midnight. NOTE: We will still stop tracking towards stretch goals at the end of the telethon at 7:00 PM CDT, but everyone will have another 5 hours to spend $5 to get the stretch goals.
We hope you find this change an improvement! Now, onward to this telethon’s details!
TELETHON SCHEDULE (Central Time Zone)
Telethons are livestreamed on Twitch and include answers to your gameplay questions, world building tours, prize giveaways, sales on items, and more! See what we have planned below beginning at 3pm CT on August 7: Read more…
Greetings Fellow Avatars! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:
The Latest Game Progress
News Announcements
Community Updates
Etceter Polish (cont.)
Etceter was cloned from Kingsport originally and while we made significant changes to the scene to make it unique we still felt it needed more polish. It also needed more obvious visual references to the historical locations mentioned in The Sword of Midras (the prequel novel written by Tracy Hickman and Richard Garriott). Additionally after building Xenos we established a characteristic Greco-Roman ruins look for that region of the world and we wanted to propagate that look to nearby towns. For instance Aerie now has a “Little Xenos” quarter.
Since Etceter is the main port that takes you to Xenos it only made sense that it should have some strong influences from that style.
[A Dev+ Forum Post by Scott “Scottie” Jones]
Having finished my part of the polish pass for Etceter, I wanted to share some of the final results for the areas I haven’t had the chance to showcase to you fine folks yet…
