Some of you might not know, Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is marketed as the continuum of the old gamers’ beloved game Ultima Online, that couldn’t be released. Even though the creator of Ultima Online is the nameless hero Raph Koster, Richard Garriott was on our minds as the almighty “Lord British”. Of course we should give credit to Richard Garriott, he gave us the long and amazing Ultima series. What we call Lord British is, the thing that started the modern MMORPGs’ way of making us watch the “actual” hero do the heroism and take the credit, which makes us wonder why we even play. But we all loved Lord British. I am yet to meet someone that has played Ultima Online in their youth and haven’t fallen in love with it.
So what happened to Ultima? This happened:
As always, like the zombie that rots everything it touches, EA destroyed Ultima Online with its reforms slowly. If you want to try it out, the servers are still on for some reason. Years after the fall of Ultima Online there began a swash deep in the internet. “Lord British is back.” I have watched tens of interviews and read as much articles about it, he really was back and he was promising all of us a new game with the Ultima Online concept. That gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. As you can guess I bought it the first day of the pre-order with all my excitement and I started playing the game as soon as I could in Pre-Alpha. The first version of the game came out in December 12, 2013 and Richard Garriott told us all that the game would be finished in about a year. But this promise slowly vanished. On their website they still say that the additional episodes are supposed to be released in subsequent years after the initial game release, which is currently estimated to be at the end of 2015. Let alone Beta, there’s still no sign of proceeding to the Alpha version.
Ultima Online
Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues
So how did they start creating this game? In kickstarter, which already rich people use in order not to spend their money, $1,919,275 were raised. The current sum is $7,853,018. All the Ultima fans put their hands under the stone in order for this legend to be resurrected and it worked. Just to remind you my friends, this man had a tiny castle, this man went to space. I say again, he went to space… I assume you get the idea. So what was done with these seven million eight hundred fifty-three thousand eighteen dollars? Including Garriott a team of 46 people was gathered. We have a working team here, that has its funding since before December 12, 2013. There are even people in the team from the old team. If you watch the gameplay video of the game below, you’ll see the condition it’s in. Shortly, someone wanted to play a game and we helped.
I would like to quote Richard Garriott here:
“I’ve met virtually no one in our industry who I think is close to as good a game designer as I am. I’m not saying that because I think I’m so brilliant. What I’m saying is, I think most game designers really just suck.”
I think I am going to have a grin whenever I read these words. It’s deplorable that a person trusts himself so much without knowing anything about the current industry, hurling words like a politician and then he messes everything up. This time I won’t be commenting on the gameplay or the graphics because the parts I could comment on are not done yet. I could tell you a bit about the promises we got though.
- NPCs will be able to communicate and talk to players like no other game and will be able to give quests the same way.
- Everything that looks like it can be used, will be usable.
- Everyone will be able to have their own house inside the city.
- Lord British is coming back.
As you can guess only the last one came to life properly. Egoism and being able to get everything we want in every moment of our lives can cause such things. So what’s our fault in this? Nothing, it’s simply hormonal.
Don’t buy this game.
Gameplay
N/A
Graphics
I can’t help but say it, I can’t believe how unbelievably worse the graphics got since 2013.
Gameplay video
The link for the game
