There’s a lengthy article/interview with Richard Garriott over at Polygon, in which Lord British reflects on the current crowdfunding successes of Shroud of the Avatar. He also discusses how Portalarium’s plans have changed since the Kickstarter campaign, and what their new targets for deliverables are.

“Running a crowd-funded game is a very interesting life as you might imagine,” Garriott said. “It’s a constant internal introspection you have to do as to how much money you currently have in the bank, how much you should be willing to spend on speeding up or improving quality, versus what you predict for new players joining you in the future.”

What Garriott has come to find is that players quickly adjust to the idea of playing a game that is still blossoming, and that once they understand the growth, they come to enjoy it.

…

“Everyone who has been with us for more than a month is in that rhythm and go, ‘Wow, each month I’m excited to see what new stuff is going to come online.'”

It was almost an experiment, one made successful in part by how well the development team was at hitting their promised goals.

“One of the things that has helped is that we’ve had 14 months of precisely on time releases,” Garriott said. “We have pushed the live button literally to the minute, to the second at times, on time, 14 months in a row.”

The status of the game is also talked about:

Garriott says about 70 percent of the game’s systems are now present, though they still need a lot of polish, and about 20 percents of the maps, content, conversations and quests are present.

“So now that’s the big push for the rest of the year,” he said. “We’re no longer gated by features, we’re gated by content. Which is generally speaking pretty predictable, so we think we’re in a good position to release the first full version of the game by the end of the year.

“Now it’s a content race. We think we can get all of the maps completed by the end of the year. The thing we’re looking at now is the storyline and quests.”

Note that “end of the year” remark; does this mean that we won’t be seeing the finished version of Shroud of the Avatar’s first episode until November or December? Discuss.

Oh, and what about the single-player campaign?

“A lot of the main plot we’re leaving turned off,” Garriott said of the playable build. “We only turned on little pieces of it to test. We’re going to try and keep the story aspects of it as quiet as possible to as close to launch as possible.

HOW LORD BRITISH ESCAPED EA’S CLUTCHES

lord british
What might surprise some long-time fans of Richard Garriott’s games is that in Shroud of the Avatar, Garriott’s characters name is still Lord British.

Despite having sold off developer Origin and the Ultima series to Electronic Arts, Garriott said he made sure to keep ownership of that game’s main character.

“I own it,” he said. “It does not belong to EA or Ultima. Prior to Origin’s sale to EA, I owned Ultima personally, Origin did not own Ultima. When EA went to buy Origin and realized the company didn’t own Ultima, they said, ‘We won’t buy Origin unless it includes the word Ultima.'”

Garriott said he told them he agreed to sell it, but that they couldn’t have Lord British. Despite that, though, Lord British remained in Ultima Online by contract.

“In the final month, we’re going to have to do more robust testing of the whole plot, but for most people we let them play the sandbox game, which isn’t spoiled by time, I think it’s enhanced by time.”

He also has some ambitious goals for the follow-on episodes in the Shroud of the Avatar series:

“This map is effectively the center tile of a tic-tac-toe board that is the total world,” he said. “Every year we want to release a doubling of the previous amount of geography.

“We will fill out that tic-tac-toe board with four more episodes. So we have at least five, if you count this first one, planned out.”

The big test, he said, is if the team can really produce a full episode of new content and maps in one calendar year.

“If this ends up taking us 20, 30 percent longer this year, each episode will probably be the same,” he said.

Of course, I’m assuming that much of this depends both on the ongoing success of Shroud’s crowdfunding campaign, and on sufficient sales of Shroud of the Avatar when it finally ships.