With the eighteenth pre-alpha test release — Release 18, as it is called — of Shroud of the Avatar beginning today, Starr Long of course posted the usual collection of instructions and change notes to the game’s website yesterday afternoon.

Thank you to our loyal backers of Shroud of the Avatar. We were not going to let torrential rains, high winds, tornadoes, microbursts, downed trees, blown out windows, massive power losses, or any other weather calamity thrown our way stop us from delivering Release 18! Access for all backers at First Responder level and above begins this Thursday, May 28 at 10:30 AM Central Time (16:30 UTC).

NOTE: Servers will be down from 9:00 AM until 10:30 AM Thursday morning in order to upload the build.

Please read this entire message, as well as the linked instructions and known issues.

We are far from launch, in a constant state of change, and we do not yet have in-game systems to inform players of these changes or to share ways to help them to explore new content and systems. This means we rely entirely on this message and the linked instructions and known issues to convey the current game state. We regularly have to answer questions or filter bug reports from helpful players, because they elect not to read this valuable information. By taking a few moments to read through this information, a great deal of our time and efforts can be redirected to focus on new “unanswered” questions, and addressing critical issues impacting each release. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to review this post, and for all the truly valuable feedback you continue to provide.

Release 17 included a lot of new content including the first Player Owned Town, Crafting Events, Player Titles, an Experience Doubler, and Lot Access Permissions. It was also our attempt to finish a bunch of work related to the Unity 5 upgrade. The good news is that the new content improved the play experience (for the most part). However, a lot of other issues were introduced in the process. For instance, we completely reworked our character state machine which governs everything the character does (animating, moving, fighting, spellcasting, etc.). This rework will, in the long term, make the game better by giving us better controls for things like blending between animations. In the near term, however, it broke almost everything and took us an entire week after the release to address the biggest issues.

Additionally, combat had been neglected for many months. As many of you have pointed out, it has been unbalanced, buggy, and almost unplayable for a few releases (and R17 actually made it worse!). On top of all that, our new user experience has been beyond challenging–punishing is more accurate, in fact. Based on those three issues, we decided to spend more time on overall improvements to combat and the new user experience. Unfortunately, that means we had to move some deliverables out of this release, but the game is now much more playable.

Also, remember we are providing new content with each release and our community is working overtime to make new events for you to enjoy. Be sure to check out a couple of the Community Events Calendars run by our community members (via in game book or the player run websites Avatars CircleCommunity Events and Events of the Avatars calendar).

You should click on through to read the complete set of changes that Release 18 brings to Shroud of the Avatar, but here are a few highlights:

Dynamic Creature & Resource Spawning: Starting with this release, we have begun implementing a new spawning methodology. Our hope is this new method will result in a more immersive and dynamic play experience. The scenes below represent our first initial pass, but we will periodically come back to these scenes as new features come online (escorts, complex idles, sophisticated patrols, etc.). Additionally, each new scene that comes online will be spawned this way. This will also allow for balanced tiers of difficulty within regions, commensurate with the tiers of resources found within the areas.

New [Combat] Deck Mechanic: The most consistent complaint about our deck mechanic is that players have to spend too much time looking at the hotbar. To address this we have made a modification to the system that allows players to assign spells to a defined slot in the hotbar even though that skill will still be dealt to them randomly. Doing this allows players to categorize their skills. For instance, all their buffs appear in slot 4 while all their DoTs appear in slot 3. Feedback so far from players on the QA server has been that this does indeed address the distraction issue while still preserving all the positive aspects of the system. It also creates a large number of new strategies in deck building.

The above, concerning the card decks in combat, is a change I’m happy to see. I honestly can’t stand combat in Shroud of the Avatar as it has been implemented to date, and I’m hoping that this shift in strategy will improve the experience of it somewhat. I mean, it’s still several steps removed from the more effective combat systems of games like Reckoning or even Pillars of Eternity, but hopefully it’ll mean that the hotbar does genuinely command less attention than it has in previous Releases.

Also, this is awesome:

Astronomy & Calendar: The sky above is now filled with a full system of celestial mechanics, including 10 orbital bodies and a constellation-filled star field. All of these move independently and will generate phases, eclipses and multiple alignment events. These are all tied to a calendar that has a direct ratio to actual Earth time (see below). Our long term plan is to use all of this data in game play. For example, there may be certain attributes that can only be added to crafted items when Deceit is in the constellation of Chaos. Please note that for now, this new sky only appears when you are in the overworld. Over the next few releases we will propagate the sky to all the other scenes.

• Moon & Sun Magic: Moon and Sun Magic are now tied to the celestial body being above the horizon versus time of day. This means there will be times when they are both equally effective because the sun and moon are both visible.

Oh, and this is good too:

New User Experience Revamp: While we desire to make a game that is challenging and makes the player think, we do not desire to punish the player, especially at the beginning of the game. However, that is the experience of the new player in our game: unending punishment. With Release 18, we decided to make the new user experience more forgiving and guide the player more than previously. We give the player more recipes, maps, and notes to help guide them (specifics below).

• Solace Bridge: Various improvements including a new NPC here who gives clues about the overall story, better/clearer/more notes in the Journal, a map of Soltown from Edvard, etc.

I’m actually hopeful that I’ll get to spend a bit of time playing Shroud of the Avatar in the week to come, and I look forward to seeing these changes in the game.