Over at the Shroud of the Avatar forums — or at the excellent ForsakenVirtues.com site — there is a summary of the most recent Developer Chat held by Richard Garriott and other Portalarium staff. Said chat is in the video embedded below:

Player housing was a major focus for this chat, and it was re-affirmed that different housing lot types (village, town, and city) will be co-mingled in certain areas of the world. Although in general, each type of municipality will be comprised of housing lots appropriate to it (village houses in villages, etc.), we can reasonably expect to see e.g. village-lot houses comprising the less-affluent areas of cities. And even within particular lot types, there will be the potential for variation in housing sizes and styles.

Some images of a prototype “hilly village” were shown during the chat; Dame Lori at Forsaken Virtues managed to capture a few screenshots of these. Here’s a representative example:

Hilly Village Overhead

Additionally, some images of a prototype town were shown, and again Dame Lori was able to capture a few screenshots of these. Another sample!

A Town

While it’s clear that a lot of the spaces in the village and town are allocated for player housing, I have to say: these are pretty big as villages and towns go. And it leaves me with a concern, as well: for players that opt to experience Shroud of the Avatar in its purely offline mode, what shape will these places take? Will they be populated by NPCs? Or will they simply be…emptier?

Additional details about houses in Shroud of the Avatar:

• Village houses will be smaller, with essentially one main room.
• Town houses will be a bit larger, having two or so main rooms.
• City houses will presumably be larger than this; some concept art shows houses with multiple floors.

Finally, a sample adventure scenario was detailed, involving a lich’s castle overlooking a barren vale. Again, Dame Lori managed to grab a screenshot:

Lich’s Vale

The basic premise of the scenario for the instance imaged above would see players battling their way through a spider-infested forest (at the bottom), passing through an abandoned village (with skeletons and other enemies to encounter) before working their way through the lich’s castle and doing away with it in an epic final battle. Richard Garriott also noted in a recent IRC chat that in besting the lich, a clue to the wider story of the game might be uncovered.

We can evidently expect the world of Shroud of the Avatar to be filled with such instances, with durations ranging from five minutes to around an hour.