I wasn’t able to watch the Shroud of the Avatar RTX demo today, but Sergorn Dragon took in the full thing, and lit up the more-or-less ongoing Google+ Hangout session we have going with message after message summarizing just what Richard Garriott, Starr Long, and Chris Spears presented to the crowd in Austin this afternoon.

Here’s the short version: it sounds utterly amazing, and very faithful to the Ultima tradition.

Here’s the long version, by which I mean Sergorn:

SOTA presentation beginning!

So now the “third era” is not social games, it’s selective multiplayer. 😛

A bit of a shift in perspective there, it would seem!

“Ultima Online is the last game we did for Origin.” That’s nice for UIX! 😛

Although realistically, it’s true if you consider the group as a whole. Starr Long didn’t work on Ultima 9, did he?

Well geez, this looks really good.

OMG

They went into a wood.

He attacked a tree, that cut wood he could get into inventory.

Then after a few hits of the axe…the tree fell down!

Resource gathering is one thing. Destructible environments (even if it is just cutting down trees) is quite another. Promising!

Use of a sawmill; pity it uses the gumps UI and isn’t directly on the world object…but heh.

Sitting on chair! Yeah seriously this looks really good.

I remember trying to implement sitting on chairs in a Neverwinter Nights mod, via NWScript. It wasn’t fun. And it’s been this sort of interactivity, with the different 3D objects that populate modern game worlds, that has been…less prevalent in modern games. So it’s good to see that the Portalarium team have worked hard to make sure it’s in Shroud of the Avatar.

Typed dialogues…awesome! He types sentences 😛

He mentions to the bartender he’s been making a chair.

The bartender comments, mentions a “throne of bone”.

So he asks about the thone of bone…and he mentions a dungeon and such. that’s crazy!

This sounds like a fun dialogue system. Can’t wait to see it in action!

I think they mentioned they’re gonna share all their art too.

This was, if memory serves, something they discussed doing during the Kickstarter campaign.

Puzzle in dungeon, yay…real time traps, yay…sealed wall passage you can break with a sword…nice lich!

Well, the demo is over; really impressive for three months in! To say it’s Ultima-ish would be an understatement. 😛

At present, the RTX Live streams appear to be offline, but once the Room 18 video feed is brought back online, and/or once RTX publishes the Shroud of the Avatar demo, I’ll be sure to embed it in a post and screenshot it thoroughly! For now, the image above — which I pulled from this article at ForsakenVirtues.com, whereat more screencaps of the demo can be found — will have to suffice.