Some time yesterday afternoon, Shroud of the Avatar reached the $2.5 million mark in its ongoing crowdfunding campaign. The project has, at the time of this writing, 24,831 backers, 2,509 of whom have supported the game via its website (for a combined total of $583,511 in contributions).

Now, before you get too excited about stretch goals — because, you’ll recall, VR support was listed as the $2.5 million stretch goal during Shroud of the Avatar’s Kickstarter campaign — you should probably have a read of this announcement from Starr Long:

The question has now arisen as to what, if anything, we are going to do with the “extra” money. Are we now going to do the $2.25M and $2.5M stretch goals we promised during Kickstarter? That is an easy question to ask but a harder question to answer. When we finished Kickstarter we had a given amount of money and a certain team size. From there we built our schedule, set our milestones, and laid out our tasks. A few months after that I joined the team. Part of my duties as Executive Producer is to manage our scope to meet our promised schedule. All game development requires constant scope management because when you estimated a task 6 months ago it might have changed since then, especially as other work was done. You might also realize a design that seemed fun on paper is not entertaining at all and you have to return to the drawing board, effectively requiring you to do the same task twice, therefore doubling the time spent on that feature.

…

Instead of creating whole new features any time or money we have a surplus of we want to focus on making those core experiences deeper and more polished. That means you will likely see us extend features like player housing or combat before we introduce something like VR support. That does not mean we will never support VR, just not right now.

The mod tools that were listed as the $2.25 million stretch goal also appear to be off the table for now; Portalarium will instead be focused on delivering a better and more polished experience with the game systems already being worked on. And in general, at least on the Shroud of the Avatar forums, this news has been received positively.

Personally, I don’t really see the appeal of VR, although I would have liked to see some mod tools come out for the game. But then, as long as Portalarium are able to put the money toward building a more stable, interactive, sandboxy world a la Ultima 6 (or 7, whatever), I think I can live without a toolkit.