There’s a short interview with Richard Garriott over at 80 level, in which the development state of Shroud of the Avatar — and the contributions of the fan community — are discussed in some detail.

What stage of development is Shroud of the Avatar on?

We are now on the home stretch we think. We’re at release 15, which mean for 15 months now we’ve been releasing every month for every 3rd week of the month the latest and greatest version. For the last four months, we’ve actually kept the servers live and operational 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We think that we’re about 80% systems complete. All the major systems are in but a lot of them need to be finished out. Maybe half the spells are in, half the skills are in, and a similar amount of the recipes have been plugged into the crafting system. But all those systems are now present (well most of them). The things that’s going to take us the longest, close to the end of the year, are creating maps and the NPCs that advance the story throughout the game. Technically since all the systems still aren’t present and all the maps aren’t present, we aren’t even at the alpha but we are close.

The player base of the game also comes up:

How many players do you have right now?

So we have 150,000 people who signed up, 50,000 people who’ve already made their purchase, and the number of people who are actively playing at any moment is already at the hundreds even on work days during alpha.

Unity and the advantages it has brought, both in terms of cost reduction and in terms of the development pace that Portalarium has been able to maintain, is also discussed. And the big question — which has been on the minds of many, of late — also gets asked:

The game will be released around this year or next year?

Right at the cusp of the end of the year, we’re not sure if it’s in the year or out of the year but right around the end of the year is when it will go completely final.

Okay, it’s not the most…definitive answer, although it does kind of give us a window; “the cusp of the end of the year” strongly implies December or January, at least to my mind. This roughly lines up with what the International Business Times claimed Garriott had said about Shroud’s release date back in February.