Thank you for being a loyal backer and follower of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 28 access for all backers at First Responder level and above begins this Thursday, March 31, at 10:30 AM US Central Daylight Time (15:30 UTC).

Release 28 represents a huge expansion of the Novian landmass with 42 new scenes appearing in seven different regions. Those scenes include adventuring areas, towns, mines, and dungeons. The story continues to advance, as well, with the underground areas of Malice and Skrekk representing pivotal moments in the Love and Courage storylines. Malice and Skrekk also represent the latest in a string of visually competitive environments. In Release 28, we also took the first of many steps to make our characters as comparable as our environments by completely overhauling our male character.

In addition, Release 28 contains a handful of general improvements to quality of life, such as increasing the top end of the Brightness slider to help those of you with darker monitors.  You will notice even more of these improvements, especially in crafting. The Recipe Book has bigger and darker fonts, as well as a new table of contents with sub categories. We also introduced Bulk Crafting and Bulk Salvage..

Yet again, I want to express a huge amount of gratitude to our Dev+ backers who tested all of the items below on the QA server and uncovered lots of bugs. They also provided editorial feedback on this post. So, they are a big reason that this post actually matches what is in the game, and that it is easy to read.

While we are getting closer to launch, we are still 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 instructionsand known issues to convey the current game state. We regularly have to answer questions or filter bug reports because some players 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.

This is a fairly extensive update; in addition to the overhaul of the male avatar model, a large number of new scenes and story elements will be added to the game. Those of you who have been pining for more information about Shroud of the Avatar’s story, or who want to actually see more story implemented in the game, would do well to check this Release out.

For a complete list of change notes, click on through to Starr’s post. You can also find an abbreviated set of change notes here on the Codex.