Greetings Fellow Avatars!  Not much new info in the news this past week.  First, Tuesday, October 11th at 3:00 PM Central (20:00 UTC) is the next Portalarium Hangout of the Avatar! They are also doing yet another telethon for more $, more vanity items, and marketing in November as well.

Here’s what else we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

• Play Release 34 Now!
• Q4 2016 Schedule

Play Release 34 Now!

Release 34 has new content to explore, including:

• Necropolis Polish
• Estgard Polish
• Bone Armor
• Cooking and Food Expansions
• Halloween Content
• Daily Oracle Confessions
• R33 Lot Deed Raffle Winners
• R34 Free Lot Deed Raffle Tickets for Non Property Owners
• Over 45 new Crafting Recipes
• New Combat Skills and Spells
• New Musical Instruments
• New Emotes

…and much more

Check out the Release 34 Instructions update for detailed information about all the new content.

Release 34 Player Instructions

Release 34 Known Issue

Q4 2016 Schedule Update

[From a forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Greetings Avatars,

As we have stated previously, our goal is to once-per-quarter post an updated schedule for our monthly releases. Even though these goals will likely change somewhat as we react to feedback, we feel it is important to provide you an updated roadmap periodically.

Our goal continues to be to deliver our backers content each and every month so that we can get feedback and use it to iterate improvements. This continues to benefit the game, sometimes with sweeping changes like the switch over to use-based advancement. Meeting that monthly goal is our highest priority, but we require flexibility in our deliverables in order to meet that goal. As you have seen in previous releases, sometimes we push things out, but we also often pull new things in.

For the fourth quarter of 2016, we will continue to polish the Path of Love while moving on to the Path of Courage. We will continue to expand Crafting with focus on Cooking, Food, Agriculture, Alcohol, and Fishing in particular. Combat will continue to be balanced and will expand to include cover as well as a refactor of Damage Types and Resistances. Town Sieges and Roving Encounters will also come online to greatly expand our feature set.

As always, all dates, durations, and deliverables are subject to change as we adjust our designs based on direct feedback from you, our backers.

RELEASE 35, October 27, 2016

• Story: The Path of Love will continue to be polished with a focus on the Tower of the Shuttered Eye along with continued work on Ardoris. We will also continue polish on the Path of Courage.
• Multiplayer Combat Balance: A pass will be made through combat skills, creature stats, player stats, advancement rates, zone difficulties, and other values for continued balance of multiplayer combat. We may also create additional skills, spells, and combos.
• Player Towns & Player Housing:  POT Owners will now be able to select from a set of start points for their town. Also, new housing content will appear; including new Elven homes for the Elven bundles and Testing Incentive Program decorations. Finally, updates to Dynamic Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game.
• Offline Reward Delivery: Reward delivery for Offline Mode will become available to players using this mode to play.
• Roving Encounters: Potential encounters (wandering merchants, monsters, etc.) will appear on the overworld for players to engage (or avoid).
• Crafting: Cooking, Food, and Agriculture will be the focus of Release 35, with one of the major goals being the reduction in reliance on purchasing ingredients from NPC merchants to cook food. This means increasing the number of plants in Agriculture and polishing Agriculture itself, including the addition of features like water harvesting. We also hope to add Alcohol recipes and Teachable Recipes. Finally, the visual effect for items that have been Enchanted or Masterworked will be redone.
• Character: Ardoris will be the first city where we begin adding region specific clothing (Japanese themed) for the residents, including unique armor for guards, clothing for citizens, and regalia for royalty. Work will also continue on Summer Telethon items, including Flaming Bagpipes and Firedancing.

RELEASE 36, November 17, 2016

• Story: Path of Love polish will continue but primary focus will begin shifting to the Path of Courage with special attention on Estgard. We also hope to have the new PVP area begin coming online with the town area first.
• Combat: We plan to refactor how Damage Types and Resistances work to better balance different weapon types, spell schools, and creature types against each other. This will also improve the variety of crafted items.
• Player Towns & Player Housing: Towns with player housing will now dynamically update their icon on the Overworld based on various data, including number of claimed lots and online population. Additionally we will continue to expand the Dynamic POT Tool set. Also Obsidian homes for the Obsidian bundles will come online. Finally, updates to Dynamic Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game.
• Crafting: Crafting will be refactored to include the new Damage Types and Resistances. We will also add more Enchantments and Masterwork modifiers, including some related to Celestial Mechanics.
• Character: We will begin work polishing the Kobolds and updating them to better reflect their lore (much of the technology in Novia can be attributed to them). We will also work on the Testing Incentives Program Wearables and Summer Telethon items.
• Social: Guilds will now be able to form alliances with each other and we will be introducing a new default guild for all new players called the Outlander Guild.

RELEASE 37, December 15, 2016

• Story: The Path of Courage polish will continue with focus on Harvest and Resolute. We will also continue expansion of the new PVP area with the addition of the dungeons area. Finally, the NPC Conversation System will be getting a much needed refactoring and polish pass.
• Town Sieges: The first iteration of Town Sieges will come online where periodically you will have to fight through battle lines to get into and out of a town under siege by the 8 Obsidian Cabalists.
• Combat: The cover system will be introduced and will modify attack and defense values when you (or your target) are behind cover.
• Player Towns & Player Housing: The first iteration of Player Owned Town Blessings will go live where monuments placed in POTs will grant long term buffs whose power and/or duration will be based on the population of the town. Also, more Obsidian homes for the Obsidian bundles will appear. The ability to Rent Rooms in a player home will start to become available to homeowners. Additionally, work will begin on the first Static POTs. Finally, updates to Dynamic Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game.
• Crafting: Fishing will get an expansion and polish pass. We will also expand weapon recipes to include more visual variants (Elven, Norgard, Obsidian, Kobold).
• Character: Valhold will be the second city where we begin adding region specific clothing (Viking themed) for the residents, including unique armor for guards, clothing for citizens, garb for merchants, and regalia for royalty. We will also begin introducing the first of the Obsidian Cabalists.

We continue to be incredibly thankful for the support we receive from this amazing community. While the funding you provide makes all of this possible, it pales in comparison with the faith you have in us, the feedback you provide us, and the content you are making for everyone to enjoy. We are humbly grateful, and we cannot wait to see you again in New Britannia!

Before I go, I wanted to include an excerpt from my original post about our Early Release Schedule that is important to set the framework for our ongoing schedule:

As a crowd funded and crowd sourced project, we feel it is incredibly important that we provide our backers with information and access well before game studios would normally do so in a traditional development model. Traditionally, the players are given information and access only after the development team has already decided exactly how things will be done, and at times, even after it has already been implemented. By the time the public normally has access to the product, there is usually no time to meaningfully react to the public feedback.

Shroud of the Avatar is different than the traditional model, as we intend to offer our backers extremely early access to information and even the game itself. With that said, we also want to be very careful that we only provide access to portions of the game when they are ready for a wider range of feedback. If we can play it internally and we know it is not ready, then there is nothing to be gained by having a wider audience come to the same conclusion. In fact, it could be quite damaging to do so.

Our strategy over the next few months is to provide you with focused and iterative releases of content. Your feedback during these releases will be critical to making the final product the best it can be, and we appreciate that you are all so willing to devote your time to helping us. With each release, we will have specific tests we will ask you all to make. As we get closer, we will send instructions on how to download, install, report bugs, etc. After each release we will review the results and reevaluate the plan including the duration of availability of each release. Please note that game data will be wiped periodically during early access.

It is important to note that all dates, durations, and deliverables are subject to change.

Sincerely,
Starr Long
Executive Producer
Shroud of the Avatar