Shroud of the Avatar – Update of the Avatar #297

by GolemDragon · September 17, 2018

Greetings friends! As I continue to work on a longer article about Shroud of the Avatar, here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Dallas No Longer at Portalarium?
Collector’s Boxes Shipping Phase 2
Release 57 Livestream: Dungeon Themed (current progress)

Dallas No Longer at Portalarium?

If you are like me, you have had a mixture of good and bad experiences when dealing with the Shroud of the Avatar dev team. One off the primary members of the Portalarium team starting back even before the Kickstarter was Dallas Snell. If you have had the pleasure to see him on any of the SotA streams as well as interact with him either via email or DM, or even in-person, you know how much of a stand up guy he really was. He was not only a co-founder of Portalarium along with Richard Garriott and Fred Schmidt, but he was also Director,Chairman,Officer (on the SEC documents in regards to Portalarium) , as well as the COO, Chief Operations Officer, of Portalarium for many years. In my experiences with Dallas, I was always able to get an efficient and honest answer from him. He was kind, courteous, and someone whom I would credit as one of the major reasons Shroud of the Avatar survived to even reach a launch date.

Recently, it was brought to my attention that Dallas Snell updated his Linkdin profile and he has an end date for his time as COO of Portalarium. After some of us started to ask questions, even a forum post about this made it’s way onto the SotA Forums. No confirmation on if Dallas retired, quit, or was laid off. However it was nice to see others show him some love. As a co-founder and being listed as a principal, etc. I am sure Dallas still has some involvement with Portalarium as a company, but in a Board of Directors manner only. I am certain my friends here at Ultima Codex join me in wishing him the best of luck in his future.

Collector’s Boxes Shipping Phase 2 (and printed book update)

As of a fewweeks ago over 3000 Collector’s Boxes shipped out to eligible backers (Explorer level and above) who supported Portlarium during the initial Kickstarter campaign or through the website prior to January 4, 2016! However, Portalarium confirmed that over 700 have yet to receive their boxes. Theyexpect all of these initial 4000 boxes, or what we have been calling internally, Phase 1, to arrive no later than September 21, 2018.

Please make sure that your Shipping address info is correct in your Shroud of the Avatar profile on their website. If you still don’t get your box by September 21, 2018 then you can attempt to contact them via the support@portalarium.com before October 19, 2018 and they will do their best to get you your Collector’s Box in what they are calling their “Phase 2 shipment” which they hope to begin shipping in Q4 of 2018.

Printed Book: As many of backers noted, at the Patron (and above) pledge level, one of the rewards is a printed version of the prequel novel “Blade of the Avatar” (aka “Sword of Midras”). However none of us have received them yet. The dev’s original plan was to get copies of the book from the book publisher for distribution but they claim they could not work out an equitable deal with them and were not happy with how they laid out the illustrations in the book. Starr Long stated that the publisher, Instead of using the Denis Loubet illustrations at the beginning of each chapter (as they were designed), they instead put them all lumped together at the beginning of each section of the book. I wonder if management at Portalarium failed to properly review the proof copy before the book originally was published. The devs have decided to self publish, or in this case, print the book themselves. They will then ship them to us directly (or indirectly in the case of the signed versions, which hopefully isn’t just a sticker slapped onto it). This will take some extra time obviously as one of the artists remaining at Portlarium will have to create a new layout for the book. I am sure Starr or one of the dev team members will provide an update as soon as they have more information.

Release 57 Livestream: Dungeon Themed (current progress)

The Release 57 Livestream was September 7! Devs had deep dives about Fishing (which is expanding in upcoming releases) and Player Made Dungeons which are previewing in Release 57 and will go live as soon as Q4!