Portalarium announced that a new build of Shroud of the Avatar is currently available to all backers. According to the team, players will be able to interact with other players in Shroud’s virtual world via several social systems including chat and emotes. These are some of the latest features to be unveiled as the team continues to deliver new early release content to backers of the crowd funded project every single month.
Portalarium’s creative director and co-founder Richard Garriott, said:
“It’s been almost a year since we first announced Shroud of the Avatar and started our Kickstarter launch. In the last eight weeks we’ve asked our backers to enter the world so they can experience our progress first hand. The momentum is building and now we have a chance to see how our multiplayer functionality stands up to the test. These short three to four day tests allow us to see how we are doing and to close the loop with our fans so we can make the game they want and we want.”
Among the other new features in this early release is the addition of an “add friend” menu that appears when players touch the “F” key. Also there will be a new village to explore, Braemar, which in addition to the previously unveiled Owls Head and Kingsport, provides a virtual world that is growing and will continue to expand with each successive release in 2014.
There is also improved crafting functionality in Release 3 as well as access to merchants which should give players who like to create their own items a chance to craft and sell to their heart’s content. Release 3 also includes several songs created by the community via The Bards of Poets’ Circle, a player run guild.
Shroud of the Avatar is a multiplayer fantasy RPG for the PC that is the spiritual successor to Richard Garriott’s previous works in the genre. It is expected to launch at the end of 2014. It is a crowd funded and crowd sourced game built in Unity that has raised more than $3.2 million from backers to date.
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John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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