The resolution of this first video of Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is so bad that I thought I'd time-traveled back to the 90s. However deductive reasoning on my part eliminated that notion quickly enough: I wasn't wearing an X-Files t-shirt, and I wasn't pining over [name redacted], [name redacted], [really, Craig?], nor Gillian Anderson (a message to lank-haired teenage me: you'll eventually live your lifelong ambition of traveling, working in the games industry, and squeezing a bit of any girl. Please, get a haircut). No, it's just low-res. It's part of an hour-long presentation Garriott and his team gave at RTX 13, talking about his adventure in crowd-funding, the many eras of multiplayer games, before finally showing off early footage. Video is below.
If you're impatient, you can skip to 22 mins in, but about 8 mins in he gets onto the infrastructure of modern multiplayer, which I think is kind of interesting. It's something a lot of these new crowd-funded games are considering. Garriott's proposal: everyone together on one shard, but the game will continually try and group friends together. He calls this "re-sharding". This is incredibly early footage, only three months in, and shows off some crafting, combat, and the two-scale map reminiscent of early Ultima games. More importantly, it shows off the cape physics.
RTX 2013 Richard Garriott SotA Demo Watch on YouTube
Mmmm, flappy. So backers, do you think what you're seeing is a step in the right direction?
