I have been such a fan of Richard Garriot over the years. From reading his life story in the Complete Book of Ultima several times, to diving deep into all of his classic Ultima’s. Even following his recent outer space adventures. I am such a fan, that I am one of the few who will defend BOTH Ultima VIII AND Ultima IX. I am his white knight. I am a fulltime, Garriott apologist. I am also an Ultima collector and a longtime member of the Ultima Dragons.

So why not take a stand and tell people this game is great? Why not stand up and tell people that it has a nice learning curve and there is something under the surface that is great? Why not say, Shroud of the Avatar is a solid piece of work?

Because I would be lying...

This game should have either been made as an open-ended single player Ultima 7-like deep, Skyrim-like rich RPG, with lots of DLC, or been made as close to Ultima Online as you can get. But trying to split the difference and please everyone is a mistake. Things end up suffering. I cannot and will not believe that Starr and Garriott with all things (and money) being equal, that this is their true vision. I want to play a game that they want to make for themselves, not a game that they are making for the masses. Some of the best pieces of music, art, movies and entertainment have come from talented individuals who made something out of pure selfishness; they made something THEY wanted to see. Ultima IV was a great example of total creativity. But here we have a game that is single player offline, single player online, multiplayer online, and….deep breath, etc, etc.

With login music thats sounds like something you would hear at cheesy renaissance faire, to annoying overworld map music of the same woman moaning over and over again I can't believe I had to turn this music off completely. The landscapes are uninteresting, and feel plain. The towns feel completely uninspired and the NPCs are lifeless and have nothing interesting to say. The performance is abysmal, as with a high end machine you will get nothing better than 25 to 30fps if you are lucky in a large city., which is completely unacceptable. The choice for a Unity engine was most definitely a poor one here.

Shroud tries to stick to it roots, and sacrifices gameplay. Why inherit the Ultima typing/keyword style conversation system inside an MMO chat window? It feels..off. An NPC portrait with text would have been 100 times better. The combat is as clunky as I have ever seen. This combat feels like a game from 1998. I do think the "deck" system idea has some potential however. it was nice to see fresh ideas as far as that goes. I will admit the crafting system does have some depth but there are so many annoying things such as your character walking slowly and doing a circle before he gathers something, because you can only mine that ore from the right side insiead of the left side.

What I do not understand is how or why this game was not only a Kickstarter game, but also why from the outset, it relied on and more importantly has ENABLED whales. As in, good luck getting any type of nice sized in game home without shelling out a lot of real world cash. For those of you who don’t know the term, “whales” represent approximately 2% of a games population that spends a ridiculous amount of money (hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars) per month. I will not insult whales; after all, some of them keep some games afloat! What I will complain about here, is the nasty 5 letter word which all of this encompasses…”greed”. Garriott is one of the 10 wealthiest game designers in the world whose outer space vacation cost him a cool 30 million dollars. Does this strike you as someone who could use or even need a Kickstarter campaign to get the funds for his game off the ground? You see, he has already made money off of Shroud of the Avatar. There is less urgency now to deliver a good "Ultima worthy" product. Garriott is not working out of his closet anymore designing Ultima IV on an Apple computer. He is the last developer on the planet who needs a kickstarter campaign.

I am disapointed, and will go back to playing my classic Ultima games, and keep telling myself that these classic older Ultima games were created by a younger Garriott, who was on a brilliant path, before he lost his way...

Despite all my tries, I couldn't play this game because it won't let me connect. Can't choose a valid character name when creating a new character. Server gives no response. I opened all the required UDP and TCP ports, restarted router, restarted PC, installed the standalone launcher (not through Steam), nothing worked. It's not a problem on my end because I play other MMOs without any issues, so it's clearly a problem with this game, which others posted about too in the past.

But the main reason why I don't recommend this is due to the fact its performance is horrible, atrocious, so badly optimized. If you search online, you will find posts by many others that said the exact same. Loading takes forever even on SSD.

I played on the Spectrum 48K, remember how long it took to load games there? 5 minutes or more. LOAD "". It's amazing that in 2023, Shroud of the Avatar manages to take longer than Spectrum 48K games in the 80s to load.

Take for instance their ridiculous requirement to open a bunch of TCP and UDP ports on the router. Why God why? Other MMOs don't ask to open any ports and work well. This is further proof this game's devs are doing something wrong.

SOTA already has low population but the issues I described above are sure ways to drive new players away, not welcome them. Stay away.

I played this game for over a year outside Steam. I liked it, even if buggy, grindy and you can fry eggs on your computer while playing it.

One day a player, that later turned to be the community manager's friend, started to harass me - e.g. telling other people made up things about me and convincing them to ban me from their cities. My girlfriend stood up for me and reported this to the support (this is how we learned who we have to deal with). Instead of helping us out, the CM started to pick on my girlfriend. She was going through a very hard time as her father was very ill (he died soon later) so she decided to start streaming on Twitch to have something nice to do for self-help. These streams were very popular since their inception, so she wished to join the streaming program (she didn't want anything for herself, just streamer bundles for giveaways). Then the CM in question told her that her Twitch username is sexual (it was im_X_bite_me). Then they started to pick on her pet names, which she had since months, and spawned them even in front of the staff at events and there were never a problem. After she learned her father died, she quit the game and handed me her account (which is legal in this game), about a week later her account was banned. I wrote to the admins that this account is no longer her, but the CM said, "once we ban someone we do not unban" (delightful rule, you do not unban the account even if you banned the wrong person). None of us knows why the account was banned, the reason stated is completely ridiculous (we were told it is because she wrote on the forum that she was refused to enter the streamer program and was "harassing the moderators"). We shared this char for a long time (it was a mage, and it is also legal), so it had a lot of money and expensive items I bought, on it. I got punished because someone else fallen into disfavour. I will probably get banned for this review too. This is some North Korean style of moderation - you step on the Great Leader's toes - you will get punished along with your family members.

To make a long story short, the game has beautiful maps, tiny community and abusive staff, that treats paying customers (we both had subscriptions) like rubbish and the official server as their private estate, which creates a toxic environment. They can do what they want, and you cannot appeal to the admin because he will ignore you. The admin - Chris is a nice person, but he is known within the community as someone who escapes dealing with difficult stuff and denies that there are problems. Other people told me that if one expresses their dissatisfaction with the management on Twitch, even if in a polite manner, they get banned both from Twitch and game.

About the technical side - no matter how powerful setup you have, your computer will be frying up, and you will get low FPS, there are many bugs not fixed since years and that combat decks system is overly complicated.

prometeram muito, mais ficou nisso na promessa, ♥♥♥♥♥ de jogo

SOA was touted as the " spiritual successor" to Richard Garriott’s much beloved and deservedly embraced Ultima Online- a game which broke ground and pushed the envelope and became the first hugely popular onlne mulitplayer RPG.

Sadly, Shroud is an empty shadow of the creativity and excellent game design found in UO.

I backed the game heavily at Knight status, following Shroud every step of the way through it's design process.

The game's failings are mostly found in it's original conceptual ideas. Instead of imagining an elegant online RPG where players can meet and immerse themselves in a fantasy world, Shroud of the Avatar is laden with a clumsy, bulky GUI which actually tears the player from the world in a most noxious way.

In short, combat is clumsy and abstracted, with the game itself forcing the player away from ideas of magic and battling with weapons against enemies- instead, at critical moments oif combat, when any decent roleplayer ought to be worried about the life of his character, it's about numbers and abstraction.

This is probably due to the original game design being built for tablet/phone play, rather than a deeper design for the PC. This is a fatal flaw which the backers of the game pointed out endlessly during the early design process, which Garriott and company promised to fixed, but simply ignored.

Another terrible decision was to eliminate UO's delightfully realistic open world design by including instancing for dungeons and fighting areas. Enemies never, ever, feel real, because you can back out of the area, and the monsters simple don't exist.

In Ultima Online, the creatures would follow you out of a dungeon and chase you over hill and dale. If you teleported through a gate to town. they might very well follow you for a major fracas in the middle of the capital with people dying, guards charging, and chaotic, realistic mayhem ensuing.

Nothing of the sort ever happens in dull, dead Shroud of the Avatar.

It is a lifeless, pitiful, wholey generic game which mimics every other WOW clone.

The best thing about the game, sadly, is the kindly group of players who have followed RG aboard. These long time roleplayers, who loved the Ultima games and backed Shroud are a helpful, creative bunch who deserve better than this wretched vehicle they've bought into.

It's a shame and much more dissapointing than a Triple AAA game that is all spectacle with no content- because this game had the potential of such promise and hope for a return to a living, breathing world so many people came to love.

The game's initial conceptual designers had to know better, and ought to have tried, instead of wasting the time and money of fans, of the animators and background artists who did their best with armor, weapons, homes and various dungeons.

Instead, here is this heaving shamble of a poorly wrought game design, dressed in the costume of a vastly superior game of genius.

Pity.

I bought into this game April 4th 2013. Long before it was ever on Steam. The concept seemed good and I liked the direction the developers said the game was going. But as we all know what developers say and what they do are two totally different things. The developers have raised over 11 million dollars so far. The original kickstarter campaign asked for 1 million dollars. They raised 1.9 million dollars through kickstarter with 22.3K backers. And along the way they decided that they would make the game episodic. Five episodes. So eleven million dollars raised and 4 years later episode one isn't released. They have telethons a few times a year trying to raise more money. In one telethon Richard Garriot auctioned off a vial of blood for money. In another one the developers would dance and take shots of alcohol for money. And I am just talking about the ethics of the development of this game. The actual gameplay is by far the worst game I have ever spent $45 on. The combat is horrendous. The epic storyline is a joke. And don't even get me started on the cash shop. You can buy a tobacco pipe in-game for $10. Oh but it is only cosmetic...what about the housing in this game. You literally need to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars to buy a land deed. Then buy the actual house. Then on top of that you have to pay the land taxes on the land which I think you can only buy with real money. And you don't just pay the taxes once my friends. This game had alot of promise. But somewhere along the way the developers decided that making money was more important than making a game people would love to play. I havent played this game in at least two years. But every month I get something in my e-mail from Portalarium about items I can get right now as an exclusive in the cash shop. A few months ago they sent me something saying I could buy a spaceship house...but only if I payed now. If you have ever looked at this game ask yourself where does a spaceship fit into this game? The developers basically decided to concentrate on the cash shop and abandon the actual game. They spend so much money on developing items for the cash shop they forgot about the game they sat out to make. If you are reading this review do yourself a favor and save your money because this game is going nowhere.

Edit: They are having another telethon March 9th to beg for more money.

Edit 2: This is a video the developers don't want you to see. It is them talking about throwing together Shroud of the Avatar in 45 days to get on kickstarter to keep their company from going bankrupt. Skip to the 41 minute mark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwdesp4g-KU

Edit 3: Here is a good example of their greed. They get something from Unity asset store for free and sell it for $20-$50.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/are-people-here-really-ok-with-this-sort-of-thing.81211/#post-764465

Edit 4: We estimate reaching a Beta version with all features and content sometime in late 2017. All features and plans listed here are subject to change. We may modify, add or remove features as we see fit during the development process.

So after four and a half years they are gonna reach beta. This is after on their official forums they said they wouldn't be using the terms "alpha" "beta" anymore just the early access title.

Edit 5: They are asking for more money. A minimum of 500K dollars on SeedInvest. With the hopes that they can get 2 milion. https://www.seedinvest.com/portalarium/series.b According to these documents Portalarium has spent 18 million on this game lol. So where did all the money go? It also states that Portalarium has about 550K dollars left and their monthly expenses are about half that. So how long before they are bankrupt?

One of the most shockingly dishonest Kickstarters ever has resulted in one of the most expensive Free to Play games yet seen, whose "Launch" attempt failed to expand it's tiny but excessively toxic community, who 6 YEARS LATER are still stalking and harassing critics on Reddit, whilst soon the whole horrendous project will rightfully keel over dead.

UPDATE: Portalarium have been dissolved, sold all the intellectual property to one of their Devs, Chris Spears under the guise of "Catnipgames"; any final hopes of a"Lord British" game have now eternally left the building, along with the Garriott himself and the rest of the developers. All SeedInvest shares have been closed at $0, although Spears lies directly and claims the SeedInvest is still open. (See comments below.)

Said developer actively supported the stalking and harassment of critics; when taken to Arbitration Court over their malicious actions, Portalarium didn't even dare turn up to defend what they'd done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfzXS-H5SzM&t

Since the 4th September 2018 then, despite being ordered to remove any reference to the scheme from their EULA, and knowing I had the legal paperwork, Portalarium have tried to pretend this never happened and haven't updated their EULA to show how unprotected the backers really are. They are liars to the last.

Meanwhile MassivelyOP themselves are fully aware I have the Arbitration Court documents, but were censoring any attempt to warn backers of this. At least that is until the now-owner of Shroud turned up and abused the staff for daring to be critical; and that hilariously happened because one of the most disgusting RMTs tried to manipulate the coverage again... Start here for the context;

https://old.reddit.com/r/shroudoftheavatar_raw/comments/dn0zbe/the_schadenfruede_for_vlad_is_delicious/

Then go to the MOP article and remember that the developer having a temper tantrum in comments, and having to have it spelt out IN DETAIL just how much previously MOP had sucked up to Portalarium, is the same one who is now entirely responsible for running and developing the game.

Now look carefully at the "Hours Played" on the postive reviews. It's easy enough to do; every time the game dips back into Mostly Negative on Steam a few of them will turn up again; The vast majority are either long term backers, with thousands of hours, running Real Money businesses who keep updating their reviews to look new and recent...

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/steam-reviews-needs-some-love.138035/page-2#post-1

... or are under 2 hours played, on accounts with no games, sockpuppets of same RMTS trying to make the game look popular.

But ACTUAL player numbers? Well, why not check Steam Charts and see for yourself?

https://steamcharts.com/app/326160

Here is what you need to know about the game itself;

* The Kickstarter was just an attempt to avoid bankruptcy for Portalarium, but they never had any intention of building the Buy To Own, no microtransactions, plot driven game described there; instead they've created a Real Money Trading MMO, where prices can go up to $30,000 for Golden Castles.

* It is not an "Indy" game now; they've taken somewhere north of $30m in total funding, but good luck tracing that as Portalarium have self-imploded to hide their records.

* The game was to all intents and purposes already launched in July 2016 when they stopped wiping the server, allowed the placing of property, and encouraged RMT to begin.

* There is a Premium Currency and Monthly Subscriptions service too.

* Everything is legal to sell via their forums, including XP farming.

* You CANNOT own property without the Real Money only Lot Deed to place it. There are RMTs who hold those deeds who will attempt to deceive you and say "anything can be bought in game for gold." This is only true for the occasional RMT who can quickly sell the gold itself, although most are now dumping stock in a panic to get out before the game implodes. As it dies, they're taking Cash Only.

* The same goes for the Player Owned Towns. There's no way to get them in game. They were limited time offer, Add On Store only, going from $750 to $6000.

* When those sold out, Portalarium switched to "Player Dungeons" and sold even more deco for that in the Store. Right now, functionality of said "Dungeons" is laughable to say the least. But by god you can sure spend real money on them...

* Because the sheer scale of cash gouging was putting people off, Portalarium openly admitted they were moving it all in game to hide it from new players;

"With that change we feel that having all of the store items visible on the website at all times is an inaccurate representation of what the game offers players and incorrectly infers that everything must be purchased to play."

Don't be fooled; it's not "everything", but it IS hundreds, and hundreds of items going up to THOUSANDS of dollars that form the only real content in game.

* The game launched with single player just a clone of the MMO, minus the online people's housing. The vast majority of NPC cities aren't even finished, and it's not planned to look at it again until later in the year. The game will likely be dead long before then.

* They were also quietly dropped by their European partner, Travian, after they discovered the claimed income from players was an absolute lie

* Also be aware that because the game is built almost entirely around RMT, the sheer amount of items in people's homes cripples performance. Even on a Solid State Drive it's rough, but a Hard Drive can be almost unplayable.

* AND THIS IS THE BIG ONE:

You need to know that the community is unbelievably toxic. Because many of them are using Shroud as a real life business, they will stop at nothing to deceive future backers (and thus try and make sales to them) and will outright stalk and harass critics because you're getting in the way of their money making.

It's hard to express how disgusting the behaviour is; The main RMT above posted under his real name at MassivelyOP and then tried to forge replying to that as "doxxing" him, in order to try and ban any critical commentators. The same RMT organises review bombing any coverage of Shroud to hide how disliked it is. They've openly organised using proxies to stuff polls in favour of Shroud. It's the most dishonest, despicable behaviour I've ever seen online.

Before that, they've even started organising to try and manipulate where Shroud appears on the Google rankings;

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-of-shroud-of-the-avatar.113281/

Meanwhile, the sociopath who threatened to kill my family is openly bragging on Portalarium's forums that no one can touch him as he harasses people, because he knows Portalarium are actively supporting him...

https://www.reddit.com/r/shroudoftheavatar_raw/comments/866byc/so_my_experiences_trying_to_get_berek_to_deal/

Click the images in the above thread to see how blatant it is.

And this is just a QUICK recap of SOME of the issues with Shroud! The game is riddled with terrible decisions. Just one week before "Launch", they completely overhauled Skills design to introduce Specialisation... after 4 years of selling people on unlimited power, and they're still scrabbling around desperately trying to work out what core features of the game are supposed to be!

But always, ALWAYS in the background will be more grasping for more money, and horrendous toxic community behaviour if ever dare wonder where the game you backed at Kickstarter went.

Stay far, far away from Shroud of the Avatar.

Don't believe me? Fine, but go for the Free Trial FIRST.

What ever you do, don't waste your money on this. I, no doubt like the vast majority of missing backers, regret ever spending mine on this moral, and miserable disaster that urinates all over the legacy of Ultima.

After more than 3 years playing this game, I'm finally able to do it justice with a review on Steam.

First of all, this isn't a proper MMORPG. The game is instanced which means you're mostly on your own. The world feels empty, lonely and unfinished. The player base is very thin right now, even the party finder "Look For Group" window is empty most of the time. Guilds are mostly empty too. If you want company, you'll need to find a good guild (good luck with that as there's no in-game mechanic to find guilds looking for new members) or try your luck in the Universe chat which isn't as busy as one would expect for an MMO.

Now I'll list some aspects that IMO are getting worse over time and made me NOT RECOMMEND this game.

1) PVP:

In the early stages of the game there was a thriving PVP community (if you look for SotA PVP on Youtube you'll find years old content). Then the devs kept doing questionable changes and listening to "some" players. Now there is NO PVP. Only a few kills/deaths per week in the whole server. Mainly friends sparring and very rare / random encounters between PVPers. People flagged for PVP (you can avoid PVP entirely by not flagging) usually avoid fighting. They do it only to get passive bonus XP.
There is no point in PVPing, there's no loot, no penalty for dying, no prize for killing, no official PVP events from the devs.
The fights usually take less than 1 minute, a quick buttom mash ends all battles for good or for bad. There's one or two PVP meta builds that will wreck every other build in the game.
If you're able to kill consistently the "top PVPers" in the game, you're very likely to be stalked and ganked by them, AFK killed, etc. The game has a paid item that can track other players once a day. The top PVPers have like 10 of these items and will track you to get their "revenge". Griefing is the core of this game's PVP.

If you like PVP, stay away from this game.

2) Parasitic Features:

There are a LOT of features that were added for the sake of being added. There is a LOT of unfinished content that is just "there". Some players will say it's up to you to "find your own adventure in Novia".

Entire scenes that are in the game for years and have zero lore connection. Some are just a generic rocky landscape with generic monsters waiting to be killed. No quest, no story, no reason for the monsters to be there..
Some are interconnected dungeons with high level mobs, dragons, mixed with an entire underground base of elves, with a secret passage to sewers where the skeleton of a giant pirate dwells, magically connected to an underground maze filled with satyrs, connected to a series of dark tunnels where the most dangerous enemies wait to prey on you (slimes, obviously), the tunnels lead to an exit in a very low level scene with some elves in the woods. Makes zero sense, and there's no tie-in to the game. The whole dungeon is just "there". Like one day the dev got some prefabs and props and started doing some random stuff that looked cool and released a couple of dungeons.
Another VERY common parasitic feature is new skills. There is one particular skill that is in the game for like 2 years now and it does NOTHING. I really mean it, there is a skill that you can spend XP on it to level, and it does NOTHING. For that long! Not to mention the Subterfuge tree, which is mostly useless and has the Pickpocketing skill that you can't even level, let alone make it work properly.

3) Crafting:

Gear crafting is 100% reliant on RNG. No matter how good or "leveled" you are. RNG can't be bypassed. 95% of the gear you produce is junk, sell it to NPCs (as the player base is so small, there isn't much demand for sub-par items).
There is only a handful of good builds, which means there is only a handful of meta crafted items. If you think you're free to use any item or combination of gear and skills you want, you're mistaken. You are pretty much forced to craft/use the best in slot choices. All the other choices are worthless. Short and Long Bows, for example, will always be worse than their Crossbow counterpart, thus becoming useless and pointless.

4) Overall Balance:

As already stated, there are only a handful of really useful builds. All of them are high survivability + high damage output. There is no such thing as a healer in this game. Nobody plays the healer because it's useless. Magic in general is being made useless lately by devs too, don't know why but they made a lot of creatures almost immune to magic, greatly limiting a mage's adventuring diversity. Physical damage folks have a better time in general. Especially heavy armored dual spear users and crossbowmen. Everybody is required to be a bard. Dedicated bards aren't a thing because you can and will be your own bard while still doing damage with your weapons. There is no point in not using bard songs.
"Balance Passes" are done, as far as I'm aware, based on player feedback. This sounds like a good thing, but in reality devs will listen to a handful of "trusted" players (*). These trusted players are generally very positive about the game and obviously won't ask for their own build to get nerfed.
Note (*): this was openly stated on stream in multiple occasions by the devs themselves.

5) Story and Lore:

I see a lot of Ultima old timers saying they love the game's plot. This is not my case though. For me it's a cliché ridden story that's so fragmented and not-expertly-implemented (i.e. quests will often bug on you), that I just GAVE UP and used a quick guide to get rid of the main storyline quest.
Lore throughout the game is forgetable at best. As already mentioned, the world doesn't feel connected to the lore in any shape or form. Adventuring zones are just "there" and even the most impressive architecture found has nearly no explanation of why or what is that. NPCs are mostly the generic "villager" type that can't respond to any kind of interaction. The text input dialogue with NPCs doesn't work outside exact keywords. Type anything other than precise keywprds, and you get a "I don't understand" response. Not to mention every NPC looks almost the same.

6) Community and Management:

I've met a lot of nice people in there, but too many are leaving in the past year or so. In general, those strong enough to endure start defending the game and devs decisions at all costs. This part of the community start to respond to criticism to the game with personal attacks. Then, enter the Management. The Management seem to be living in an echo chamber, listening only to praise and nothing else. The devs were praised by the community even when they had a 15 day outage + 30 day rollback due to a mistake.
If you decide to start playing this game, beware when voicing your opinions, especially if you disagree with devs.

What about the future?

The devs are adding content at slow pace, and IMO it's not the kind of content the game needs. Let me explain: they're adding new scenes and towns. The existing ones are already EMPTY, no one playing on them. More zones means more thinly spread community, which does more harm than good to the game. Not to mention that every new scene added looks and plays almost the same as the previous, with very minor aesthetic changes.
For all the reasons above mentioned, I believe the game approaches its final days faster than it should.

Going through both the positive and negative reviews, I thought my play time of just under 16 hours would be insufficient to justify a review of any length. Surprise surprise, there's tons of useless reviews from people with half or less of that, padding out the numbers.

I didn't read two thousand of each to see how much of either positive or negative is bupkis, but flipping through the "positive" reviews is weirdly like wandering a desert. I don't recall seeing a single person talking about their favorite gameplay styles or experiences... but I DID see a lot of "why is this not on the front page 24/7?!" sarcasm, as well as stuff that might as well have been copied from the original Kickstarter sales pitch. When it came to negative reviews, at least those which went further than "man this sucks" gave reasons for their dissatisfaction, whether it was complaints about lack of content, or simplistic combat mechanics, or janky physics, or the overall lack of development focus, or what have you.

Here's my experience: NOTHING IN THIS GAME REMINDS ME OF ANY ULTIMA GAMES.

Not gameplay, not lore, not roleplaying... there's just nothing here to bite into. It's why I stopped playing after less than 16 hours, despite being an OG Ultima fanboy going back to the days of playing on my local library's Apple IIe back in the 1980s.

If I start a new game of Ultima IV right now, I will find myself immersed in a story driven by characters with actual motives, in a world where magic has value and purpose, and there's unmistakable differences between party members such as Iolo the Bard and Shamino the Ranger. NPCs have their own lives to lead, jobs to do, even personal relationships with other NPCs. The world feels alive, filled with places to go, things to do, and reasons to do them.

In Shroud of the Avatar, all of that is dead and gone. It's like the name is a joke, and the punchline is that SotA is Ultima's burial shroud.

Had someone told me that a fan cobbled this together over the course of ten years, with plenty of passion but no actual focus and no cash, and that it was never intended to connect to the official games in any way, I would have believed you.

But Richard Garriott put his own name on the project, and in many ways, Shroud of the Avatar is a lot like Richard's earliest games like Alakabeth, experiments never really meant to be sold to anyone. You ran around, did stuff, fought things, la de dah. The sad part here is that SotA isn't as structured, let alone as complete, as Ultima I was. I almost don't want to even call SotA an "alpha still in testing", since there are many games on Steam which remain in Alpha but have far more content, polish and functionality.

It just seems to me that Richard gave up almost from the outset, perhaps tossing whatever notes he had slapped together by that point and throwing them at a dev team for whom he otherwise provides no direction. I'm told he's done stuff like briefly attend his own online birthday parties, and that's about it. None of the light and soul which infused the games that made Richard a literal living legend is on display here; it is not even a husk, as that which is a husk must once have contained life. It is a sputtering, incomplete, and directionless marionette.

I'm sure there are people who play and enjoy this game legitimately. I just haven't been able to find any of their reviews here telling me WHY and HOW.

I have been playing this game since long before it was offered on Steam. I have thousands of hours and had thousands of dollars invested in this game. (My main account was never linked to steam, so steam does not reflect all the hours I have played this game.)

Early on it was wonderful, the community was warm and welcoming, all of us were full of hope for the wonderful game we were helping to create. We played, offered help to new players, set up and attended events that enriched the world, found and reported bugs, offered feedback (most of it constructive), made lasting freindships, and generally had a lovely time.

But slowly things began to change as the feedback we were offering (especially concerning combat) became less and less listened to by the devs. As we were listened to less we became a bit more strident and that spiraled downward into a situation where we were talking in frustration because the devs weren't listening at all -- until we have the situation today, where the mildest disagreements can get your account banned from the forums all together.

The state of the game suffered when they stopped listening to the folks who had invested so much money, time and effort into the game (with the sole purpose of making it the best game it could be). It has devolved from something that could have been wonderful fun into a horrible grind where resource gathering is mind-numbingly boring, combat mechanics are clunky, the experience gain system is disheartening, and while the community gives the appearance of being friendly, will turn on you in a moment if you voice the least criticism.

I have put off saying all this because I still had hope that the game could be turned around, but I have finally realized that it will never happen. The recent 'downsizing' of fully HALF the devs/staff has shown most clearly that this game is now limping along toward the final death. They may possibly be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat with a financial partner who is willing to bail it out and completely revamp the things that are broken, but I believe that likelihood is remote.

So not only can I absolutely not recommend this game to anyone, I would go so far as to offer a warning, that this game is most definitely not worth puting your money into.