Greetings, citizens of New Britannia! We are finally ready to discuss our plans for the next few months! While this has been covered in blogs, posts, and streams, it has never been put in the more formal announcement spot… until now!
Huge changes are coming to Shroud of the Avatar. For the past 60 days, I have been working furiously to transform Shroud of the Avatar into something much closer to what we envisioned from the start. The full list of new features is too long to include here (literally 2,000+ items), but the short version is:
- Moved from Unity 2018.4 (eight years old) to Unity 6.5
- Massive performance pass to remove runtime allocations and hitching, plus shader cleanup to reduce GPU load and a texture and asset cleanup
- Switched from Mono to the higher-performance IL2CPP system
- All NPCs speak their lines with unique voices
- Full localization for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Mandarin, and Japanese
- Load time optimizations
- Rebalancing of most major systems and classes
- Server rebuilt from the ground up on Linux using a new, custom networking layer for increased responsiveness
- Server refactored so almost all features can be changed on the fly (no more patches for PoT work!)
- New patching client and server that are faster and no longer rely on the torrent-like technology blocked by many networks
- Return to the Isle of Storms as the starting location
- 221 windows and dialogs rebuilt from scratch to support scaling, skinning, customization, and other new features
- Dozens of exploits fixed
- Complete AI refactor to make creatures more formidable without increasing their stats at all
- New logic for control points (testable in early form in East Reach Gap now)
- Player-spoken lines through the catchphrase system
- Vastly improved vendor search, including global search
- Dozens of improvements and fixes to the player deco and crafting systems
- More than 1,300 achievements and a brand-new achievement system
- Hundreds of other major features and changes
In short, the new client and server are both dramatically faster and better, load times are shorter, and it all runs largely hitch-free.
So if you haven’t been keeping up with our progress, I know what you’re asking: “What decade is this going live in?” Well, the answer is this one — in approximately five weeks. Curious what it looks like? Go see for yourself by grabbing the patcher and using your existing Shroud login. This won’t currently work for players who launch through Steam, but we expect to have that resolved in the next two weeks.
Windows Client patcher:
https://patch.catnipgames.net/sota-win/launcher/ChaosShard-latest.exe
Linux Client patcher:
https://patch.catnipgames.net/sota-linux/launcher/ChaosShard-latest.tar.gz
Mac Client patcher:
https://patch.catnipgames.net/sota-osx/launcher/ChaosShard-latest.app.zip
Our target dates are currently:
- Open testing windows: Starting now, with scheduled periods of open access to the Chaos Shard — expect character wipes.
- Chaos launch: October 1, the official launch of the Chaos Shard, with all players connecting to the new server. The old server will stay up for emergencies, but logins will be disabled by default.
- Official relaunch of Shroud, with a reacquisition campaign and paid ads: when it’s ready! (Possibly in time for the holidays.)
There is definitely a chance this slips slightly, but progress so far looks great for that October 1 date. If you want to follow along with the 100+ changes going in every day, you can read about them here: https://catnipgames.net/
New topic: DRAGON CON! Richard Garriott and Starr Long will be joining me at Dragon Con, September 3–7, in Atlanta, Georgia. We’ll be talking about Shroud of the Avatar, advancements in game development technology, and Richard’s plans for future games. Join us in person and get a free Shroud T-shirt, or one promoting Richard’s planned next project!
See you guys in game and thanks for sticking around!
– Chris “Atos” Spears