Shroud of the Avatar: State of the Game and Roadmap for 2023

Happy New Year and welcome to 2023! This past year has certainly been a roller coaster for many of us, and Shroud of the Avatar (SotA) is looking forward to a much better new year.

In 2022, we added lots of Episode 2 content, including Grusk, Grusk Factory, Vikland, and Vikland’s Obsidian Valley adventure areas. We’ve also made many improvements, including offering many new items in our in-game store, removing the Heritage (“account bound”) flag from all store items, and adding a new Emote Hotbar to the UI. On our website, we’ve restored our “Make a Difference” Store—20% of any purchase from our website charity store will be donated to the charity associated with each category. Shroud of the Avatar supports Water.org, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Breast Cancer, Movember, Children's Miracle Network of Hospitals, and Doctors Without Borders. Our “Make a Difference” Store can be found here.

With late September’s Release 106 update, we experienced our first ever major outage and data loss issues. In the days that followed, we battled tirelessly to avoid a rollback but ultimately had to revert our database to the start of the previous release. This was our first major rollback event and the longest service outage since the Shroud of the Avatar server’s data became persistent prior to our official launch. We’d like to thank our community again for being so supportive and understanding during that trying time. Following this R106 event, we audited our procedures and implemented critical changes, including increased retention times, and are migrating our servers to better hardware with newer technologies to improve resilience and redundancy. We will continue implementing these and additional improvements into the new year.

Moving into 2023, we continue working towards migrating SotA to Unity 2021. This update will keep us within Unity’s supported life cycle and ensure we can properly integrate their bug fixes, feature improvements, and tools. In particular, we’re looking forward to several changes in Unity 2021 that should allow for some interesting improvements to our game world over time (such as the ability to paint holes in terrain).

As we’ve done for the past nine years, we’ll continue to release content updates and bug fixes on a monthly schedule, in addition to providing major new content on a quarterly basis. Also, quality-of-life improvements may be added to the game throughout the year independent of the normal schedule.

Over the past few months, we’ve been analyzing data from SotA’s starter areas. Throughout the next year, we’ll be using the information gathered from that research to make incremental improvements to those same areas. Relatedly, we intend to add small tutorial scenes outside of the starter areas that will help players better understand certain game mechanics (see feature listing below).

Some of you may remember Scottie, our legendary artist, and be happy to know he’s returning to the fold during Q1. He’ll be working on adding new houses, fixing existing houses, and maybe even creating some cool, new items throughout the year!

Below are a few general categories of upcoming additions coming to Shroud of the Avatar in 2023. This is not a complete list, but rather a list of features we are committing to complete before 2023 comes to a close. Each feature has a targeted quarter for completion and we will provide quarterly updates as to the status as well as any relevant changes or delays.

• Episode 2 (Ongoing)
  Creating new adventure scenes, enemies and custom battles, quests, puzzles, and other activities for Episode 2.
  
  
• In Game Guide (Q4)
  A "codex" of knowledge similar to the journal, allowing players to "unlock" information related to game mechanics, locations, critical characters, and other topics. Initially will include a few topics, but more will be added with future releases.
  
  
• Small Teaching Scenes (Q4)
  Several small, private scenes will come into the game where players can learn about a particular system (e.g. housing, deck building, etc.). Access would be from popular NPC Towns, at-will, and repeatable. Scene scope and themes would vary depending on the lesson, but could be similar to a small Isle of Storms or simple encounter.
  
  
• Treasure Map System [Phase I] (Q2)
  Treasure maps will be found in the world as loot or on NPCs, which will depict a location where Treasure can be found. Avatars will use the maps to discover the location in various scenes where they will dig up treasures that are defended by enemies. After the initial implementation, follow-up updates will introduce more methods and avenues of play. The additional phases target dates will be determined once the base system is operational.
  
  
• “In Game Events” menu item (Q4)
  This new icon will be part of the HUD menu (top-right of the screen) and will contain relevant information, such as when Double XP is active, Game Calendar Events, and more!
  
  
• Terrain Flattening Prototype (Q4)
  This new Player-Owned Town feature will allow houses and special governor placeable objects to flatten terrain in an area. However, the degree of terrain variation will still have limitations.
  
  
• House "Free Placement" on lots (Q3)
  Currently, one house can be placed per lot, and that house appears in the center of the lot. The initial implementation of Free Placement will allow most Row and Village houses to be placed anywhere on all lot sizes that will fit them. This new feature may also allow multiple houses within the same lot (if the lot is large enough).
  
  
• Deed updates (POT Water and Deco counts) (Q2)
  We will review availability and decoration/lighting counts for all in-game deeds and make appropriate changes. We’ll audit the data in the initial phase, and in additional phases we’ll make adjustments adding additional deeds to the upgrade paths, as well as adjust deco/light counts.

We’re committing ourselves to be better communicators for you. The official location to get news and game updates will continue to be the “Announcements” section of our official forum (found in the community menu of our website). We’ll share updates using Twitter, our website’s “All Updates” section, and the announcements channel in our official Discord channel. You’ll be able to subscribe to these updates via the forums, RSS, and Discord (if you have a discord server where the announcement can be sent).

Changes are being made to the structure of our official forums to assist in our communication improvements:

• The TOS Rules will be re-written to be easier to follow. We’ll continue to post updates in the locked thread when the TOS is adjusted.
  
  
• The “Player Guilds and Groups” forum section will be restructured to allow guilds to maintain an advertisement thread, allowing a “bump” no more than once every seven days. (The catch-all thread will be eliminated in place of individual threads).
  
  
• The “Wishlist Requests” forum section will be restructured:
  
  1. The catch-all thread will be retired (locked). Instead, each new idea will have its own thread, allowing replies from the community for each respective idea. Some wishlist ideas may be selected by the SotA developers to be researched. A selected idea will have their Jira number posted in its thread and the thread will be closed to further comment. (Note: The selection of a Wishlist item is not a guarantee that the idea will be implemented.)
     
  2. Implemented and outdated wishlist ideas will have their threads moved into an archive subsection and remain visible to players.
     
  3. The “Decoration Wishlist - Items Already In-game” thread will remain, although a developer post will be added to better explain how to make item requests (e.g. addition of item screenshot, “/loc” coordinates, etc).

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• “AskADev” questions will still be answered whenever possible on our Livestreams, but we’ll also post answers to some of the most important, pressing, or recurring questions in an “AskADev Answers” thread in the “Announcements” section of our forum.
  
  
• Official Livestreams at twitch.tv/shroudoftheavatar will each have a summary post after the stream concludes, located in the “Announcements” section of our forums.

Throughout 2023, we’ll provide updates on our roadmap progress during our official Twitch livestreams—normally held on the day after the release is published—and in our official announcements. In fact, we’ll discuss plans shared in this document in this upcoming Friday’s livestream. Be sure to join in on our official Twitch Channel for more information and our infamous “prizening” giveaways!

As we look to the future of 2023 and beyond, our team will strive to create content that is captivating and beautiful, add new features, improve the UI, keep game balance as one of our highest priorities, and continue squashing bugs regardless of how old they are. We’ve shared some broad ideas here, but we’ve got more plans in the works with details that will be shared throughout the year.

We hope that our community is as excited about our future as we are!

— The Shroud of the Avatar Team​