Die Shard: First Footage Of Shroud Of The Avatar
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.
Mmmm, flappy. So backers, do you think what you're seeing is a step in the right direction?