Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is a kickstarted funded RPG, a game with Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott at its helm. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s the guy who created Ultima, one of the first RPG franchises to really establish itself within the genre and progress into the modern era, over two decades.
The game has been up on Steam’s Early Access, allowing for eager fans to basically play test the game for the team at Portalarium, for free. The developers haven’t been taking this for granted, however, as they’ve posted three postmortems for the first early access testing phase.
The executive producer on Forsaken Virtues, Starr Long, called testing the game a part of a “new paradigm of crowd funded and crowd sourced development,” adding that their development process has more transparency and a “tighter communication loop” between the team at Portalarium and its fans/backers.
Long went on to further talk about their progress made with the early access feedback:
“But at a deeper level, it was a test to see if we could give you something so very early in development and have you understand what to expect. We worked on that by being as clear as we could on what to expect, and what not to expect. It seemed to have worked, as almost everyone who played understood what they were looking at. This understanding allowed all of you to give us really valuable and accurate feedback that we can act on.”
There is a list of changes to be made to Forsaken Virtues based off of feedback from the testers, most notably the smoothing of jittery shadows, NPCs being able to respond to basic conversation starters, some tweaks to the saving and transferring of items, and of course – the addition of a jump feature, because we all know everyone loves to jump everywhere in RPGs.
Both Lord British and technical director Chris Spears posted their own postmortems on the game’s forums, further contributing to the previous list made by Starr Long, all of the said tweaks and additions are to be included in Forsaken Virtue’s second testing phase.
The next update and testing phase is set to begin just after the beginning of the new year. Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is on track for a launch in October of next year, across PC, Mac and Linux.
