New Scenes
Handling the myriad of issues noticed thanks to the new number of backers didn’t stop the team from getting some pretty awesome work done, though. A new desert scene makes its way onto the…. Well, scene… It’s a gorgeous piece of work, and more impressive is that it virtually came straight from the Unity Store. Once again, the genius of crowd sourcing some of the game’s development and choosing Unity as the engine for the game is clearly demonstrated.
Starr notes that the new desert maps are built from a sample scene they bought via the Unity store, but the initial scene was just so well done that they haven’t had to much more than change basic topology. The ability to source that material from an external location saves the team a truckload of time, and it helps support the growing community of developers contributing to the Unity store. The time saved allows the team to focus on other content, like the new scorpions found in desert biomes.
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Scenes like the new desert biome are really making Shroud feel like a more finished game.
Another totally new scene is the entrance to the Graff Gem Mines, but every scene should have some fairly significant changes. For one, players who have thrown off the moral coil can now search the scene for the Ankh, or two in the case of some scenes, which is available to the mostly dead should they care for selective resuscitation. However, only ghosts can see it, and that’s just one more example of the unbelievable elitism you find among the dead.
Another update to scenes will be the mobs inhabiting them. Demonstrating their continuing commitment to immersion, Shroud of the Avatar developers are taking a look at critters in various scenes. The intent is to ensure when creatures are in a scene that there’s some reason for it, and that they behave in a way that one would expect. Starr gives the example of wolves that might stand around in the area near their lair, but otherwise should be roaming the scene looking for prey.
There should be visual indications of the presence of some creatures, as well. Spiders for instance, would fill their environment with webs, so a player walking into a scene or into a certain portion of a scene, would know there are likely spiders in the area by looking around them. The changes are just a start, but with many of the other tweaks to graphics and animations, it should go a long ways to helping the game feel more immersive.
Combat Changes
Other changes being made in this pass include some updates related to combat. After studying the data on combat damage, Starr Long says the team realized there was something wrong with magic. Where melee combat had spikes and lulls in damage output indicative of the occasional critical hits, magic had a really stable damage output over time. After investigating, they realized it was because magic wasn’t getting critical hits, so that was addressed in this pass. Magic users in Shroud of the Avatar should notice a dramatic increase in the amount of damage they do in combat now.
Another change has to do with ammo. Since introducing the need for ammo as a sort of way to put ranged combat more on par with hand-to-hand, ammo management has become a part of life for archers in New Britannia. Arrows will be increasingly common as loot if you take the new skill called “Ammo Scavenger.” Bow-wielding enemies such as the Elf Archer are more likely to drop arrows, and will drop more of them, after you pick up this new innate skill. Though before you get too gleeful, be aware that moving while shooting will have a more negative impact after this release, as well.
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Apparently spiders aren’t afraid of fire… Maybe I was thinking of wolves?
My favorite change this pass might be the new stances in the Tactics tree, though. The two obvious ones are Reckless where you sacrifice defense for attack, and its opposite stance, Defensive. After those two are more extreme versions, though. One, Passive, sacrifices attack and defense for an increase to health and focus regeneration. There’s also a Berserker stance. Berserkers sacrifice a lot more defense and lost health and focus over time in exchange for massive attack bonuses.
Stances will be runes like other abilities, which I think is really cool. You can switch between them if you get another in a subsequent draw, but what if you don’t? It may not make much difference if you’re just in Reckless or Defensive, but I could see more than one Berserker collapsing after a fight because they weren’t able to drop the stance quickly enough. I really like the idea of having to weigh the longer-term when applying these stances, but I’m betting that’s a little more hardcore than is intended. If it becomes an issue, it’ll probably get changed a bit.
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You can bet money that I’ll be rolling a new berserker, just so he can flip out while wearing a Santa hat!
New combat consumables like explosion potions and caltrops are now in. They go into your bar just like potions and can be thrown like fireballs to damage and slow your enemies down. That should further enhance ranged combat by giving archers and mages a method for slowing down advancing attackers. What’s more, it should also help demonstrate how integral crafting is becoming to the game, so there’s another reason to for you to cheer.
The last significant change to combat in this round, or at least the last I’ll be going over, is the new Ignite Weapons skill in the Fire Magic skill tree. It has a cool effect and adds damage, but the coolness extends beyond that. The fire effect is applied via the same mechanic that will apply other effects later. It means we should be seeing ice and lightning effects soon, and I’d expect poison to make its way into the game pretty quick, as well.
Happy Yule
I think this last month taught us a lot about Portalarium and where we can expect them to be taking Shroud of the Avatar as we slide into the New Year. I would have expected the Steam launch to have taken up all their time over the last month, but they still managed to roll out a lot of updates. They even pushed out updates to the guild system, new holiday content, and plenty of other things I didn’t even have time to get into through this article.
They effectively had every legitimate excuse to kick back and coast through the holiday season, but they chose not to take the easy road. In fact, they added additional obstacles by phrasing much of their business strategy around the moral questions of what was better for their backers. It’s the sort of attitude that makes me really confident that the next year will see increasingly cool things out of these folks.
It also makes me confident that you’ll enjoy this release just as much, if not more, than you have all the ones leading up to it. Which is why you’ll be seeing plenty of me online during this holiday break, as well. So the happiest of Yuletides to you, and I’ll see you in game.
