A new demo narrated by developer Richard Garriott for Portalarium's Kickstarter-funded RPG Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues shows off the game's rudimentary combat, crafting and dialogue.
The demo, similar to one shown off last week at the Rooster Teeth Expo, starts with Garriott's character in search for wood that he can use to craft a chair. The combat is very bare-bones at this point in development, says Garriott, though he intends to keep the UI as minimalist as possible so as not to obstruct the "porthole" into the fantasy world of the game.
Garriott chops down a tree for lumber, which he then takes to his home in Owl's Head, a safe town protected by a giant Tesla tower. At the crafting benches, he reduces logs to boards and boards to dowels, and combines two boards and four dowels to create a chair. Making sure that players sit in chairs has always been important to Garriott since the days of classic Ultima, he says.
In the town's bar, Garriott speaks with the bartender not using a menu but by typing actual phrases, offering an introduction and ordering some beer. The bartender tells him about a dungeon near the town, and Garriott notes that there is no quest log as in many other modern RPGs; players will need to find quests and remember them on their own.
Garriott concludes the demo by entering the nearby dungeon and racing past skeletons and giant spiders to the bottom, solving a torch puzzle on the way. After defeating an evil lich at the bottom of the crypts, Garriott's character is free to claim his throne of bone for himself.
The Kickstarter update accompanying this video stresses that this is not a throw-away demo cobbled together, but is in fact a functional early version of the game.
Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues will release on Windows, Mac and Linux.
