New Shroud Of The Avatar Head Says Recent Acquisition Will 'Positively Impact' The Game

shroud of the avatar old town bannerThere’s been a lot of controversy surrounding Catnip Games’ recent acquisition of Portalarium’s operating assets including the fantasy MMORPG Shroud of the Avatar. Portalarium CEO and Catnip Games founder Chris Spears answers a few big questions about the deal on the official forums. He also assures the community that the new setup will actually be good for the game.

“As many of you know we have had some exciting changes recently that will positively impact the game in many ways,” says Chris. The good news is that the team will not be changing and that Richard Garriot and Starr Long will be staying with the game. Episode 2 is also on track for release and Seed Investors will still profit from the success of SotA.

Chris also answers the all-important question of “why?”, citing cost saving, reduced risk, and less paperwork as the reasons behind the acquisition.

“There are a lot of reasons but the big ones are cost savings, risk, and company focus. Costs savings include not having to pay for 3 extra types of insurance that ran several $k a month, not needing an employment company that increased overhead dramatically, not needing a lawyer and multiple CPAs to deal with corporate and tax filings quarterly, and a number of other pointless costs. Risk is reduced because we have far fewer things to screw up as a result of the simpler structure and fewer filings. Finally, company focus going forward will be on one thing, making Shroud of the Avatar better and better every month without having a mountain of paperwork completely unrelated to the game weighing us down.”

Chris goes on to talk about the changes to the game. “If I had to sum it up in a single sentence I think it would be that we are going to have a more open and collaborative game creation process,” he says. “When we started the project, we involved the players in development in many ways. We are going to work to try to involve players far more going forward. Our community is one of our strongest assets and we’ve made them stand on the sidelines far too much lately. We are working on a number of initiatives to fix this.”

The developers will also be holding more in-game community events and will even be giving a handful of “highly responsible and trustworthy” players GM powers to help them out. “These new Game Masters(GMs) will not get the full suite of dev powers but rather a subset to allow them to appear invisible, summon creatures, apply temporary buffs, change the weather, summon other players, and teleport to other players.”

Players will also be given a bigger role in creating content for the game through the introduction of Lua scripting which will be rolled out in phases. Phase 1 is expected to roll out before the end of the year while Phase 2, which includes graphic components, is scheduled for sometime in Q2 2020.

“While this may not sound like a big deal, trust me, it is!”, says Chris. “For example, creating a lua script to read and parse your own combat logs, post that data to a server you run so you can see who has the highest DPS on the server that is running the script. Also, making a script for your guild so it would post your location and scene to an external server so you can see your entire guild’s location in real time. Even things like hooking up guild chat to a text-to-speech program so you could build a broadcast of your guild chat to listen to on your phone while on the way home from work. Again, TONS of things this opens for players.“

Chris also promises the community that the studio will be doing their best to rake in more players starting with more paid ads and increasing the budget for ads. There’s also plans for cross-promotions with other games in the future including cross-livestreams.

Chris wraps things up by thanking the community and Richard Garriot for their support. “Thank you all so much for your support over the years and going forward! As Starr has said many times before, and I completely agree with, I do feel like we’re making something special and I am forever thankful that Richard has entrusted me with making that happen.”

Head over to the Shroud of the Avatar official forums to view the full post.