Famous games designer (and creator of the modern RPG) Richard Garriott, best known for the Ulima franchise, as well as the ill-fated Tabula Rasa, is returning to the game development fold, and is looking for a little help from fans. His new game, Shroud of the Avatar, was announced on Friday by Garriott’s new studio, Portalarium. Based in Austin, Texas, the developer’s announcement was timed to coincide with the first day of the city’s SXSW Gaming Festival. With Shroud of the Avatar, Garriott is aiming to provide gamers with “the keys to an ultimate role-playing experience.”
“These important tenets include things like a fully interactive virtual world, deep original fiction with ethical parables such that players’ choices are relevant, cultural histories and fully developed alternative languages and text. Also we want our players to have physical game components like cloth maps, fictional manuals and trinkets. These are all things that people came to expect in my earlier works and we plan on bringing them all back to create Shroud of the Avatar.”
In order to fund his new title, Garriott has launched a Kickstarter campaign under his alias, Lord British. In the video, Garriott explains that he feels modern RPGs coddle players too much, and hopes to set them free to do as they wish with Shroud of the Avatar.
As of this writing, the project is almost halfway to its $1 million target, with 29 days still to go. So it would be safe to assume we will be seeing Shroud of the Avatar on the PC very soon.
