Curious about Shroud of the Avatar but not curious enough to drop money on the title first? Now you can try it out and save your cash, as the game is holding another free trial event through September 27th. For the developers, it provides a valuable opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t work in the current new player experience and how the servers handle stress. For you, it’s… well, it’s a chance to try out the game without buying it.
Naturally, your options are fairly limited in the free trial; you have no ability to own land, you can’t buy or sell items by player vendors, you can’t PvP, you can’t trade items, you can’t use the letter “j” in your name, and so forth. (All right, that last one isn’t true.) But if you’d like a taste for what the game is like, well, it’s still the most free option to find out that you’re likely to get. Jump on in before September 27th if you’re curious; just make an account, download the game, and get going.
And stay tuned for later today when we deliver another episode of our SOTA-themed Choose My Adventure column!
A free trial is the ONLY way I’d recommend anyone goes near Shroud. Sure, you’ll be underwhelmed, wonder how a game this bad can even exist in 2017 and possibly run away screaming from the whole thing, but at least you’ll have tried it. PS: Even though they keep saying, “We haven’t launched…” the game’s been persistent for over 12 months and won’t be wiped again, so it’s as good as launched and all those people grinding for the past year (because, make no mistake, this IS a total grind), are already uncatchable. Have a nice day!
I’ll wait for the inevitable F2P release of the game. As sad as it is, Pay-to-play and sub-games are about 5 years too late if they don’t have their user base established.
I’m sure F2P will happen, but i would even be happy with a lower price point. $40 is pretty steep for a lackluster game that’s still technically an “Early Access”.
With the number of these ‘events’ they’re holding its barely worth a headline these days…
The more I have tried this the more I am convinced Garriott had little or nothing to do with Ultima Online.
Quote of the year
Raph Koster was its lead designer. He gets written out of history a lot these days.
At what point are they just going to make this F2P?
I mean seriously, they have free weeks/weekends/months so often it honestly seems like it’s mostly F2P anyways.
They’ve sworn countless times it never will be, but then again, they also promised us a Buy to Own game with no microtransactions, and look what we actually ended up with…
Being cynical, what they’re doing right now is effectively running the game as F2P for most of the year, but turning it off again every now and then so they can’t be described as such in the media. This way they get lots of people to play it as F2P, desperately hope they’ll convert them into paid accounts, but never get held to account for how badly the project has failed.
It’s such a very, very Portalarium way of doing things…
Correct. The game is nothing but microtransactions… ON TOP OF the box price. Having their cake and eating it too… and wondering why the ship is sinking.
I’ve tried it a couple of times before and each time I didn’t like it. I am however going to try it again because, Ultima. /sigh
I feel the same. Everything from the graphics to the UI to the character appearance to combat seems so drab to me. But, I still remember all the years I enjoyed the Ultima series and that’ll bring me back on occasion to take another look.
By all means try… but the game is nothing like Ultima, period. If Garriott wasn’t involved, no one would independently offer, “Hey, this is like Ultima…” EVER.