Developers of Shroud of the Avatar are still working hard on the Top-10 priorities they mentioned in the Q1 update schedule. Today, they released the 64th update to the game and have included some quality-of-life changes to player towns and guilds, work on player-made dungeon encounters, and seasonal content, which we are going to hit first.
In what is now a staple for Richard Garriott games, the Arch Lapin, a killer bunny, has returned! This callback to Monty Python and the Holy Grail looks like a fuzzy white bunny, but don’t let that fool you: It’s deadly and can be killed only with the fabled Sacred Orb of Obliteration. We could be wrong, but the instructions for using the Sacred Orb begin with “And the Lord spake, saying, First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin.” The Lapin boss drops two loot items now: Confection Eggs and Confection Bunnies. Sounds tasty.
Additionally, the Spring Equinox celebration brings craftable dyed eggs, purchasable items like a platter of colorful cupcakes, and other springtime items. We have some screenies of these shinies below.
The team at Portalarium have also made improvements to player-made dungeons. Release 63 included an early iteration of this content, but it was originally planned for Release 64, so hopefully, it’s now in full bloom. This release includes a larger variety of encounters and totems, and the team added ramps to the Natural Cavern by player request.
On the subject of Release 63, Executive Producer Starr Long wanted players to be aware of why Episode 2 lands are delayed:
“Please note that Release 63 was our first release since moving to a distributed working model (no office). This meant a larger than normal number of post-release patches and a larger than expected impact on Release 64 deliverables. Additionally, two of our engineers and one designer had vacations during Release 64 which greatly reduced our capacity.”
Lastly, look for some quality-of-life improvements. Player-run towns now have a message-of-the-day. The team upgraded to the latest Unity engine 2018.3. The shader memory footprint has been reduced, and texture streaming should be more stable. “We dedicated a portion of the release to working solely on fixing bugs and reducing our overall bug count,” Long wrote in the patch notes.
If you haven’t kept up with Shroud of the Avatar, then now might be the time to jump into the game, read the full patch notes for Release 64, or feel free to watch MJ’s latest livestream from New Britannia.
