Shroud of the Avatar - Interview with Garriott

Gamezone interviews Richard Garriott about Shroud of the Avatar and asks him how the game will change RPGs.

Tom: That is clear in your games, and I'm sure Shroud of the Avatar will have some sci-fi tendencies.

Richard: What's interesting is, it originally started as sort of a steampunk historical future, but at first my core fanbase was like "What are you doing?! We really want medieval!", and so I kind of hid the steampunky, clockpunky stuff and we promoted the medieval stuff and everybody felt comfortable. Now that everyone's comfortable, we're actually putting back in the steampunk and clockpunk. Because after a while we were like "This is too traditional. What can we do to mix it up?" but we had this [steampunk] right here, so we pulled it back in. So yes, we will sort of see a historical future edge to it.

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Tom: Shroud of the Avatar is your latest project. That was funded through Kickstarter, with Forsaken Virtues being the first in a series of five episodes. It’s been deemed a spiritual successor to Ultima: in fact, you even said you’d call it Ultima if you had the rights to it.

Richard: Yeah! In fact, every year I give EA a call and say “Look. It wouldn’t be hard to make it an Ultima! You’re not doing anything. We could make a deal. Let’s do it.” And every time I called their executives go “Yeah. That’s a great idea!” And then they shop it around internally, and there’s always some group internally that goes “No. Someday, I’m gonna use it.” And so EA understandably favors their in-house studios, and so the potential deals have fallen apart every time. And so I’ve been very careful to make sure it’s not a derivative work. There're no references in Shroud of the Avatar to names, places, events that happened before. But Shroud of the Avatar is clearly a Lord British, medieval game that includes virtues as a core concept and is not incompatible with anything I’ve done in the past. And therefore, in your own mind’s eye if you don’t want to break the continuity I’m not forcing you to break that as a player.