So, I pledged to back this game on kickstarter years ago, but hadn't kept up with it because my internet was super, super crappy. I'm living with my parents for now after breaking up with my girlfriend so now my internet is not crappy.

As it turns out; they just had pre-release 32, and with it, permanence. So, no more character wipes. So, I figured I'd give it a try. It's fairly interesting so far; a few good things and a few bad.

The Good:

No character classes: You grow by learning skills, and using those skills. When you complete a quest or kill a monster you get EXP added to your pool which is then spent on skills when they are used or for innate skills when a skill they influence is used. This means, you can create hybrid classes and use a variety of tactics.

Immersive storytelling: Unlike other games where you read a giant wall of text; or rather, scroll down to the bottom of a giant wall of text and click accept; quests in this game are triggered by talking to NPCs. You can go minimal on it and just click on key words to progress the conversation, but you can also work key words into phrases so it feels more like you are actually participating in the conversation.

No subscription fee: I'm not sure if this might change later, but for now, there is no subscription. You pay once to get in, and that's it. You're in.

Single player online mode: This is a great solution to over-crowding. You can set yourself to single player online, or friends only online modes, or even play in offline mode (though your offline character is different from your online one)

Combat is fluid even with a poor connection: A few days ago, something happened to briefly cause my internet to become really poor. Looting a corpse often took 10-20 seconds to get a response back from the server, BUT combat was completely unaffected. The client simulates what the enemy is doing fairly accurately and allows you to keep fighting without lag. At least in single player online mode (I mostly play in that mode because rendering a ton of people can be hard on my poor computer.)

The bad:

Exploration is limited: The world map is separate from town and areas, with a load screen every time you enter and exit an area. Walking around the world map can be annoyingly slow, as it's not just a "select an area" map, but a large area of it's own with no monsters or things to interact with where you can do nothing but run in the direction of where you want to go until you get there and there is nothing to do in the meantime. Supposedly, you can get random encounters, but it's only happened to me like... twice ever.

Minimal UI: Lord British really hates modern RPG conventions and has been very reluctant to include them. There is no minimap, the compass is minimal, quest givers are unmarked, and your character's actual level is hidden. Apparently, life and stamina bars were only begrudgingly added with the promise to remove them later when they are able to animate health and stamina cues. This can be a breath of fresh air in some cases, but most of the time the game does not offer anything to compensate for the lack of information. You can buy maps in game which you can open up and try to use as a minimap, except they are all written in the Britanian Cypher. (Why LB? WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ALL OF YOUR MAPS??)

The Ugly:

You only get one character. You can delete your character and start over, but you cannot have two characters at once (Except for having a separate offline character). LB says this is for immersion; that your avatar represents you specifically and thus multiple characters would I guess tempt you to have a character where you misbehave and another character where you don't? I don't get the reasoning, really. I don't see a problem with roleplaying as multiple different characters in the same game.

*looks up*

Oh, another rpg with the 'medieval bland' aesthetic. No that's...that's great. It's an unexplored niche, truly.

Its almost as if nobody has heard of flintlock fantasy, and that makes me sad.

Um, that argument doesn't really work in this case, since Ultima was one of the first and Shroud of the Avatar is clearly meant to be as close to a part of that universe as LB is allowed legally.

Also, the Ultima universe isn't entirely fantasy; there are some scifi elements as well. In fact, in Shroud of the Avatar, it seems a major part of the plot involves an oracle that uses robots to spy on everyone in the world and gives guidance to outlanders through a giant robot head.

Not sure where he's going with that exactly, but the Oracle part of things; and the bronze aesthetic of the robots make it feel like there's potential for it to grow into a more steampunk world as the story progresses.

It's not even an argument, it's simply an observation. And even if we take Ultima's pedigree into account, the gaming landscape hasn't just been at a standstill the whole time since the franchise's inception, what was fresh then is stale as fuck now, and this looks almost aggressively generic.

That was probably on purpose. There's a lot of appeals to nostalgia in this game (and a lot of other kickstarter projects)

Also when your project is run by a guy who asks people to call him Lord British and sells his blood on eBay. Got to expect a fondness for the old fantasy tropes

Oh no, I don't doubt that it's deliberate, it's just hardly like there aren't already a ton of rpgs playing the old tropes to the hilt as it is. I wonder if 'hey, miss ultima' is enough of a hook to give it an edge considering the oversaturation.

But yeah considering we have suspiciously similar substitutes for castlevania, banjo kazooie and two different flavors of megaman [and that's just the projects I've heard of], I can't say I'm surprised.

Ah yes, ol' Dick Garriot's "we'll reinvent the wheel" RPG. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm as thrilled to possibly have a re-emergence of old-school RPGs as anyone, but listening to the list of 'groundbreaking' features promised early on didn't sound like anything you couldn't with relative ease have modded into Morrowind (aside from the multiplayer part, but it frankly rubs me the wrong way to begin with in this kind of games).
Also, Morrowind had glorious, glorious spellcrafting. Nothing quite like creating a spell that gives you and your enemies levitation, so you can lure them into the sky and laugh your ass off as they fall to their deaths when the effect runs out. How's that for open-ended?

I think the idea is that he wants to go back and undo a lot of modern RPG conventions that he believes hurts immersion. The problem is... a lot of those things became staples of the genre for a reason and can't simply be removed without replacing their usefulness somehow. It's going to be interesting to see if he can come up with good solutions or if he will settle for just making an out-dated system.