Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues Post-funding Updates

It's been several weeks since we checked in on the status of Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, and during that time the team at Portalarium has been busy posting a significant number of updates, with the most notable one arriving today with the announcement that Release 6 will become available tomorrow for backers. But first, a "State of the Realm" video address:



And word is on the latest build:

Thank you to our loyal backers of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 6 access for all backers at First Responder level and above begins this Thursday, May 22 at 10:30 AM Central Time. Release 6 access will end on Sunday, May 25 at 10:00 PM Central Time. Starting today, you can begin installing and patching (see instructions below), but login will not be enabled until Thursday morning.

After Release 5, I posted about my impressions of that release and our decision to make Release 6 the inaugural, once per quarter release focused mostly on polish and iteration. As our first attempt at this kind of release, I am quite pleased with the results, even if many of them were behind the scenes. While we definitely made some forward strides on polish, we spent a significant amount of time on laying the groundwork for future work on lighting, terrain, texturing, item security, data security, combat balancing, visual effects systems, etc. All that groundwork will yield some amazing things in future releases, even if in the near term it isn't the most visible of changes. Below are the original/revised R6 deliverables, along with some extra notes and new deliverables in italics.