Shroud of the Avatar is a game that I saw advertised on Facebook and thought "that looks interesting". They were advertising for a free trial of the game and I decided to download it.
Shroud of the Avatar is supposed to be the spiritual successor to the Ultima franchise. I never actually played any of the Ultima games because I wasn't into PC gaming back then, but I have seen enough of them in video to know what they are about.
SotA is a game that is heavy on dialogue. They want you to read a lot as a player, almost to the point of it being comical. In one instance, in the video below, I am asking questions to a caravan driver outside of a burning town. He tells me that I am asking too many questions for someone that should be evacuating, but then continues to speak in paragraphs.
Part of me likes the game because I can see what they are trying to achieve with it, but I think games have moved on since then. I'm not saying that current games can't be made in an older style, but it seems that they even included some of the terrible aspects of games from back then. There are some quality of life improvements that games have made over the years that this game doesn't do. It feels antiquated and not very well optimized. The UI and combat look and feel like an MMORPG from 2008. This is a game for the old school crowd more than anything.
Nothing about the way this plays has me wanting to go back for more. I'm sure there's a story here that is good, but the mechanics are old and stilted. They aren't fluid. It's like they are trying to really grab people in with the nostalgia factor.
Combat is old school WoW. You click on an enemy to start attacking and then use mana (they call it focus, I believe) to do your abilities. The abilities have a cool down, and I'm sure there are rotations you can use for those skills later on as you learn more abilities.
The video below was over 40 minutes long before I edited it down. A lot of that was me reading stuff that didn't really matter, or sitting through the load screens. I cut a lot of that out.
If you want to check out the game for yourself, I recommend getting the free trial on their website here: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com
Or you can spend $40 for the full version on Steam here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/326160/Shroud_of_the_Avatar_Forsaken_Virtues/
The difference between the two is that if you buy the full version for $40, you can play the game as a singleplayer game and get access to everything, whereas the trial is just that: a trial version that's multiplayer only.
