Shroud of the Avatar released to backers

The first release of Richard Garriott's highly anticipated fantasy role-playing game, Shroud of the Avatar, is available today for backers of the crowd funded project. You may now log in to your account, download the client, create a character, and explore the streets of Owl's Head, the first town open. It's currently single player online only, but future releases will roll out multiplayer online modes.

Release 1 allows players to test out the game's intriguing dialog system with non-player characters (NPC). Additionally, you can equip different clothing, armors, and weapons, and select a house from the entire list of player houses — even the Lord of the Manor estate. To outfit your home, various chests of furniture and decorations have been placed all throughout town which you can easily pick up.

"We are pleased with our progress," game creator Richard Garriott said, "and we are excited to show our fans what we've created in the short amount of time we've been working on the game.

"It's still very early in development, and this is not your traditional development model. Since the game is crowd funded and crowd sourced, we feel it's important to give our community an early glimpse of the game's progress…earlier than what you'd normally see in traditional game development. But this is important because player feedback at this stage will be utilized in helping us understand any changes we need to make and to possibly reaffirm that we are on the right track."

You can head here for instructions on how to download, install, and being playing Shroud of the Avatar.