The Evolution of Avatar: A Game-Changing Concept in Online Gaming

The term "Avatar" has become an integral part of online gaming, but its origins date back to the early days of Ultima IV. Richard Garriott, one of the creators of the game, introduced the concept of an avatar as a way to differentiate his fictional world from other RPGs. The idea was to create a unique experience where players could interact with each other and the environment in a more immersive way. Garriott's vision was not just about creating a game, but about building a community that would come together to shape the world of Avatar.

The success of Ultima IV led to the creation of Shroud of the Avatar, a spiritual successor that would take the concept of avatars to new heights. The game's development team aimed to create an unparalleled online gaming experience, where players could interact with each other and the environment in real-time. They also wanted to explore the idea of "shards," which would become a hallmark of the Shroud of the Avatar universe. According to Garriott, the concept of shards was inspired by the idea of magical artifacts that contained copies of the world. The theory was that upon breaking these shards, players could join different servers, each containing a unique version of the game world.

The team behind Shroud of the Avatar realized that they needed to revolutionize their approach to online gaming. They decided to adopt a unique server model, where the server would be distributed among all players' machines. This design allowed for greater flexibility and scalability, enabling players to play solo or in groups without relying on traditional client-server architecture. The team also implemented a robust system of validation, which ensured that gold transactions, deaths, and other important events were accurately recorded.

The development of Shroud of the Avatar was marked by significant milestones. The game's server architecture was launched every month for 15 months, with each iteration running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for four months without any unscheduled downtime. This feat is impressive, especially considering that individual players' machines would inevitably fail or be hacked. Garriott attributes the service's success to its fault-tolerant design, which allowed it to adapt and recover from setbacks.

Shroud of the Avatar has already made significant strides in its development process. The game is currently available on Steam Early Access and can be purchased directly through the website (shroudoftheavatar.com). Backers of the project can now play 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with plans for an alpha release by summer and a beta phase by fall. The team is working towards a final "wipe" – the closest thing to a commercial release – which they hope to achieve by the end of the year.

As the development process continues, it's clear that Shroud of the Avatar has the potential to revolutionize online gaming once again. With its innovative server architecture and robust system of validation, this game is poised to set new standards for community-driven experiences. Fans of the series can look forward to more updates and insights into the world of Shroud of the Avatar, as well as exclusive content from Garriott himself.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone this is Steve and we are joined once again by Lord British or Richard garat and today we're talking about some of your legacy yeah so you and your team brought a lot of uh a lot of innovation to the games industry especially when it comes to RPGs and MMOs so what what was sort of the start of all of that yeah well the you know of course these these gray hairs can tell you that uh uh or or if you if you if you're Wikipedia you'll see that I've been around for about as long as anybody has been around in this industry um you know my very first uh games for example like calbath which is sort of Ultima zero in my mind uh introduced things like uh tile Graphics uh scrolling tile graphic maps are first in Ultima uh 3D perspective line drawn dungeons uh first showed up in a calbath uh if you go b a little bit further forward the word Avatar which is now obviously quite common in our games industry that really and shroud of the Avatar and in Shroud of the Avatar in fact I I wanted to use the word Avatar in Shroud of the Avatar specifically to help you know uh reinforce that uh data point that uh uh you know prior to Ultima 4 which was called quest of the Avatar uh your character in a game was called your character and uh and you might be playing the character of Conan the Barbarian with Ultima 4 since it was a game about virtue I wanted to be you in the virtual world and so I Ed the Sanskrit word Avatar uh then uh you know as you mentioned the term MMO RPGs uh is really credited to the team and I for Ultima Online I I think I actually get credit on the internet but I'm not sure it was actually me but it was somewhere within the you know myself or star or some of the other team members that first used that term was that under uh origin systems these games yeah all everything we mentioned has been under origin my brother and I uh started to form origin in ' 82 although I think our incorporation forly was ' 83 1983 and of course some other big names in from origin would include Warren Spectre Chris Roberts robt uh yep and uh uh there's probably the two other biggest names Tony zerve also did the Crusader series another think particularly popular one uh but uh uh but yeah origin when we um when we settled in Austin Texas we were the only entertainment software company within probably a, miles and so if you wanted to be in the games industry you know the some of the other early California companies might be too far away there were a couple people on the couple companies on the East Coast uh but if you in the middle of the United States or especially if you in the southern part of the United States uh everyone came to origin um you know which is how we how we got a hold to Chris uh Chris had originally been developing in England which's from and uh and he tried to hire or was was Contracting with an artist named Dennis Lu who did familiar name who did all of the covers of of all ultimas plus a lot of Chris's stuff and um uh and we hired Dennis luet and we so we basically stole stole Dennis from Chris who when he was freelance and so fair for Chris came over to office going like hey what are you doing taking my artist and who the heck are you guys anyway down here in Austin uh because his parents were living in Austin still do okay and uh and so we said look if you want if you want to work with Dennis just let's all work together in terms of items you created or contributed to with the cre there's a we went over Avatar previously at CES talked about the word Shard as it pertains to servers yeah in fact Shard is an interesting one too because um uh you know I've I if you go to a database convention and they talk about keeping databases duplicated on like the East Coast or the West Coast they'll call them shards but they'll have no idea that that term comes from Ultima Online and uh uh and the reason why that term exists that now especially all MMOs use that if they have a copy of the server set you know on East Coast yard or the West Coast yard um when we designed Ultima Online EA's sales projections for the lifetime of the product was 30,000 units and we thought oh that's that's just way too low they're wrong it'll be maybe a 100,000 and uh and we said well you know in case we're wildely successful we'll build the world that if we had a we sold a million copies in lifetime we'll build Britannia to hold that many people which means you know concurrently maybe a 100,000 people playing or 10 10 to 100,000 people and uh and then when we had people sign up for the beta we had way more people sign up for the beta you know we had 50 within a within a few days might have been a week we had like 50,000 people pay us $5 a piece for the privilege of being in the beta and EA and us went oh my gosh this going to be much bigger than we thought we're not going to be able to fit everybody in one world and I actually thought to me that was disappointing because I was going I want people to be together and so I didn't want this fiction where these two worlds were unrelated to each other and so I invented the term shards because at the end of Ultima 1 mundane the evil wizard uh is Immortal due to this the existence of his gym of immortality and the way you kill him is you first destroy the gym and break it into shards and the theory was that upon that breaking of this you know super powerful magical artifact uh a copy of the world was kept in each Shard you would join one Shard I would join another but maybe someday we'll reunite the shards and so therefore really part of the same world it's a very clever infiction adaptation so but that's it's just an arbitrary word Shard but now it's literally used by all the of online gaming so we've got uh shards which have affected Industries outside of gaming fairly impressive in its own right MH at least in terms of terminology avatars become movies in addition to G all all games use avatars now uh movies now obviously use the term directly uh and um uh and and even things like uh you know tile Graphics up until 3D now has become so easy uh or with Hardware related uh you know teg Graphics obviously was also had a 20year run as a fairly good standard for role playing games uh and so you know and so for sh of the Avatar I hope we're going to do it again you know the U uh I can't remember if we have ever talked about this where we we have a very unique server model for shoud of the Avatar you know because I didn't want shards I really do want everybody to be in one world together and so we have uh instead of having a client server model which is the way almost all MMOs are marketed are architected um we actually distribute the server into everyone's machine and so that lets you first of all play solo player if you wish but it also means that if the three of us are in an an instance that is private we can we're all running the server and so it means that we only need to check in with the home office for validation of gold transactions or deaths or you other things cheating uh but since we're all three simultaneously keeping the heartbeat of the server going if one of us drops out or their machine blue screens uh the other people in the can just keep going so it's not a tra like traditional peer-to-peer where the if the host drops then you're screwed correct it's more sophisticated corre it's more sophisticated in fact um you know as we had been talking about previously despite this is a completely new type of architecture we've been launching it every month for 15 months and it's been running 24 hours a day 7 days a week for four months and it has never failed and part of the reason is because it has to be so fault tolerant you know you know someone's going to try to hack it you know someone's machine is just going to crash and so with the foundation of the logic of how the servers operate just has to be able to deal with something goes wrong and so it's extremely fault tolerant it's not to say no individual person's machine has failed because obviously that has happened but the service broadly has never never had even one moment of unscheduled downtime impressive and it for a shroud of the Avatar I guess we'll we'll throw a quick plug in there for that is there a Target release date is there a price can they buy into it now you can buy it now it's already on Steam Early Access or directly through our website at shroud ofthe avatar.com uh and any of our backers can come in and play 24 hours a day seven days a week um we'll be in Alpha by summer uh beta by fall and uh we hope to do the the final wipe which is the closest thing we have to commercial release uh hopefully right at the end of the year we're struggling to try to make sure we get it into this calendar year but it'll be close so for more information as always links in the description below we shot another video just prior to this and talking about Shad of the Avatar updates so if you're interested in what you hear here check that out and we will see you all next time ehey everyone this is Steve and we are joined once again by Lord British or Richard garat and today we're talking about some of your legacy yeah so you and your team brought a lot of uh a lot of innovation to the games industry especially when it comes to RPGs and MMOs so what what was sort of the start of all of that yeah well the you know of course these these gray hairs can tell you that uh uh or or if you if you if you're Wikipedia you'll see that I've been around for about as long as anybody has been around in this industry um you know my very first uh games for example like calbath which is sort of Ultima zero in my mind uh introduced things like uh tile Graphics uh scrolling tile graphic maps are first in Ultima uh 3D perspective line drawn dungeons uh first showed up in a calbath uh if you go b a little bit further forward the word Avatar which is now obviously quite common in our games industry that really and shroud of the Avatar and in Shroud of the Avatar in fact I I wanted to use the word Avatar in Shroud of the Avatar specifically to help you know uh reinforce that uh data point that uh uh you know prior to Ultima 4 which was called quest of the Avatar uh your character in a game was called your character and uh and you might be playing the character of Conan the Barbarian with Ultima 4 since it was a game about virtue I wanted to be you in the virtual world and so I Ed the Sanskrit word Avatar uh then uh you know as you mentioned the term MMO RPGs uh is really credited to the team and I for Ultima Online I I think I actually get credit on the internet but I'm not sure it was actually me but it was somewhere within the you know myself or star or some of the other team members that first used that term was that under uh origin systems these games yeah all everything we mentioned has been under origin my brother and I uh started to form origin in ' 82 although I think our incorporation forly was ' 83 1983 and of course some other big names in from origin would include Warren Spectre Chris Roberts robt uh yep and uh uh there's probably the two other biggest names Tony zerve also did the Crusader series another think particularly popular one uh but uh uh but yeah origin when we um when we settled in Austin Texas we were the only entertainment software company within probably a, miles and so if you wanted to be in the games industry you know the some of the other early California companies might be too far away there were a couple people on the couple companies on the East Coast uh but if you in the middle of the United States or especially if you in the southern part of the United States uh everyone came to origin um you know which is how we how we got a hold to Chris uh Chris had originally been developing in England which's from and uh and he tried to hire or was was Contracting with an artist named Dennis Lu who did familiar name who did all of the covers of of all ultimas plus a lot of Chris's stuff and um uh and we hired Dennis luet and we so we basically stole stole Dennis from Chris who when he was freelance and so fair for Chris came over to office going like hey what are you doing taking my artist and who the heck are you guys anyway down here in Austin uh because his parents were living in Austin still do okay and uh and so we said look if you want if you want to work with Dennis just let's all work together in terms of items you created or contributed to with the cre there's a we went over Avatar previously at CES talked about the word Shard as it pertains to servers yeah in fact Shard is an interesting one too because um uh you know I've I if you go to a database convention and they talk about keeping databases duplicated on like the East Coast or the West Coast they'll call them shards but they'll have no idea that that term comes from Ultima Online and uh uh and the reason why that term exists that now especially all MMOs use that if they have a copy of the server set you know on East Coast yard or the West Coast yard um when we designed Ultima Online EA's sales projections for the lifetime of the product was 30,000 units and we thought oh that's that's just way too low they're wrong it'll be maybe a 100,000 and uh and we said well you know in case we're wildely successful we'll build the world that if we had a we sold a million copies in lifetime we'll build Britannia to hold that many people which means you know concurrently maybe a 100,000 people playing or 10 10 to 100,000 people and uh and then when we had people sign up for the beta we had way more people sign up for the beta you know we had 50 within a within a few days might have been a week we had like 50,000 people pay us $5 a piece for the privilege of being in the beta and EA and us went oh my gosh this going to be much bigger than we thought we're not going to be able to fit everybody in one world and I actually thought to me that was disappointing because I was going I want people to be together and so I didn't want this fiction where these two worlds were unrelated to each other and so I invented the term shards because at the end of Ultima 1 mundane the evil wizard uh is Immortal due to this the existence of his gym of immortality and the way you kill him is you first destroy the gym and break it into shards and the theory was that upon that breaking of this you know super powerful magical artifact uh a copy of the world was kept in each Shard you would join one Shard I would join another but maybe someday we'll reunite the shards and so therefore really part of the same world it's a very clever infiction adaptation so but that's it's just an arbitrary word Shard but now it's literally used by all the of online gaming so we've got uh shards which have affected Industries outside of gaming fairly impressive in its own right MH at least in terms of terminology avatars become movies in addition to G all all games use avatars now uh movies now obviously use the term directly uh and um uh and and even things like uh you know tile Graphics up until 3D now has become so easy uh or with Hardware related uh you know teg Graphics obviously was also had a 20year run as a fairly good standard for role playing games uh and so you know and so for sh of the Avatar I hope we're going to do it again you know the U uh I can't remember if we have ever talked about this where we we have a very unique server model for shoud of the Avatar you know because I didn't want shards I really do want everybody to be in one world together and so we have uh instead of having a client server model which is the way almost all MMOs are marketed are architected um we actually distribute the server into everyone's machine and so that lets you first of all play solo player if you wish but it also means that if the three of us are in an an instance that is private we can we're all running the server and so it means that we only need to check in with the home office for validation of gold transactions or deaths or you other things cheating uh but since we're all three simultaneously keeping the heartbeat of the server going if one of us drops out or their machine blue screens uh the other people in the can just keep going so it's not a tra like traditional peer-to-peer where the if the host drops then you're screwed correct it's more sophisticated corre it's more sophisticated in fact um you know as we had been talking about previously despite this is a completely new type of architecture we've been launching it every month for 15 months and it's been running 24 hours a day 7 days a week for four months and it has never failed and part of the reason is because it has to be so fault tolerant you know you know someone's going to try to hack it you know someone's machine is just going to crash and so with the foundation of the logic of how the servers operate just has to be able to deal with something goes wrong and so it's extremely fault tolerant it's not to say no individual person's machine has failed because obviously that has happened but the service broadly has never never had even one moment of unscheduled downtime impressive and it for a shroud of the Avatar I guess we'll we'll throw a quick plug in there for that is there a Target release date is there a price can they buy into it now you can buy it now it's already on Steam Early Access or directly through our website at shroud ofthe avatar.com uh and any of our backers can come in and play 24 hours a day seven days a week um we'll be in Alpha by summer uh beta by fall and uh we hope to do the the final wipe which is the closest thing we have to commercial release uh hopefully right at the end of the year we're struggling to try to make sure we get it into this calendar year but it'll be close so for more information as always links in the description below we shot another video just prior to this and talking about Shad of the Avatar updates so if you're interested in what you hear here check that out and we will see you all next time e\n"