Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues

Introduction

Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is the MMORPG Richard Garriott built after leaving the Ultima series he created, pitched explicitly to backers as a spiritual return to that world's sandbox, player-housing-driven design. Garriott's studio, Portalarium, raised the project's funding through a 2013 Kickstarter and opened it to the public on Steam Early Access on 24 November 2014. What followed was an unusually long development: the game didn't reach a full release, under the Forsaken Virtues subtitle, until 27 March 2018 — more than three years after backers first got access to a working build. Portalarium sold the project to its own lead developer in 2019, forming the small studio, Catnip Games, that still runs it today. The game sits at a "Mixed" 52.2% positive across 2,346 Steam reviews, a figure that, on close reading, represents two genuinely separate and well-supported stories rather than one muddled one.

A real, documented land controversy — not just disgruntled players

The single most specific, repeated complaint in this review's sample concerns the game's real-money housing system, and this outlet verified it extends well beyond the reviews themselves. Player housing and land plots are purchased using Crowns of the Obsidian (COTO), a premium currency that can be bought with real money or earned slowly in-game, and independent reporting on the system at launch documented plots selling for anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars depending on location and size. That matches what shows up directly in this review's sample: "the most developed system is the part that asks for money," reads one pointed review, and a separate reviewer who says they backed the game at the "Ancestor" tier for $275 in 2014 describes years of intermittent, disappointing attempts to get into it. A different reviewer puts it more starkly, describing "thousands of dollars" spent and calling the outcome a betrayal by Garriott personally. This review cannot verify any individual player's dollar figure, but the underlying system producing these complaints is real, documented independently of Steam reviews, and not an exaggeration by any one disappointed backer.

The counter-story: a small community that keeps getting credited by name

What keeps this from being a simple cautionary tale is a second pattern, just as consistent, running through reviewers on both sides of the recommend split: genuine, specific praise for the people still playing. "The dwindling community population is excellent. Helpful and charitable," writes one reviewer with 693 hours logged, in the same review where they question why the population keeps shrinking. Others independently echo the exact same framing — "friendliest player-base you'll ever find," "very dedicated and extremely supportive," "the community is great and you can have fun here" — from reviewers who otherwise call the game janky or list long complaint sections. One reviewer with over 10,000 hours recorded writes plainly that the game "didn't live up to the hype" and that "key leadership left the project," but thanks Catnip Games by name for "keeping the dream alive." That level of agreement, from players who disagree about almost everything else, is the strongest evidence this review found that the community itself, not the game's systems, is now the main reason anyone recommends staying.

Technical rot on top of the business-model complaints

Set the housing controversy aside and the game still carries real, specific technical complaints that have nothing to do with monetisation. Multiple reviewers independently describe a cursor that intermittently vanishes mid-session, forcing a restart to use the UI at all; one recent review reports memory spiking to 18GB and the client hanging outright on login. Abandoned player housing plots and towns, a direct side effect of the real-money land system above, get blamed by name for stuttering and frame-time issues in populated areas. None of this is catastrophic in isolation, but stacked on top of a business model already under suspicion, it reinforces the review sample's most common overall framing: a game whose ambition and lineage are real, let down by a small team visibly struggling to keep up with the upkeep its own systems require.

A pattern that predates this review's own sample

None of this is a new or sudden development. In October 2022, the game suffered a server outage severe enough that Catnip Games had to roll the entire live world back by more than a month to recover it, an incident the studio itself publicly addressed and promised would not undermine the game's long-term future. That episode isn't something this review found in the current reviews sample directly, but it matches the shape of almost everything the sample does describe: a small team stretched thin, a live world with real structural problems, and a studio that keeps choosing to patch, rebuild and continue rather than walk away. Whether that persistence is admirable or a reason for caution is, fittingly, exactly the question this review's two contradictory stories leave unresolved.

Verdict

Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is a genuinely hard game to score fairly, because its two loudest stories are both true at once: a real, well-documented real-money land system that left identifiable backers feeling cheated, and a small, shrinking community that an unusual number of reviewers — on both sides of the score — go out of their way to call one of the best things about playing it. Judged as the Ultima Online successor it was crowdfunded to be, it's a disappointment with a receipts-backed monetisation complaint attached. Judged as whatever it's actually become under Catnip Games' small, post-2019 stewardship, it's a niche, technically rough sandbox kept alive mostly by the goodwill of the people still logging in. Go in for that community, not for the promises made back in 2013.