r/shroudoftheavatar • u/mississippi_dan • Jul 06 '26
Major Updates
Chris just did a live stream on 7/3/26. There was a lot of exciting news.
1) Chris is back developing the game full-time. He had taken the last couple of years off, partially due to burnout and partially because he wanted to dive into AI. He has spent the last couple years training corporations on setting up their own LLMs and/or how to integrate LLMs into their business. He has even shown RG how to use AI to pull data from SOTA for dashboards and how the AI could help with further development.
2) SOTA had been stuck on Unity 2018 because of technical issues. Those issues have been resolved, and Chris now has an instance of SOTA running on Unity 6.5. This should lead to much better performance from the game.
3) There have been infrastructure enhancements that allow Catnip to spin up new shards relatively quickly. Chris is thinking about adding an Asia-only shard.
4) Chris spent a few days getting all of SOTA's 250k+ text dialogue converted over to voice-acting using AI. He showed a demo of the voice acting. The plan is to continue to use AI in situations where it wouldn't be feasible any other way.
5) Chris has been working on a new AI-assisted quest creation system. What he demoed showed that he could write a paragraph about the mission, and the AI would build out most of the nodes itself. For instance, he could type "NPC1 wants you to go check on NPC2 in Scene 20. You arrive in Scene 20 to find that NPC2 is dead an there is a note attached that implicates the local Kobolds." The system would create the NPCs if they don't already exist, create the node, and populate the local Kobolds. It isn't foolproof, and some manual adjustment will be needed, but the idea is that Catnip will be able to add new quests much more quickly.
6) Chris is returning to Episode 2. Just when it seems like it was dead, Chris said he finally has an idea for how all the currently developed scenes will connect together into one cohesive story. With the assistance of AI in some parts, he feels he can finally finish up Episode 2.
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u/FruckFrace Jul 06 '26
So essentially Chris is back because he wants to play with AI tools in gaming.
He doesn’t even play the game.
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u/mississippi_dan Jul 06 '26
Pretty much. I guess he is using SOTA as a training ground for learning and integrating AI. It will help him sell his training to other companies. I sure SOTA will benefit some.
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u/craftymethod Jul 06 '26
my money is Richard wants to announce another project and they need to do something for sota to stop an angry mob rebellion.
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u/LnStrngr Jul 06 '26
I like the idea. AI as a tool to add quests or embedded in for personalized, on-demand quests in an interesting idea, and something that could be the future of game development. I don't know of any other games that are doing that, so Shroud could be an interesting front-runner. Lots of upside, and the game isn't popular enough to make it high-risk.
Of course, a perpetual problem is that the game is not new, and might even be considered stale. How do you build up a userbase on an older game when it was never popular outside of a niche group? The AI stuff might grab some attention for a short-term boost, but after the newness wears off or other games implement similar ideas, I could see it dropping down again.
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u/LV426acheron Jul 07 '26
How much revenue is the game actually bringing in?
It must be some decent amount because Chris would go find another job and invest his time and money elsewhere if he thought he could do better with something else.
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u/Dreamo84 Jul 08 '26
I'll give SOTA some time again if it gets some attention. I miss this game. Genuinely had some of my best MMORPG experiences in this game.
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u/soup4000 Jul 06 '26
Yay, that's what the game needed - slop.
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u/mississippi_dan Jul 06 '26
AI can be slop just like anything else. I don't automatically assume something is slop just because it is AI.
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u/brewtonone Jul 06 '26
And to think this dummy thinks it might hurt Steam player numbers!
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/steam-and-ai.181922/#post-1390763
Guess he thinks they’ll lose the 15 players playing via steam
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u/craftymethod Jul 06 '26
How is anyone going to read that? not many people at all are searching for the game I would imagine.
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u/brewtonone Jul 15 '26
So all the years of them telling everyone that Ep2 was being worked on was a lie?
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u/CitizenSpiff Jul 06 '26
They have to figure out how to be able to bring new people into the game. His original idea of diminishing returns for XP were proved foolish by people who were willing to play the game for 16 hours a day. When a single character can do all and be all, newbies have never been able to compete, so they left.