Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter ends with over $2 million pledged

Legendary designer Richard Garriott's return to his fantasy RPG roots are off to a good start with his latest game, Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, completing its Kickstarter campaign with over $2 million pledged. The original goal set in place by Garriott and his Portalarium team was $1 million.

“I am incredibly grateful to all the fans who backed us during the Kickstarter campaign,” said Garriott. “And those fans are now part of our design and development process going forward with Shroud of the Avatar. We will be listening to all of them as we go about making the kind of fantasy RPG that I really enjoyed making in the earlier part of my career. But this is really only the start. We will continue to keep our own crowd funding store open to bring in more funds to help us add even more features to the game.”

The Kickstarter for Shrouds of the Avatar ended on Sunday with more than 23-thousand backers pledging a total of $2.030 million. The added funds means Shroud of the Avatar will now contain several new features including animal taming, guild houses and banks, castles and keeps as a new "town type," and a serialized novel that serves as a prequel to the game's storyline.

If you were unable to make a pledge on Kickstarter, there is still an opportunity to support the project. The game's official store provides several ways to back the project.

"The Kickstarter backers will forever have certain perks that will remain exclusive to that part of our campaign,” Garriott added. “People who visit the game store now will see many Kickstarter-like tiers to back the project. But we will continue to add new items to the game that will be available for purchase by both our Kickstarter backers and new backers. The exciting part is that a lot of what we will be adding going forward will be based on feedback from our fans; items and features that they are already telling us they want to see in the game."

Shroud of the Avatar is expected to launch in 2014 for PC, Mac and Linux.