Shroud of the Avatar introduces "layaway" scheme, pay for reward tiers in instalments

Shroud of the Avatar's Kickstarter drive may have closed with a moderately whopping $1.9m to its name - nearly double the amount Portalarium were asking for - but Richard Garriott isn't done asking for your money just yet. You can still purchase, and upgrade, cash pledges for the project over on the website - and pretty soon you'll be able to do so in instalments. Thanks to the new 'Layaway plan', you can support SOTA with regular monthly payments rather than with one giant lump sum - for example, to afford the $11,000 necessary to become a 'Lord of the Manor'. The catch, however, is that there will be a monthly service fee associated with the scheme, meaning that overall you'll end up paying more.

Since the Kickstarter ended back in April, Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues hasn't received a crazy amount of extra money - at the time of writing, the total stands at $2,294,182, with $374,907 of that coming from the website alone. According to comments on the latest Kickstarter update , the layaway scheme was actually requested by the community. The accompanying service fee, meanwhile, is something charged to the company by a third-party billing system - Portalarium won't be making a profit on that.

Cheers, Massively .

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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.