Shroud of the Avatar Has Zero Bugs, Claims Richard Garriott

Richard Garriott wants you to know that Shroud of the Avatar is bug-free. Not mostly bug-free. Not "in a much better place than last year." Completely, entirely free of bugs, every single day.

That's the claim, anyway. And the reason, according to Garriott, is AI.

For a while, many players had suspected that the MMORPG's recent major update leaned heavily on AI tools, and that Garriott himself was a big believer in the technology. Those suspicions now have confirmation from the man himself. In an appearance on the TechJesse podcast, Garriott spoke openly about how AI has changed the way Shroud of the Avatar is built and maintained. He did not hold back.

A Thousand Bugs, Then None

By Garriott's own account, the game's bug list used to be a permanent fixture of development. "Shroud of the Avatar has persistently had at least a bug count of a thousand bugs all the time," he said on the podcast, adding that some of those issues had lingered for three to five years without ever being tackled because they weren't considered high priority.

That's a frank admission. Plenty of long-running online games carry a backlog of low-priority bugs that never quite make it to the top of anyone's to-do list, but it's rare to hear a developer put a number on it so casually.

Then came the pivot. "Now, with AI, those bugs are fixed as soon as they're found, within an hour of them being found," Garriott said.

He went on to describe what these tools actually do in his team's workflow. According to Garriott, they document the work that's been done, compare incoming bug reports against one another, recompile reports, test that a fix keeps working, and propose a solution. That proposed solution, he stressed, is checked by a person before anything goes ahead.

His verdict on the whole setup is about as bullish as it gets. "It is dramatically superior to any human workflow, any previously purely human workflow," he said, before delivering the headline line: "Shroud of the Avatar now has zero bugs, every day. Zero."

Garriott Gets Back in the Weeds

It's not all evangelism, to be fair. Garriott did briefly acknowledge the problems that come with using generative AI tools. He emphasized that humans are still working alongside them, and said the team is making sure it uses the technology "ethically." He did not, however, go into detail about what that means in practice - at least not in the comments reported from the podcast.

More interesting, perhaps, is what AI has done for Garriott personally. He says the tools have pulled him much closer to day-to-day development on SOTA than he has been in some time.

"It lets me, who used to be very distant from it, now get right in the weeds," he explained. "I can actually be right there on the front line."

That's a notable shift for someone whose public profile lately has been more about rights and legacy than patch notes. Garriott frames it as AI handling the grunt work while he steers the ship. "AI did the work for me just fine, but it has no judgment capability to know if this is where we want to go as a piece of art," he said. "Humans do the art, machines can help do the labor."

It's a tidy philosophy. Whether it holds up depends on how you feel about where the line between "art" and "labor" actually sits.

Our Take

Let's be honest: "zero bugs, every day" is the kind of claim that invites scrutiny. Anyone who has spent time in an MMORPG knows that bugs are often discovered by players long before developers ever see them, so a game can only be as bug-free as its reports allow. Garriott's description suggests the speed of fixes has changed dramatically, but "zero" seems to hinge on what counts as a known bug at any given moment.

Still, this is a significant moment in a wider conversation. Studios are increasingly open about AI in development, from smaller teams like the one behind Pantheon fielding questions about its AI use to Epic reportedly reshuffling a major shooter around an AI-first approach. Garriott's comments push that debate into very concrete territory.

It's worth watching how Shroud of the Avatar players react - and whether the game's stability in the coming months actually backs up the boast. A claim this bold will be tested by the community, one way or another.