Shards Online: NDA Lifted, Steam Launch, Legacy Ruleset, More

February 12, 2017 Matt Chelen Comments

In a recent newsletter, Shards Online developer Citadel Studios made several fairly big announcements. Perhaps the most important is the announcement that the NDA has been lifted...for the core client, at least. The experimental client, which is rife with untested features of all kinds, is still under NDA. The news follows a temporary waiving of the NDA that never quite ended.

The team also made several announcements about the Steam launch, which will arrive "in the upcoming months." Anyone who pledges to the game's ongoing crowdfunding campaign before it ends will be given a week-long head start on the game's official servers in the week leading up to the Steam launch. This will be fairly significant, as progress will be wiped beforehand.

Those that pledge in advance will also receive "unique in-game titles based on lifetime loyalty earned" and access to a "new and improved Loyalty Store." If you currently play the game and are out of loyalty points, but imagine that you will want something from the new Loyalty Store, fear not, for you all loyalty points that you have spent will be refunded to you.

If you've already pledged to the crowdfunding campaign and gained access to the Alpha, there's a new server called "Sanctuary" that you might want to check out. Sanctuary employs a "hardcore, old-school ruleset" similar to that of Ultima Online.

Sanctuary's ruleset includes the following rules.

Original gameplay and ruleset modelled after Ultima Online circa 1999/2000.

700 Skill Cap & 225 Stat Cap.

Powerful magic items.

Full Loot, Playerkilling and PK Stat Loss.

Craft and wield you very own spellbook.

Original skills such as Provocation, Animal Taming and much more..

Citadel Studios explains the reason for creating the Sanctuary ruleset as follows.

Sanctuary is a showcase of the power to transform Shards Online into the rulesetyou choose, be it an accurate representation of a gaming time in the past or an exciting new world of your own creation.

Additionally, a new patch has "eliminated" Celador's server lag, fixed "most server crashes," improved the pet system and pet AI, balanced the Backstab and Stealth skills, made it so that you can now obtain "sunken treasure maps" by fishing, and re-opened the Prizm lounge. You can find the full newsletter here.