Legends of Aria is headed to Steam early access, Citadel Studios announced this morning. The launch is set for December 4th. Preorders are live now and come with a week of head-start access as well as entry to the ongoing closed beta testing and a leg up on the inevitable land rush (“the chance to lay claim to their own plots of land and build their homes before anyone else”).
“We’ve gone from making a smaller scale online RPG to making the large-scale full-on sandbox MMORPG we’ve been dying to play since Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and EverQuest first made us all believers in the genre years ago,” Citadel’s Derek Brinkmann says in the press release. “We’ve got even more content and additions planned for the future of Aria, but we’re just excited to finally open the doors and see what the players will do in our world this December.”
MMORPG players will remember back when the game was still called Shards Online and was being touted as a spiritual successor to Ultima Online specifically. In early 2017, Citadel announced a name change and major overhaul of the game to make it more like a traditional MMORPG than a shard-based multiplayer title, complete with a skill-based character development system, a rewritten combat system, and sandbox exploration, though the game will also continue to support modding and player-run servers. A major graphics upgrade went in earlier this year too.
Check out the new trailer to get caught up on where the game is going!
