Citadel Studios Announce Codename Shards
A team of experienced developers in the MMO field have formed a new studio, Citadel Studios, and their first title, codenamed Shards, promises to change the face of player collaboration forever.
Citadel was founded by game industry veterans Derek Brinkmann, Chris Ondrus and Tim Cotten, whose collective credits range from RPG classics like the Elder Scrolls series, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online. Citadel’s goal is to create something like nothing else on the market.
“We left our soul-crushing, corporate jobs to make the games we’d actually play,” said Derek Brinkmann, founder and CEO of Citadel Studios. “As we started our first project and experimented with concepts, we discovered ways we could share our passion for creating living worlds with gamers themselves. Ultimately the community will dictate what Shards becomes, because we’re not just providing a game but also a platform for players to express their creativity.”
The team appear very vocal about their dislike for modern marketing strategies within online games in particular, which should bode well for anyone that shares their view.
What is interesting is both the name and their promises. As we know, a ‘shard’, in MMO terms, is another term for a server. to quote wikipedia, “An instance of an MMORPG that is one of several independent and structurally identical virtual worlds, none of which has so many players as to exhaust a system’s resources.”
To straight up refer to your game with this name? It’s clear that the team’s intentions revolve around the various instances of their creation. Whether it be that player choice will influence each instance individually, or that players can add or change things in their own shard to help it grow unique, there’s no way to know right now. That reveal trailer is giving away nothing.
Either way the game has piqued my interest in name and promise alone. Let’s just hope Citadel Studios have the talent to back up the ambition.
)
