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Player-Run MMORPG By Former Ultima Online Devs Finding Kickstarter Success
An anonymous reader writes: Shards Online has returned to Kickstarter with a refocused plan and a promise to match pledges dollar-for-dollar up to their goal. With just a week gone by, they have already reached 75% of their goal. Project Lead Derek Brinkmann says, "If Ultima Online and Neverwinter Nights had a love child, Shards Online would be the result. By combining the persistent virtual world of Ultima Online with the freedom of community run servers and the ability to act as a dungeonmaster in Neverwinter Nights, we are creating a paradise for roleplayers where you are no longer constrained by the rules handed to you by the development team." The team now has their sights set on their stretch goals like more animations for roleplayers and an extra game world to be released at Alpha.
We should mention that this is actually Round #2 with Kickstarter.
When we didn't reach our first goal, we continued development with our own money (as we had been doing from the inception of the game). As former leads on Ultima Online, we have a solid vision for what we want to bring forward to the gaming world, as well as the sandbox and production experience to make it happen.
Kickstarter is all about accelerating and enhancing development of our core tech. One nice thing that differentiates us from most Kickstarters that have a bunch of concept art and a pitch is that we have a working game already built. Now it's all about fleshing it out into a full MMO so we're not just recreating a middleware market.
Shards Online is all about building an amazing sandbox game, and then giving the full content over to players.