When Citadel Studios announced back in April that it was planning to relaunch the Kickstarted MMORPG Legends of Aria (fka Shards Online) as a “Classic” version on Steam, it came with some heavy caveats – namely, the fact that Citadel had sold the game to a crypto game developer, which has since spent the last two and a half years seemingly going nowhere fast. Now it’s going nowhere at all, as the devs have abandoned the crypto part of the project entirely.
When the buyout originally went down in 2021, the legacy server for Aria was tucked away in the corner of a Discord, and the new owners tried and failed to remake the game into a pay-to-earn monstrosity modeled with Ultima Online stylings and called Britaria. There was even a failed attempt to mint crypto tokens and sell pay-to-win packages. By last summer, Britaria’s devs admitted that they stood to lose the game’s IP rights owing to the precise terms of the deal with Citadel – and the fact that development of the crypto game had been much slower than the devs expected. Throughout 2024, the devs have tinkered with pre-alpha events, and then in April, the crypto owners (currently operating as Moonglow Games, as far as we know) acknowledged that Citadel was reviving Legends of Aria, telling its dwindling Discord that “there’s nothing abnormal going on” and that Citadel’s Derek Brinkmann was “still a close advisor to the Britaria project.”
In any case, now Moonglow has made clear that Britaria is dead – and in fact, it’s for sale. As first noticed by MMO Fallout, last night in Discord the devs announced they’ve ended development of the game.
“It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that our team can no longer continue operating this project and will soon be preparing to shut it down. While we have faced numerous challenges, both financially and technically, working with legacy code, your support has made us press on and get this far. Unfortunately, despite all our efforts, continuing operations has become untenable due to financial constraints.”
The company says it’s “opening a 60-day window for interested community members or external parties to submit bids to take over the project.” It’s also muted its Discord, so players can’t talk about it there.
They’re talking about it on the Legends of Aria Classic Discord, however, as development on that version of the non-crypto game under Citadel marches on. It launched May 9th and laid out a massive roadmap just a few weeks ago – as well as postponed the start of its subscription. So it’s almost like the last three years just… never happened. Except, of course, that they did, and MMO players – and Kickstarter backers – aren’t likely to forget.
More on Classic:
More on the buyout saga:
