MMORPG.com got a preview of Celador, the main world of Shards Online, rather recently, and came away full of anticipation:

Pre-Alpha 2 will be running in the current small-ish and “demo” map of Uaran, but when Pre-Alpha 3 hits players will finally have access to the first official map of Celador. Sort of the quinstessential storybook map, Celador is mostly complete as it is now. Derek toured me around the area using god-speed but expect Celador to be roughly the size of 3 or 4 zones in Azeroth, as an example. There are thieve’s guilds, ruins, the Dead Gate and hosts of other POIs for players to explore and interact with.

We saw the Plains area, the intended main housing area. You can put houses pretty much anywhere in Celador, but this one is just a more open and easy place to build them properly. Derek also showed me the Dead Gate, an immense stone portal that when activated, will allow you to travel to alternate shards. In the lore, this is basically the device that players will use to travel between the alternate dimensions (or player-run shards). Any given cluster of player-run shards will have as many copies of Celador as is needed (the only map where housing takes place, and the Dead Gate will let you travel between alternate copies.

But how does one open the Gate? That’s something Derek didn’t want to give too much away for yet, but there will be a server event in-game to unlock the gate. Once you open it, you can travel to any other shard in the cluster. What’s funny though is that the first Shard to open the gate will still have to wait for others to open the other side before they can travel elsewhere.

It must be said: the Citadel Studios team seem to be doing a marvelous job at world-building; the screenshots of Celador featured in the article are really nothing short of gorgeous.