Citadel Studios released another newsletter for Shards Online community members earlier today. One piece of content therefrom, a letter from the game’s new producer, is also visible on the Shards website:

Greetings Attuned Mortals and Immortals alike! Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brett ‘Strig’ Robinson and I’ve recently joined the Citadel Studios team as Executive Producer.

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I am joining Citadel Studios at a really exciting time. Shards Online is taking a truly innovative approach to the MMORPG and while still early in development, Shards is already in a playable and enjoyable state. More than that, I have had a chance to tinker with modding, and even in Pre-Alpha and without our full spectrum of planned tools I am amazed at how powerful and flexible it is. The ability to completely mod the game from top to bottom to create your own unique Shards experience is going to be one of SO’s most exciting and powerful facets; providing what so many MMOs claim to offer but fail to deliver: a truly infinite amount of content to explore.

However, those of you who follow Shards may be interested in some of the other information contained in the newsletter, so I’ll try and highlight what I think are the interesting bits. There will, to begin with, be a pre-alpha playtest of the Celador shard on Saturday, May 9th at 2:00 PM Eastern Time:

Celador is coming along so beautifully that we felt with a little extra effort we could get you all in and playing earlier than expected. What’s more, we have some exciting new features we’d like to have your feedback on, and the best place to test them out is on the Celador Shard.

We will have an early glimpse into our Harvesting and Crafting system, the Day/Night and lighting systems, and as we mentioned in the Community Roundtable, we have made some fairly sweeping changes to the AI system.

Citadel Studios also released a few images of Celador in its current state, to better illustrate just what pre-alpha players can look forward to:

Just prior to the playtest, at 1:00 PM Eastern Time, there will also be another community roundtable session; you should email community-AT-citadelstudios.net by May 7th if you’d like to take part in the roundtable voice chat.

Oh, and Citadel Studios are also wondering if they should sell t-shirts for Shards Online.