Citadel Studios recently released an update to the development roadmap for Legends of Aria, the spiritual successor to Ultima Online that was formerly known as Shards Online:

At long last, our Roadmap has been updated! We are already hard at work on many of the things we need, but the thing we’ll need the most is out of our hands: Feedback and bug reports. You are both the secret weapon and the secret ingredient.

Here’s the plan so far. In June, after a patch or two, we will move into what we are calling “Open Beta.” We will be at a point where we need to start addressing the issues we can only find with lots of people. What this means in practice is that we’ll start handing out free trial keys very freely. I especially want to hear from guilds and guild masters in order to do some large group testing before the real free for all begins.

July marks the Final Wipe for Legends of Aria and our Early Access Launch. Kickstarters and Founders will begin their one week headstart and the land rush will begin.

Early Access will not be available on the Steam platform; No MMO is ever finished and they certainly experience growing pains – we expect balance issues and bugs, and probably a rollback or two (meaning we reset the game to a point a few hours in the past to undo the effects of a major problem), but it will be time to start building the living world that is Aria.

And time to start giving out the some of the various rewards for our Kickstarter and Founder’s Pack friends, who made this whole thing possible. Furniture, pets, titles, and virtual clothes are first out of the gate; more information on each reward to come as we get them out the door.

There’s a smashing new in-game screenshot as well, showing off some sort of castle. Citadel Studios also point out that the Steam release of the game is — deliberately — not on the updated roadmap. They are evidently holding off on bringing the game to that platform until they have time to market it to the community there, which is probably not a bad idea.