A love letter to the golden age of Classic MMOs

Welcome to Thallun: a warm, lived-in fantasy world sitting on the bones of an extraordinary age that time forgot. Pick your side, master your class, and step into an unhurried world built for the journey.

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Recapture the adventure

Oath & Shard is a love letter to the golden age of classic tab-target MMORPGs, when worlds felt vast and dangerous, classes had unmistakable identity, and walking from one town to the next felt like an actual adventure.

A World Meant to Be Explored

In Oath & Shard, we've built a world that feels worth exploring. In every zone, max-level sections encourage players to cross paths, so there are opportunities for new and veteran players to see each other and interact. Day and night cycles affect the world in subtle ways, bringing forth new dangers and unlocking secrets for those who know where to look. And of course, you'll be keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground, traveling the spaces between towns and dungeon entrances, so there are plenty of serendipitous encounters and the world feels alive.

A Place Where Reputation Matters

There are no megaservers, no invisible sharding layers, and no automated cross-realm dungeon queues here. You play on a distinct server with a real community you will see every single night. Because grouping takes a conversation (checking the town dungeon board, asking in chat, or whispering a friend), your reputation is your most valuable stat. Being remembered as the Bulwark who never drops threat, the Cleric who saved a botched pull, or that one rival across the faction line you've been trading ambushes with for the past two months is what gives the game its meaning.

Deliberate Pace, Tactical Pulls

Out in the countryside, leveling follows that classic, deeply satisfying rhythm: picking up a cluster of overlapping quests at an inn, heading out for a long loop through the wilds, and coming back with bags full and half a dozen turn-ins waiting. Step into a public camp or a 5-player dungeon, and the pace asks you to think before you swing. Tanks don't get effortless room-wide threat, and enemy packs aren't uniform blobs of health meant to be AoE'd down on the run. Every pull is a small puzzle of positioning, crowd control, and kill order: scout the room, mark the healer, lock down the caster, survive the pull, drink up, and move on.

An Economy Built for Crafting

In Oath & Shard, the best weapons and armor come from quests, dungeons, and raids. Our crafting professions exist exclusively to make everything around that gear better: potions, flasks, feasts, enchants, socketed gems, and engineering contraptions. Because those items are consumed or re-applied with every upgrade, demand never expires. Whether you're trading face-to-face in Valdris Harbor, shipping C.O.D. orders through the mailbox, or playing the Auction House, being a dedicated crafter makes you an indispensable fixture of your server.

Living in the Bones of a Forgotten Age

A hundred generations ago, the Draconic War shattered the rule of the great wyrms. Today, history has faded into myth, and myth into pious allegory. Farmers deal with wolf problems, hucksters run desert tourist traps, and kings bicker over trade routes, all while living inside the marbled ruins of a First Age which has been long forgotten.

On the surface, Thallun is mundane, humorous, and grounded. Underneath, the old powers, and the wild magic of the Aether, are stirring back to life.

Two Alliances Locked in Conflict

The Oathfast

Races
Humans & Dwarves
Capital
Valdris Harbor

Heirs to the ancient oath sworn at the end of the Draconic War, the humans hold the great ports and ancestral cities, though they've long forgotten who originally built them. Beside them stand the dwarves. Their ancestral memory drove them out of the dark and onto the sea as pirates and treasure-hunters.

The Shard

Races
Orcs & The Touched
Capital
Khar'thal

Pushed to the wilds and the margins of the world. Declining the ancient oaths, the orcs withdrew into the deep wilderness as keepers of nature and the Aether, knowing survival depends on that power remaining strong. Allied with them are the Touched: humans forever altered by exposure to wild magic, scorned by the Oathfast and forging their own future on the frontier.

Classes & Specializations
Distinct strengths, and deliberate weaknesses.

Every class in Oath & Shard has two distinct specializations you can switch between when in a rest area, built around unique resource systems and iconic class fantasies. No class can do everything. Bringing a group together means combining toolkits that genuinely need each other.

Warrior

TankMeleePlate armor

Plate, steel, and Rage built from every blow given and taken. A Bulwark holds the line behind a shield; a Vanguard opens wounds with a two-handed weapon and finishes what bleeds.

Bulwark

Tank
A Bulwark's training begins with being hit and continues, with short breaks, for the rest of their career.
How it plays

A shield tank who answers every attack. Blocking, dodging or parrying readies Riposte, and your strikes can reset Iron Bash and make it free. Brace raises your block chance ahead of a heavy hit.

Key resources
Rage
Builds as you take hits and deal damage, and your strikes spend it. It drains away out of combat.
Signature abilities

Vanguard

Melee DPS
Vanguards are taught to end fights quickly, partly on principle and partly because they gave up the shield.
How it plays

A melee fighter with a two-handed weapon who opens wounds and finishes off bleeding foes. Keeping Bloodletting on the target readies Punish, a strike that always crits, and Cull ends the fight once the target is nearly dead.

Key resources
Rage
Builds as you deal damage and take hits, and your strikes spend it. It drains away out of combat.
Signature abilities

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the development status of Oath & Shard?

We are currently in active early development! Our core server architecture, combat engine, class kits, social systems, and initial leveling zones and dungeons are up and running, and we are actively building out the world of Thallun zone by zone. We are targeting running our first Alpha tests in early 2027.

Does Oath & Shard support solo play? What group content is there?

Our general philosophy is that you should have plenty of content available (such as quests) to get you from min to max level even if you are a solo player. However, we believe that fundamentally, MMORPGs are about groups, and therefore we always tune the leveling curve such that doing at least some group content (such as doing each instanced dungeon) is always worthwhile.

At the end-game, Oath & Shard will feature a classic approach of offering Heroic Instanced Dungeons designed for 5-player groups, epic quests which will require both solo and group components, and 20-player raids for those looking for the highest challenge in the game.

How can I follow development or join future playtests?

Join our Discord and subscribe to our YouTube channel! We'll be sharing regular devlogs, zone walkthroughs, class deep-dives, and announcements whenever community playtests open up.

What will the game cost when it releases?

We are still finalizing our plans, but at this stage we will most likely go with a subscription fee model with no base game cost. We think it's important to make sure that the game has a sustainable future, and having a subscription fee provides recurring revenue which aligns the interests of the player base and the development team to ensure that new content is created on a regular basis.

To be clear, Oath & Shard will never have "pay to win" mechanics such as level boosts, "real money for currency" tokens, or anything of that nature.