Sarnaut: the world that came apart
Thousands of years ago Sarnaut was an ordinary planet — continents, seas, states, trade and wars. The largest continent was Yul, and that is where the first human civilisations rose, among them the great empire of the June, which an ancient Curse later wiped out.
Then came the Great Cataclysm. The planet broke, and what was left of it were allods: chunks of land hanging in the void and held there by magic. Every allod has its own ground, its own sky and its own edge with nothing past it. Some of them are the size of a kingdom. Some are a rock with room for one village and a dock.
The official account of what caused the Cataclysm comes from the Conclave of Great Mages, and it boils down to something simple: the Astral creates and destroys equally well, Sarnaut was the stretch where creation had the upper hand, and then it lost it. The world should have gone with it, and only did not because the mages learned to hold the balance. Which is why magic carries the weight it does here. It is not decoration on the story; it is literally what the ground under your feet rests on.
The Astral: the road and the thing most likely to kill you
The Astral is the void between the allods, and the substance everything once came out of. You cannot walk it. You can sail it. Gibberling legend says the route was found by accident: a fisherman with a drink in him fell asleep in his boat and woke up past the edge of his allod, alive only because a pebble he had picked off the riverbed was glowing and keeping the Astral off the hull. A week later the whole village had packed up and sailed, and the Era of Astral Travel had started.
That find turned into an industry. Astral ships with engines, reactors, shields and guns; crews that go deep; and the layers of the Astral, where the deeper the layer, the nastier what lives in it and the better what it drops. The fourth and deepest layer is the one Game of Gods opened.
Hence the thing that sets the game apart once you are high level: it does not come down to one more dungeon with a boss at the end of a corridor, it comes down to an entire environment. You do not reach the serious loot without a ship, a crew and an agreement about who flies when. A guild is a necessity here, not a formality. The layers, the ships and what there is to do down there are covered on the Astral page.
Two factions, six races
The surviving peoples settled into two camps. The League is Kania, the Gibberlings and the Elves; Great Mage Aidenus gathers strength around it, and its capital is Novograd. The Empire is Xadagan, the Orcs and the Arisen; Great Mage Yasker stands behind it, and its capital is Nezebgrad.
The quarrel is old and personal: Xadagan broke away from Kania before the Cataclysm, and nothing has been settled since. The League talks about honour, loyalty and dignity, the Empire about order, will and the common cause. In practice both sides are certain they are right, and neither one is giving up the astral routes.
Picking a race picks your faction and the classes open to you at the same time, so it is worth thinking about before you commit.
Nine archetypes
There are nine archetypes in 3.0: Warrior, Paladin, Scout, Healer, Warden, Mage, Summoner, Psionicist and Bard. Every race gets its own subset and its own names for them — the Kanian Mage is called a Magician, the Elf one an Archmage — and not every race can take every archetype. The full race-by-archetype table is on the classes page.
What Game of Gods brought
Update 3.0.0, “Episode II: Game of Gods”, went onto the servers at the end of October 2011, timed to the game’s birthday; Western servers know the same content as Volume 5: Game of Gods. The story is where the name comes from: the Great Mages work out that the gods are about to settle things in one decisive clash, that mortals cannot stand in it with the strength they have, and Yasker and Aidenus show their own heroes the way to Ascension.
The Bard
The ninth archetype, and not much like the other eight: it fights with music rather than with a weapon. A sword, a mace or a wand is there for the stats and for a couple of abilities — everything else is performance. There is no special class resource, nothing like combat advantage or magic instability; abilities run on energy and most of the damage is magical.
The role is group support: blessings for health and mana, for their regeneration, for physical and for magical damage. The Bard heals itself and its allies, blocks incoming control and strips it off, and can pull an opponent into melee or frighten everything standing nearby. Kanians, Xadaganians, Elves and Orcs can play one. Gibberlings and the Arisen cannot.
The cap, and what starts above it
The maximum level went up to 51, and the experience gaps between levels were cut down, so the walls you used to grind against are gone. Above the cap a separate ladder opened instead: the rank of Great, earned with Emblems of Greatness that come from clearing Dead City and from beating players at Witch’s Hollow. A Great gets a title, an extra talent point, an extra Ruby, a distinctive frame around the portrait, and a second specialisation — two sets of stats, Rubies and talents, switched between as needed.
Rebirth changed too. A progenitor who has been through the ritual once can gain a second Incarnation; an Incarnation itself cannot be reborn. The choice of abilities to carry over widened to four, but a twice-reborn character still uses only one of them — either from the first Incarnation or from the second.
Dragon Form stopped being a separate mode you switch on. The stats from Dragon Relics and from ordinary gear add together, and the form is always working. Its own numbers were cut to compensate, but the Relics became visible: they replace a weapon of the same type and role as long as the level difference is small.
Loot in the deep follows its own rules. Rewards in the fourth layer of the Astral are worked out by sector, and items off bosses drop for the whole group at once, so there is nothing to split. Upgrading became more predictable — the quality of the upgrader is what decides it now. And ship equipment stopped demanding crafting components and sacks of gold; it simply drops off bosses.
Why people come back to 3.0 specifically
What holds up about this version is that the game is already big but still holds together. The Astral is the content, not one line on a list of dailies. Gear comes out of runs where it matters who you go with. And the cap sits close enough that reaching the interesting part is not restricted to people who are online every evening.
Some come back for something specific: for the Bard, for the fourth layer, for Emblems of Greatness. Others come back for a feeling that is hard to explain to anyone who has not flown — void off the side, a sail that is not yours on the horizon, and the understanding that whatever gets agreed out there, you agree it yourselves. If that sounds right, you can start playing now.
Updated: 08/19/2026