Kinda seems like the announcement was mostly to get attention for whatever the new game is, by stepping on the upcoming Eden launch. The DAOC community doesn’t seem to be large enough to support two active free shards. Given the typical free shard life cycle, any Eden launch within six months would just split the user base into unplayable small communities. It to mention the nascent Era of Camelot project.
Era of Camelot is yet another freeshard under development. Its website is
https://eraofcamelot.com/
Its discord has been pretty quiet; I think the dev team wisely took the opportunity of the Eden launch to go more heads-down on their work, and not try to compete for attention or fragment the player base.
I have no feel for whether Era of Camelot will come to fruition, or if it does whether it will be good. But it's there.