Producer Steve Snow has posted an update on the state of Horizons: Empires of Istaria over at the official Horizons website.  Some of the highlights:

Two systems that are currently being focused on are Combat and Community Building. As the next three months go by, players will start to see fixes and optimizations rolled out two these two systems on a technical side. The art team is finishing up a very interesting addition to the game that I cannot talk about just yet as that would ruin the surprise. Once that is done they are going to start building more monsters. I've seen some of the concepts for them and they are looking pretty cool. There have been a few discussions regarding the Shadow Dragon. I want to clearly point out that the Shadow Dragon is not meant to fill any role other than a part of the Rite of Passage. He is in the game right now so we can see how he functions in a combat situation. Whether he stays the way he is or gets harder is yet to be determined. But rest assured, he will not hook into anything other than the dragon advancement quest. We don't want people farming him and preventing dragons from completing the Rite of Passage because part of their quest is constantly camped. Yes, this does mean that we are in the final phase of testing for Dragon advancement and players should expect to see this very soon!

You can read the entire update by following this link.