MMORPG News - Designing a Single Server MMORPG @ GameSetWatch

GameSetWatch have a piece from designer and Divide by Zero Games founder James Portnow who explains the advantages of having a single shard MMO server, which has a lot of advantages and a big disadvantage as far as development cost is concerned.

We won’t be able to provide meaningful stories in MMOs until we can allow the players to affect the world they play in. Currently, this is impossible because of the nature of “shards”, “mirrored worlds”, or, as they are best known, “servers” (though this last term is somewhat inaccurate).

The reason for this is: If players on Server A can make choices that differ from those made by players on Server B and those choices actually impact the game world, on the development side you soon end up with a fracturing storyline and so much content to develop that you’ll be fast on your way to learning a lot about bankruptcy court.

There are many ways to solve this problem, my favorite of which is a largely instantiated world tied together with an overarching story structure (I know that’s a dense sentence – come to one of my talks, you’ll find out exactly what I mean by it – but, as it doesn’t really affect the rest of the article, I’m not going to steal more of your valuable time by parsing it).