Are there multiple worlds/servers/shards or one huge single shared world?
With MMOGs, one thing we like to say is ‘Content is King’. There’s nothing more challenging than filling a huge virtual world up with interesting content, points of interest, quests/missions, NPCs, etc. We believe very strongly in a hand-crafted, interesting, immersive world, and this takes the artists, world builders, and designers a long time to make. So, from our perspective, creating one vast world as opposed to a traditional ‘shard’ system just wouldn’t be worth it… the content would be spread out way to thin and you’d probably just have repetitive terrain going on and on for hundreds of miles. An MMOG world should be interesting; in fact, it should be more interesting than the real world, with more fantastic views and settings, and more of them. Currently, in order to provide enough interesting and compelling content, we think multiple game worlds or “shards” are the way to go.
