Worlds Adrift has updated its website with a new design-focused blog that sheds quite a bit of light on how the game will play. The dev team envisions a “vast, dangerous world” where “the systems have as few rules as possible to really push a more open sandbox environment.”
Since the entire game is built around physics, it’s impossible for the devs to disable PvP interactions and have the world function as intended. “When a player gets hit by a cannonball he isn’t killed because cannonballs do X amount of damage to players, but because a cannonball weighs 20kgs and hit the player at 30 m/s,” the post explains. “A cannonball hit kills a player the same way a rock falling on her head kills her, the same way a tree trunk rolling onto her kills her, and the same way a ship crushing her kills her. So while we could turn off cannonball damage, we’d also need to try and determine if it was a player who caused the rock or tree to kill another player, when it could have happened due to a creature – or herself!”
That said, the devs “want player encounters to be relatively rare,” and they will be “working very hard” to prevent the game from devolving into a typical griefbox.
[Source: Freeform multiplayer; thanks Dengar!]
