Pantheon’s Brad McQuaid has another new blog post up – he’s on a roll this week – this one on alternate rulesets in MMORPGs and the MMO’s multi-server structure. “I really think the idea of alternate rule-set servers/realms, while dabbled with, have never (yet) reached their true potential,” he says, arguing that there’s a “fine line” between managing to stick to what gives the core game its identity and being willing to experiment with “variations on a theme” that enhance rather than “threaten or violate that core, that magic, that x factor.”
He also downplays the desire for single-shard MMOs, citing the desire to create communities that are “not too small and not too big” with plenty of content for the number of players accessing them on each individual server out of many. In fact, he throws a little bit of shade on devs who are “bragging about world size, or creating a truly seamless world, or using CPU and memory to create virtual mega-cities is all at odds with our objectives.”
“Outside of ‘now it’s possible’, don’t get the fascination with having fewer Realms, or even one mega-Realm. Sure, it’s cool that it’s possible now. Yes, I can envision some MMO or other online game genre or design trying to use the ‘everyone is truly in one shared world’ as a feature or an enhancement or that it somehow makes things possible in terms of gameplay that wasn’t possible in the past. But for Pantheon it really comes down to Community, Content, and Alternate Rulesets, and all three work better with more Realms, not fewer.”
