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[Interview] Shards Online: It's a Revolution in MMOs - The Freedom to Create
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
Shards Online is a game that in its understated way is going to change the way MMOs are developed by bringing the community to bear in a way that has never been done before. Citadel Studios is committed to creating something different and unique that places the powers of creation into the hands of the people who love MMOs so they can provide experiences to players who are oftentimes disappointed by the genre these days.
Read more of Suzie Ford's Shards Online: It's a Revolution in MMOs That is All About Freedom.
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Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Comments
O wait i think i see this words fews thousands times!!!!!!!
Hype 0 util release and i test(maybe)
Umm...maybe i just do not get it yet. But this seems made to be pretty much a super niche game. Maybe a few of your friends will log in and play with you.
But the main selling point is everyone makes their own world and rules? Kinda sounds like it defeats the purpose of a MMO to me. Will be hundreds of servers out there all basically different games?
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
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I have access to Pre Alpha and love it!
The creation interface surely is not yet there where it should be, after all it's PreAlpha which means "not even Alpha"! But even in this limited not-yet-mature stage its amazing what you can do. The Lua scripting environment and the API provided by CS is very approachable and evolving from week to week in tight contact with the community. You can even go down to each single swing of a sword and control whats happening there, so we basically have access to the very core game engine. And the developers listen! There is an issue tracking and idea submission system which together with the IRC channel and the forums creates a development ecosystem in whish developers and community can work together efficiently.
Creation is not mainly about boasting the latest graphics à la Skyrim or other AAA games, its about giving US the freedom to create like never seen before in an RPG.
The NWN PWs became awesome because of what the community made of it, but there were serious technical quirks to overcome and when the Master Server was shut down we all were let down. Derek Brinkmann has clearly stated in one of the last roundtables that this will not happen with Shards Online and if Citadel ever goes down they will release something to free us from any "phone home" protections.
It surely is a niche market, but a highly interesting one. I personally was never interested in commercial MMOs and only played a bit of UO and mostly on NWN worlds. WoW is boring to me as well as most other MMOs I have tried. Its a huge difference if you develop a community of players and developers who create and shape a virtual envoironment together or if you just consume a commercial product.
Cheers
Chris a.k.a. "Yorlik"
Arcanima Project Moderator
http://www.arcanima.org
http://www.arcanima.org
Hey Dan, I understand your concerns, but comparing the graphics of Shards Online to Ultima Online is a bit unfair. We have some nice in-game shots on our Screenshots page.
We are also always working to improve the graphical look of the game. We have come a long way even since the Kickstarter campaign.
http://www.arcanima.org
Except character progress gets lost 90% of the time since you can only keep character progress within a shard cluster.. the moment you want to join a different cluster you need to make a new character for that cluster.
https://ashesofcreation.com/r/Y4U3PQCASUPJ5SED
I believe there was a misunderstanding. Characters are kept within a cluster as long as not some additional thing gets developed.
But the limit to the size of a cluster is dictated by the available hardware. So - if you are rich or have enough donators and want want to provide a world as large as 10,000 players you can do it.
AFAIK the final limit per single shard (where a cluster can consist of dozens or hundreds of these) is not yet set but will be at least 128 players, maybe 256 or something in that ballpark. So basically it all scales up with how many single shards your available hardware (which could be a cluster of host computers) can run. A single shard in a cluster can be seen a a gamezone, like a city or a forest. Character transition within a cluster from shard to shard is seamless and transparent to the player even between different host computers . Its like portaling or to compare it to NWN like the transition between maps. But single shard maps are much bigger than a NWN maps, you typically need round about 30 minutes to run straight from one end to the other.
http://www.arcanima.org
I'll go back for another look later. But I am pretty sure Sword Coast coming out the end of this year scratches this itch for me.
Along with club worlds is trove.
This is no different than it is for other MMOs. I have characters on many servers in Ultima Online, Everquest, WoW ect.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Ok, Shard just went to the top of my list of future MMOs. And easily, this sounds awesome.
We could actually make an MMORPG.com shard made by and for the people here.
That would be awesome.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, you can usually pay to move but it honestly don't work on custom shads. Then someone would run a cheat shard incredible easy with superloot.
If you don't want the problem you just play on the shards the devs run, but the potential is just incredible.
With a player created dungeon database you can add to it means a lot of choices, some servers can have short fast dungeons while others have long EQ styled ones instead. And it makes finding all solutions on the official wiki way harder, we could actually get some puzzle stuff players have to solve themselves in dungeons again (those went away with wikis).
Not too mention how much content there will be in the game, Biowares Neverwinter nights had thousands of player run servers already back then. The only thing is that there have to be some ratings on how good stuff actually is, some shards will suck while others will be great depending on who created the stuff.
I like this, it have a lot of pen and paper over it. There are many really talented dungeon and story creators who only has it as a hobby and this have the potential of devs from MMO companies discovering talented people in a way we never seen before.
I can't wait to get my hands on this.
The screenshots look amazing to me.
I am really looking forward to this game. In my ideal world I would have in my gaming rotation one mmo on rails and another like this that is open ended.
I was always amazed at how talented people were at creating modules for Neverwinter Nights. If Shards is an upgrade to this experience I will definitely be playing.
Del Cabon
A US Army ('Just Cause') Vet and MMORPG Native formerly of Trinsic, Norath and Dereth. Currently playing LOTRO.
What I understand can't you move players from the private servers to official ones.
It would be easy to add some kind of system that let the shard admin allow you to move or copy a character that is balanced for the server though and they could implement a score value for the gear to make it easy. Then it would be up to the shards admin or owner to decide if you could move characters to it at all, if certain character that have the right power could be moved or if everyone have to start from scratch.
But that certain servers will be easy and others hard is a strenght, it is a huge problem with modern MMOs since players enjoy different difficulties but most games use about the same one. If you decide to play on super easy shards should be your decision even if it means you can't freely move between them.
I truly don't know an easy way to do this but i do know this is not enough for me.
The way i like it to happen is give us say an Unreal Engine and tools and allows us to import our own content into our own shards.Then you have a loading and unloading system so that files are not too large.You obviously cannot store a million shards of ideas on each players HD,that is why i said load/unload data.
Sure it might take 5 maybe even 10 minutes to download the data before you can enter a shard but it just gives each shard a better looking game.You can still have shared assets if people don't want to make an entire zone from scratch as well.
To me this way you always have to use low end graphics and that just does not excite me.Also being a budget game there is only so many assets,so it will be exactly like NWO and the way quests were done.After a week or so you begin to see the same stuff over and over just shifted around a bit differently and it gets real boring real fast.My point is you NEED NEW player made assets or it is just NWO questing all over again but instead of some small tavern you get shifted around full maps.
I would still be willing to try this game out,perhaps they somehow can manage to pull this off,until then i would be very skeptical of this attempted game design.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.