Single World MMOs & Storytelling

Game Set Watch has an interesting article on 'Single Server' MMORPGs. The premise of the article is that sharding is the key factor in the difficulty of creating compelling game wide storylines. If one server makes one decision and another makes the opposite decision how do you release a storyline to the whole community in a compelling and engaging way? We've seen server wide events in World of Warcraft, but they have amounted to instance unlocks and the variance in the storyline has not been the story, but instead it has been the length of time to unlock the next part of the story.

As an Eve Online player I've been fascinated by the tremendous effort they put into their hardware, optimizations, and the "Largest Supercomputer in the Gaming Industry". Eve has some great story arcs if you follow them and they have a great ability to deliver those stories to the player base in their news windows and on their site because they only have to tell one story. I will say that some of the in-game effects of those story arcs are a bit thin. The story arcs happen, you get the news, but you don't always feel a part of it. However, there are other elements than just the stories that the single server allows. Including Eve Radio, which could exist in another game but not with the same connection to the game. Eve radio runs contests and the on-air personalities actually interact with the players directly. The experience would not be the same if the on-air personality had to preface everything with "Player X from Server Y says..." instead they can interact with the entire community. That's very powerful.

Another example is Eve's Council of Stellar Management. This is something that gains alot of power when you consider a single shard environment. CCP can get the playerbase involved and have player representatives elected and not worry about inter-server issues. Sure, they will have politics, but they don't have to create a governing body for each server to make sure they are represented.

Possibly the greatest factor of single shard games though is that each player's actions contribute to the other's game experience. This truly lets the game leverage its playerbase. When a corporation in Eve does something really game changing, such as the downfall of Band of Brothers or the Eve Bank Scandal, that event happend in the *world you play in*, not on some other server. Everything that happens effects you and everything you do effects everyone else. Sure, there are degrees of that effect, but the effect is there and it provides an interesting and engaging element to the game.

If game developers can get their heads and investors around the monetary investment in single server architectures I think we'll see more and more games heading that way. It's definitely something to keep an eye on.

-Stephen