Shards Online: Letter from Derek Brinkmann; Community Roundtable Upcoming
Shards Online project director Derek Brinkmann posted an update to the game’s website recently, to give the Shards community a bit of an update on the development progress being made on the game.
The team has been heads down working on the project since Kickstarter. It is great to be able to turn my focus back towards development and getting Shards Online to Alpha. The focus of the development team is on two areas right now; making progress on the first map and getting our server in the hands of our Early Admins. In addition, we have been planning some really fun events for our Pre-alpha Playtesters to keep the feedback rolling in.
Celador, our first alpha map, is really starting take shape. In addition to the quarry and village area shown during Kickstarter, we are building out the Black Forest, Lower Plains, and Lake Tethys. These are the primary areas of the map where players will be building houses. We expect to get these areas into the hands of our playtesters sometime in March.
We are also working on polishing up the blueprints for the initial set of player houses we plan to provide in Alpha. We are already up to 10 different house blueprints and I myself cannot wait to get my first house built in Celador.
The houses can be seen above, alongside a screenshot of one of the areas Brinkmann mentions: the Black Forest.
We also have lots of things in the pipe! The resource gathering, house placement and cooking systems are past initial design and are ready to begin development. We are also fleshing out the content and stories for the residents of Eldeir Village and the denizens of the graveyard.
Finally, on the player run server front, I have been personally working to optimize the Lua script engine to make sure we have the ability to support enough servers for all of our Pre-alpha Admins. We also have the server admin web interface in early stages of development. The next major tasks would be script cleanup and documentation and the Modder’s handbook.
Additionally, Citadel Studios are planning a playtest event for January 31st, and will be hosting the first of several community roundtables on February 7th.
Hmm, don’t like the language they’re using that states there will be primary areas where players will be building houses. It could be inferred that there are places where building houses is disallowed, which is what SotA is doing. Sorta goes against the spirit of the whole thing. Perhaps they’re assuming people will primarily be building their houses there simply because the terrain is conducive. Or they could be selling house deeds… 🙂
As I recall, even UO limited where houses could be built to some degree. Probably necessary to do so; players will as often as not opt to be assholes, even when it comes to where to place their dwellings.
That’s what local zoning ordinances and enforcement, including burning the place down, are for. 🙂
Don’t restrictions of this nature just move that one level up? Burning the place down and making it impossible to build the place in the first place have the same net outcome, albeit one involves less death and pyrotechnics.
They do. The problem is at some point you’ll be staring at your root directory in your file manager, pretending its brief list of files and directories are an entire world, when in fact it’s just the root directory in your file manager and above the surface lies a much deeper tree.
The difference is that allowing people to do something that a little voice in the back of their minds says they shouldn’t do, then having realistic consequences for that action are the essence of a story. What happens when you give in to temptation and kiss your best friend’s wife while half drunk at a party? Little mistakes can add up to grand adventure. If people die in the process, all the more dramatic. Letting people do the wrong thing, fail a little, suffer a consequence, is what the complexities of emergent stories are built from. Action and reaction without end or even agreement on who started it. It’s better to let a player in full plate walk into the ocean and drown than to make the water impenetrable.
I like the “do it and see what happens” philosophy over the “you can’t do it because we think it would be bad” philosophy.