I recently had the chance to sit down with Derek Brinkmann, the Founder and CEO of Citadel Studios, and talk about Shards Online. We discussed the details of server hosting, the core content provided on the official servers, and more.

Will the core Shards Online world consist of only the four maps listed on the roadmap?

Actually, there are a couple more maps that we’ve added since then. They’ve kind of been thrown in. Celador has an extension to it called Outlands. On the map, there’s this giant gate. On the other side of that, that’s the Outlands. That’s actually a separate map because it’s so big. We’ve added that. That’s actually going to be playable at Alpha 1, which is in a couple of months.

The other one we’ve added is Two Towers. Two Towers is a PvP map. It’s actually kind of set up to work for a MOBA. It has lanes and it has two bases—one on each side. We haven’t actually implemented any of the content for it, but the actual world building for it is complete.

Then there’s the Founders shard. All we have for that right now is a piece of concept art.

We’re trying to get away from using the word “shards” for maps because it can get a little confusing. The problem is that, in our storyline, the world before the game started was called Aria. It shattered into pieces and we called those the shards of Aria. So we were kind of calling each individual map a shard. But what happened was we really weren’t thinking very well because, when people think of shards, they think of an entire game server, not just one map. That’s where the confusion comes in.

So the Founders map, it’s basically just a dance club/bar floating in space. It’s basically just a VIP area for our early supporters. Even when the game is live, this area will be limited to just VIPs, which right now are our $75 and up levels. It’s an exclusive area and also there will be a couple of things that you can only get here and there will be one quest that you can start here that you can’t get anywhere else.

So those will be the three additional maps outside of the development roadmap.

So it will be limited to the maps shown, the Outlands, the Two Towers, and the Founders map?

In Beta, yes. The plan is to launch an additional map every three months. Our hope is to get four new maps every year after we’re in Beta.

And you’re planning to only do one set of official content, correct?

Yes. There are different rulesets, so there will be a permadeath ruleset and I think we’re also going to have a hardcore ruleset. There will probably be three official servers when we hit Beta. Then there will be the community servers where they can run whatever rules they want and, eventually, with custom assets, they will be able to run whatever maps they want, as well, not just the ones that we provide.

I ask because I had seen talk of plans for a steampunk server and a sci-fi server.

They’re actually just individual maps within the larger universe. The steampunk map is the first map after Beta. The Terminus map is the sci-fi one. It’s basically an alien world. It actually exists in a completely different dimension from the other maps. The Coliseum obviously is like a Roman-style one.

The Tower of Babel is interesting because it will kind of have multiple genres within it. Each level of the dungeon in Tower of Babel is its own dungeon in itself. It’s similar to the dungeon in Sword Art Online. Each level is really unique and custom.

Are you planning to continue to add floors to the Tower of Babel after it’s launched?

We never really thought about it that much. It really depends on the resources that we have because we’re always going to be working on new maps. The way we built the Catacombs is really interesting because we’re working towards eventually allowing modders to create custom dungeons from the Catacombs tileset that we created.

The idea is that there is potentially an unlimited number of configurations that dungeon can be built in. I suspect that Tower of Babel will be built in a similar fashion where each level can be custom-designed. You could have this concept of reusing the same level layout as you go higher and it just gets harder and harder.

Let’s say you have five different dungeon types in the Tower of Babel. So the first five levels would be those five dungeon types and then it would cycle. When you get to level six, it would be the first level, but with a different build.

So the theme would repeat every five levels or so, but the content inside would change. We could continue to add new levels that way by reusing the theme and creating a new set of content.

I’ve seen that you guys wanted to up the player limit in shards to 128 by release. I’ve also seen that there will be clusters that support thousands of players. Does that mean that the player limit is on a per shard basis instead of a per cluster basis?

It’s kind of similar to the way EVE Online does their world where each individual system that you travel to has a certain number of players on it. Actually, I think there is a limit in there somewhere, but they just let the server lag to hell when it gets overloaded. We may or may not decide to go that route.

The idea is that there is no real limit to the size of a single server because you can just keep adding regions and adding regions just like EVE Online adds systems and systems and systems. EVE has just one server. We’re going to have multiple servers just because we run different sets of rules, but the idea is that any one server has no theoretical limit to the number of players. It’s really just based on how many maps are running in that server. And that’s why we’ll only have one server for the default rules, one server for permadeath, and one server for hardcore. It’s because we can make those servers as big as we want. We can scale them up to meet the number of players that are going to play there.

So then the current 64-player limit is based on the fact that you can only have one map per cluster.

Exactly. And even the 64-player limit is going to go up when we get further along. We had committed to getting 128 players per map at Beta.

What we do is we run multiple parallel universes. It’s basically the same set of maps running multiple times within a single server. You can travel between them. There’s actually this gate on Celador that allows you to travel between alternate realities. It’s looking very dead right now because it’s not active, but when we have the ability to travel between those universes, it will activate and you will be able to travel to those alternate realities.

Every set of copies of the map, let’s say they support, comfortably, 500 players. Just throwing out a number. If we run two alternate universes, that’s 1000. If we run three, you know, and it goes up from there.

Are alternate universes the instancing that has been talked about previously?

It’s instancing without being instancing. In most games—if you look at the way City of Heroes did instances or Guild Wars—the number of instances of any one zone scale up and down based on the number of players that are online. In our game, the world is persistent. It doesn’t go anywhere. That’s really important for us because of the fact that we have housing just anywhere in the world.

We wouldn’t be able to just bring up and bring down copies of this map because this guy has a house here. We can’t bring his map down. We’re kind of doing that for the whole world, but even the dungeons don’t come up and down dynamically. We scale up the number of them just to accommodate the player population.

And it’s going to be up to server hosts to do the same once you give them the functionality?

Yeah. We have a lot of admins that are already kind of involved in the process and they’re already getting servers set up to handle running multiple maps. It’s actually really cool to watch.

What level of control are you planning to allow for custom assets?

Theoretically, there will be no limit. We want to be able to let them make new maps, new armor, new mobs—just about anything. It will be rolled out in phases. Right now, the customization is server-side, which means they can change the way the game works. They can add quests. They can add loot. They can add variations of monsters—you can make a monster bigger, you can change its color, or whatever.

But really, it comes down to the rules. You can change the way combat works. You can add combat abilities. You can add spells. So a lot of all that stuff is working already and then each of the different phases of custom assets will get more and more powerful. The next phase, I think, we’ll start allowing custom mobs and equipment first, and sounds.

We may just roll out custom assets as one giant thing. It all depends on how things lay out as we go through Alpha. But really, the idea is that we’re giving you the keys to the client where you can basically just build whatever you want assuming you have the ability to.

But will there be a base amount of content that you have to have, say skills or avatar customization?

They can basically rip everything out. You can rip our entire combat system out. You can rip out the skill system and replace it with levels. You can basically replace just about everything from a gameplay perspective, like things that you can do in the game. There’s still some UI that is not configurable, like no matter how you mod your server, you’re going to get this hotbar at the bottom. And then containers, they all appear like this. Those are things that we’re working to expand about the customizability, eventually allowing you to make a completely dynamic HUD at the bottom that’s custom to your game.

With that in mind, do you consider the world of Aria to be more of a proof of concept or stepping stone for new players than say, an official world that is meant to be played long-term?

The best way to explain that is to give you a comparison and the first one that comes to mind for me is Skyrim. When you look at people who mod Skyrim, they still generally work with the world that the game comes with. It takes years to build a game, even with all of the engine built for you and you just have these modding tools. To go and say “I’m building an entire game from scratch,” it’s a stretch. It would be a lot of work.

What I suspect will happen with mods is that they’re going to start small. Somebody makes a new monster or somebody makes a questline, but it’s all generally still in this world or at least working with the majority of the maps that we provide. Then they’ll start going out a little bit further, making a custom map that is only available on their server.

It may take a year before we see the first complete game mod where you log into that server and it looks nothing like the game of Shards Online. I see that happening, but it’s not going to happen right out of the gate. You have to give modders time to learn the tools and they have to start small and work their way up. Whenever I’m working with the admins, I always make sure I encourage them to start small because if they go “okay, I’m going to make this MechWarrior world with Shards Online,” it’s like “well, not so fast. You need to take small steps.”

I envision five years from now when you log into five different servers and you get five completely different game experiences where they don’t even feel the same. Five years from now—it may not even be that far—we talk about allowing you to maintain the same avatar, even when you travel across rules. You can have the same character name. Some of the properties can travel from server to server even if one’s hardcore and one’s easy. This concept of you having a single avatar that travels across all the worlds of Shards Online, that’s the kind of big picture stuff where there’s really only one cluster, kind of like EVE Online where you have one server.

What items you can bring to worlds is dependent on the agreement between those two worlds. Maybe I have a level-based server and he’s coming from a server that’s skill-based. I’ll have to basically start with a fresh character, but I can keep his appearance. I can keep the way his face looks. Maybe he can keep some of the clothing that he has. It’s just going to be based on restrictions that they put in place for characters traveling from other sets of rules.

That’s kind of big picture down the line. We really eventually want to have just one world, one giant universe.

And everyone will eventually have access to the server software?

Yes. It’s going to work a lot like Minecraft. If you own Minecraft, you can run a Minecraft server. That is going to translate to this game. When we’re on Steam Early Access, if you buy the game on Steam, you have access to run a server.

Connecting servers together requires a central piece that we call a cluster. That’s the piece that connects all of the maps that you’re running together. We will be offering that. We will be hosting it.

At the beginning, we’re going to be offering it for free. As soon as we roll out clusters, we’re going to let our admins that we have now run clusters without charging them. But at some point, we may have to actually start having some sort of monthly fee for running your own multi-region server. You can still just fire up the server and run a single map, but if you want to connect them together, you have to use a cluster.

To run a cluster, do you have to have multiple computers running multiple shards?

It depends on what shards are running and how many of them. I can run one copy of every single map that we have right now, which is Celador, Two Towers, Limbo, Outlands, and Catacombs. I can run all five of those on one machine and it runs fine. So really, it depends on the number of players you’re supporting and how many maps you want to host. It all depends.

It’s really going to come down to trial and error for the admins. You can easily fire up a single map on one server without any trial and error. You can do it within seconds. But if you’re trying to set up a server that’s going to support, let’s say, 1000 players, it’s going to take some figuring out. Also, as we go through the process, other admins will have experiences like “oh, it works very well on this cloud service” or “oh, I was able to run five Celadors on this type of instance.” That information will permeate through the community of people who are running servers.

It’s kind of never really been done before. The only games that you can draw parallels to that for are Neverwinter Nights. Those guys set up the game so they can connect multiple maps. And you also have games like, well, gray shards like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft emulated servers. They’ve kind of done stuff like that, but it was never easy because the company never really set it up with that intention. This is kind of the first game that has that intention of allowing players to connect multiple maps together in an RPG setting. It’s kind of never been done before.

Are you eventually planning to allow hosts to monetize their clusters or shards?

We actually don’t have any plans to restrict it. This question has definitely come up with the admins before and the only thing we can say is we don’t plan to stop it.

It’s one of those situations where, in the beginning, we probably won’t officially support it, but we also won’t consider it outside of the EULA. What that means is that, if you decide to monetize your shard, all the legal stuff that goes along with that falls on you. We’re not going to take any legal responsibility for you collecting money. We’ll probably going to have you treat it like a donation. You can offer people that play on your server the option to donate to your server costs kind of thing. We’ll basically just say “look, we’re not going to stop you. If you want to build a mod that has an in-game store and people actually donate money and it gives them points in the in-game store, go for it.” As long as we can pull it off from a legal standpoint, we have no problem with it.

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Shards Online can be played now by pledging $40 or more. Steam Early Access will happen later this year.