Shards Dev Roundtable Streaming Now! July 5th

Thebeasttt

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Wizardry

The concept is good but as i was watching i remembered why this just won't work.

The first thing every gamer looks for is heavily populated servers.This concept will have all the gamer's off making and designing their own servers,leaving for an empty solo minded community.

The way this concept NEEDS to work is the developer runs the servers and gives each player a certain limit,perhaps even charge to upload content to the main server.There is yet another problem...."limitations" you won't be able to allow total 100% freedom on content uploads.Example ...you can't allow me to upload an elite sword of epicness with +500 stats ,so you catch my drift.
Point being if the dev is going to apply limitations then they might as well just create the entire game,it really is not an easy concept to pull off.
I mean everyone can can go out and download the unreal dev kit "UDK",script and run their own servers and as long as not profiting can do the same basic thing cost free,so why pay Shards to do something that is totally free already?

Logrus_CS

Wizardry said:

The concept is good but as i was watching i remembered why this just won't work.

The first thing every gamer looks for is heavily populated servers.This concept will have all the gamer's off making and designing their own servers,leaving for an empty solo minded community.

The way this concept NEEDS to work is the developer runs the servers and gives each player a certain limit,perhaps even charge to upload content to the main server.There is yet another problem...."limitations" you won't be able to allow total 100% freedom on content uploads.Example ...you can't allow me to upload an elite sword of epicness with +500 stats ,so you catch my drift.
Point being if the dev is going to apply limitations then they might as well just create the entire game,it really is not an easy concept to pull off.
I mean everyone can can go out and download the unreal dev kit "UDK",script and run their own servers and as long as not profiting can do the same basic thing cost free,so why pay Shards to do something that is totally free already?

Shards by itself is a full game, with official servers and content developed and run by Citadel. 

Players will also be able to run their own servers if they choose (as part of the same purchase of the game), which are separate from Citadel's servers.  Player run worlds/shards can be connected together to form clusters (as long as they are running the same rulesets.)   The only thing beyond purchase price would be the clustering tech to interconnect multiple shards.


We expect there will be many gamers just looking to either stay only on the official worlds, or just as likely find a community world with mods and rulesets they like and spend their entirety playing there. Developing and running a game is time consuming, at the outset there will probably be a myriad of player run shards to choose from as alternatives from the Citadel run game, but these will be whittled pretty quickly to the most innovative and well administered ones. 
Players would be free to make their elite sword of epicness, but it would only exist on their own shard or cluster and much like any  other game's servers where admins do stupid stuff like that it would be empty pretty quickly and avoided thereafter.


Regarding going out and downloading a game engine or dev kit and then scripting and running their own game being the same thing as Shards; I'd say the majority of our early admin program supporters which bought in at $200 or more, are probably some of the people who went out and did just that. Only to find the fact is simply that most if not all the options out there are either tools for helping game developers, or games that allow you to tweak some of the rules of gameplay. 

Since we provide not only the game engine, (client and server), and assets (art, animations, effects, sounds etc) but also the actual working game. Thats essentially a copy of what the official servers are running, including all the scripts that are running the game world. Which means they can launch their server 5 minutes after installing with just a config update. And since they have the running scripts for the entire game, (which are modable and replaceable), they aren't stuck just tweaking rules.  There are already early admin adopters, working on their own worlds which run class/level based systems rather than sandbox. There are people working on custom death systems , D6 combat systems,and a myriad of other things. We even have an educator leveraging the game as a teaching platform.

Thebeasttt

They really need to go all or nothing with the customization. If you can make a world with custom rules, races and combat I'm sold. If not this project will largely be a waste of time.