If somebody wants to build a house in a bay in an icy biome, and they can’t find that location on their own server, they can always go to another server to search.
I watched this dev diary, embedded below, and that little phrase right there set off fireworks in my brain. Jeff Butler and Rosie Rappaport are not talking about making a new character to explore another server – they’re talking about using the fast travel nodes that they call leylines to travel not only between locations on your own server, but to other servers as well! I’ve been theorizing that the method they are using to generate the world of Norrath means that each server is going to be vastly different, and it seems that I am correct. You can’t get much more confirmation of differences than the devs discussing the possibility of an icy bay existing on one server but not on another. Just think of what this means for exploration – every server opens up an entirely new world to explore!
I’m always disappointed when games include fast travel. I like travel being meaningful, it makes finding cool remote locations all the more special, but the world really shrinks when you can just zip around from one spot to the next. I like regional economies, which really aren’t possible with the ability to cross the globe in seconds or minutes (although admittedly world wide auction houses kill regional economies long before fast travel does). But I am sitting here pondering what it means to be able to travel between servers.
We already know that you can keep storage in your house, so presumably if you can travel to another server and build there, items can be transported between servers with you. If this isn’t the case, then building on a server other than your home server would be very limiting as you’d lose access to anything stored in your vaults. So the first thing that I’m wondering is – what does this do to the economy? Everyone who has ever played a market knows that prices of goods can vary wildly from one server to the next, sometimes by 100% or more! It seems to me that if the servers can vary so much that one server might have an icy bay and another might not, that the possibility of particular items being more common on one than on another is pretty high. But if you can find a ley line and skip on over to a new server, bringing your items with you, will you be able to make a tidy sum by taking advantage of this, or will the prices of goods settle in to a standard across all servers? Although that question does assume the markets will be server specific. There is the possibility of server-wide auction houses.
Economies aside, it is nice to know that if I discover 6 months into the game that a friend of mine is playing on another server, I can just skip on over to play.
Watch the video to see what the devs think of ley line travel and exploration!
I can only see this as a fantastically good development. I struggle to find any drawbacks :D