Sporting more trivulets of information than you're normal preview,
PC.ign has gone in-depth (as in Leviathan deep) with the creators of the MMORPG
Shadowbane to deliver a
multi-layered preview for our synaptic pleasure. Here's a bit o' the transmission:
What this means for gameplay is that the world itself is segmented, which means that you'll be exploring smaller sections of the world, sort of like islands, instead of traveling over one long continent. While one fragment could be filled with a steamy jungle environment, the next could be chilled with the ice winds of the arctic. You'll travel through these fragments (or server-clusters, if you want to think of it more literally) using magic gates and portals, but you won't actually notice "zones" between each fragment. Different region will have zone names, but the team promises that loading will be on the fly, loading terrain around you at all times at a distance larger that your sight line, meaning that you won't notice loading, and furthermore, won't have blind spots while you're exploring.
It sounds a lot like how
Mythic is handling
Dark Age of Camelot; the world is taken in smaller chunks and each person's computer is only responsible for the immediate circle. <hopes I'm within my NDA rights (actually I don't think I could violate them on the multiplayer programming issue even if I wanted to)>
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