Honestly, you're setting yourself up for failure if you think that a big box SOE MMO is not going to have instancing.
Please describe how you would accommodate 1 million+ subscriptions w/o the virtual real estate provided by instancing. All popular or near popular MMOs contain instanced dungeons, or even instanced zones at large.
The scale of gameplay cannot be contained to static zones that crash if there are 150+ people in them. The population is just too spread out. With the prevalent technology we have all information about the game will be catalogued and readily available within days of its discovery. If people have to wait to get to a singular spawn that only occurs once every 30 minutes, they will rightfully think that is bad game design.
I absolutely think there is a place for static zones and a server community. I just don't see why an instance is evil - given the circumstances I described. A bundled adventure that you have to form a group for yourself, that has to be traveled to. It doesn't mean there can't be zones like unrest, it just means that there can't ONLY be zones like unrest.
How many unrest zones do you need for a server whose population is 30,000?
|