citadelstudios

Derek: Yes we plan to continue development post-KS regardless of outcome. If there is one thing this campaign did, it proved to us that there are tons of people out there dying for a game like this.

If we do not meet our goal, our current plan is to refocus and adjust our scope for the first fully playable alpha. The last thing we want to do is sacrifice features of the final game.

Tim: Heh. We like to put it in terms of "not restricting players with artificial constructs of morality that make gameplay design easier."

We like hard game design, which means building meaningful worlds where actions have consequences. Good or bad!

The UO experience is intoxicating.

As someone whose both played and developed it I can tell you we want to capture everything about UO that is "living world" and "action/consequence" while taking the interactivity to the next level (and improving the graphics).

As a former developer, I can tell you that the unparalleled power we had as designers and programmers with UO is something we've rebuilt in Shards from the get-go.

The entire game is built to scale and to have an extremely moddable architecture. There's a scripting engine that runs the game mechanics that is completely customizable.

The core difference is that we're legitimizing the entire concept of player run shards with Shards Online by offering you our content and codebase to do whatever you want with.

Tim: I like to think of Shards Online in the same way as Ultima Online. There is no end-game PvP. The entire game is "end-game."

Snooping on inventories, pick-pocketing, stealth, hiding - all the things that make a rogue great are natural skills in Shards Online.

The real trick is that we give players the ability to enable/disable/customize these things in their own Shards (like deploying your own custom Minecraft server).

Tim: Well, let's see. In Shards Online I could eat about 15 tacos before becoming satiated according to the hunger formula.

In reality, probably three.

Four if they're Doritos Tacos.