Dungeons & Dragons Online Interview
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Q: While most mmorpg developers are promising the largest virtual worlds ever seen and creating technology for allowing ten thousands of players to be online in one world together, you do exactly the opposite. Why do you think it would improve the player community when playing on smaller servers?
A: Communities form over a common sense of (home). In MMPs, players traditionally are wanderers, ranging far over huge landscapes. In some big worlds, it's rare that you see the same person more than once. By deliberately crafting smaller physical spaces that encourage recirculation, you see the same faces every day they become not just fellow players, but neighbors and friends. And when we started thinking about D&D, we realized that playing with a group of friends was, for us, the quintessential part of the D&D experience. This is really what made us sit back and think about the whole point of having many players in a world, and the meaning of the world size. We felt we had to create the environment in which the D&D experience of playing with and among friends could happen.
