Planets

Reddit /r/MMORPG AMA with Raph Koster

"I will say, the planets are large enough for multiple areas to have cities."

"You can literally flatten a planet to the bedrock, and drive all the plants and creatures extinct."

"Yes, you can build pretty tall buildings too. I think there are a few in some of the screenshots..."

"[Planets] are each actually unique. We have a really cool proc gen system. Basically, level designers can create templates for data like the preferred slope of mountains, width of canyons, etc. We call these topographies. Think of it like authoring the "rules" to generate areas like Bolivian salt flats, or the Grand Canyon, or those cool mountains in China, or whatever.

Then for a given world, we grab some of these, not all, and blend them. And in the process, we place mineral veins underground, carve caves, drop points of interest in, etc. And we select the gravity, the length of the year and impact of the seasons, etc.

We had a cool desert topography with awesome caves. I wanted to go take more video exploring there... but we had pressed the button again, and now it was a completely different desert world. Its caves were not as cool :( And that is fine -- it may well have been much more valuable to mine even though it was less interesting to map."

"We are intentionally not a seamless world. Having partitioned zones lets us do:

• an ever changing map where planets can be discovered and can go away, wormholes can collapse, etc
• worlds that are actually consumable -- mine out all the gold, it's GONE. Pave the planet over and turn it into a shopping mall.
• segmenting player control of areas on really bright lines for things like PvP rulesets
• cheaper operating costs since we can bubble zones up and down really easily in the cloud"