Gods And Heroes: “Persistent/Public” vs. “Instanced” Content

While fans of the Hellenistic world (the Mediterranean ca. 300 BCE – 400 CE) are anxiously awaiting the release of Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising, some questions have come up regarding the game’s content.  For the uninitiated, “persistent,” or “public” content refers to items and areas available to anyone, allowing all players to interact at the same time. “Instanced” content, on the other hand, is restricted to certain players.

The current “burning” issue concerns which type of content will dominate GAH:RR. Perpetual Entertainment‘s Stieg Hedlund discussed the content issue in a recent interview. He wasn’t sure where the “instanced” content scuttlebutt got started, but definitely wanted to address potential players’ concerns:

“The vast majority of the very large world that we’re presenting is public–I’d estimate 75 percent of all of the content is in this form.

“We do use instances, but not willy-nilly–there are two reasons we’ll make one: If we are creating a scripted event that won’t make sense to those not involved (and will break immersion or remove resources for them), we’ll do that in an instance. It’s a good way to eliminate ‘spawn  camping’ (staying in the same place and repeatedly fighting the same enemies as soon as they ‘spawn’ into the world) and to make events that are more heroic and centered around players and groups.

“The other reason is for computer performance. One of the big payoffs of squads is epic warfare, where we’ll tune an area so that a full group with full squads can do battle with appropriate numbers of foes. We put things like this in an instance, because if another group like yours shows up it’ll be hard not to have a drop in performance with that many characters onscreen.”

Gods And Heroes: Rome Rising is an MMORPG set in the days of the Roman Empire. In this version of the Roman world, however, gods and goddesses such as Mars, Mithras, Venus and Minerva are real and interact with mortals. No release date has been given, but rumor has it that beta testing should be starting sometime this year.

Via Gamespot

While fans of the Hellenistic world (the Mediterranean ca. 300 BCE – 400 CE) are anxiously awaiting the release of Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising, some questions have come up regarding the game’s content.  For the uninitiated, “persistent,” or “public” content refers to items and areas available to anyone, allowing all players to interact at the same time. “Instanced” content, on the other hand, is restricted to certain players.

The current “burning” issue concerns which type of content will dominate GAH:RR. Perpetual Entertainment‘s Stieg Hedlund discussed the content issue in a recent interview. He wasn’t sure where the “instanced” content scuttlebutt got started, but definitely wanted to address potential players’ concerns:

“The vast majority of the very large world that we’re presenting is public–I’d estimate 75 percent of all of the content is in this form.

“We do use instances, but not willy-nilly–there are two reasons we’ll make one: If we are creating a scripted event that won’t make sense to those not involved (and will break immersion or remove resources for them), we’ll do that in an instance. It’s a good way to eliminate ‘spawn  camping’ (staying in the same place and repeatedly fighting the same enemies as soon as they ‘spawn’ into the world) and to make events that are more heroic and centered around players and groups.

“The other reason is for computer performance. One of the big payoffs of squads is epic warfare, where we’ll tune an area so that a full group with full squads can do battle with appropriate numbers of foes. We put things like this in an instance, because if another group like yours shows up it’ll be hard not to have a drop in performance with that many characters onscreen.”

Gods And Heroes: Rome Rising is an MMORPG set in the days of the Roman Empire. In this version of the Roman world, however, gods and goddesses such as Mars, Mithras, Venus and Minerva are real and interact with mortals. No release date has been given, but rumor has it that beta testing should be starting sometime this year.

Via Gamespot