The Instanced Content Revolution

GameRifts has published a new article that discusses the concept of “instanced content” in many of today’s upcoming MMORPGs. An excerpt to follow:

The concept of instancing will undoubtedly have a large effect on players and their interaction with each other. The greatest fear for most gamers is that instanced content will create a situation where players never meet other players they do not already know, and while this is certainly a valid concern I feel that so far it is unwarranted. All three of NCsoft’s upcoming titles that focus on instanced content have been intelligent enough in design to avoid basing their game 100% on instancing. Guild Wars, for example, provides towns that exist in a persistent state where players can interact, and to further the ability for players to meet each other it provides game types where players can be randomly joined in both cooperative and competitive environments to insure the social element of the massively multiplayer game is not lost. AutoAssault also provides major areas of its gaming environment that are persistent instead of instanced, and overall these entries into the MMORPG market seem to foster the understanding that, for the sake of social interaction, there must be a symbiosis between instanced and persistent content. Fortunately, instanced content will not hail the death of player interaction, but it will definitely set a new precedent in how player interaction affects game play.