Developing the Biggest MMORPG to Date

Costs

Edge of Chaos strives to be the biggest Sandbox MMORPG in existence. Usually, only the biggest game studios like Bethesda, EA, or Sony, just to name a few, can afford to build massive, AAA games. Making an open-world vision come true requires a dedicated network engineering team, as well as significant backend resources. In these types of architecture, costs can be prohibitive for indie studios.  

Using MetaGravity's groundbreaking technology, the Edge of Chaos team will be able to scale the game world to previously unseen levels, while keeping per-player costs significantly lower than current industry standards.

Scalability

What's not known to many outside the games industry is how difficult it is to put a large number of players into a virtual world. Unlike simply rendering a large number of players in a scene, it is much more difficult to create a self-consistent simulation, where events have causality chains where each action matters and impacts the world.

In current games, typically the top end of that number is around several hundred players. The method currently used is called spatial partitioning, where the world is divided into smaller chunks, local simulations are carried out on each, boundaries are synchronized, and self-consistent reality is created.

<graphics>

Persistence & Ownership

Nowadays the majority of online games are built around dozens (if not hundreds) of smaller servers. Each one is a different world, and it’s very hard to connect them in a meaningful way. While you can build a community on each one, you can’t bind them together. What’s more, those worlds don’t have the persistence that allows them to “feel alive”. Individual players rarely have any major impact on the virtual world. 

Another issue is the lack of continuity of data. What does that mean? For example, if you cut down a tree it will just respawn when you re-enter the game. This issue also contributes to the problem of persistence.

When it comes to ownership, players almost always have the opportunity to craft different items, or even whole buildings. However, all those items are replicable by other players. They are of various rarities, but never truly unique.

Costs & Scalability

MetaGravity’s goal with Edge of Chaos is to offer a world expansive enough to accommodate tens of thousands of concurrent human players. While games like Fortnite, Roblox, or World of Warcraft have a limited number of players in an instance, Edge of Chaos will break down the existing barriers to allow a nearly unlimited server space. 

MetaGravity’s technology addresses a major obstacle in developing expansive virtual worlds: the cost and scale of cloud computing. As games push the boundaries of scale, they require more cloud capacity. More cloud capacity translates into more costs, and not just financial ones: they include a significant increase in energy consumption and its impact on the climate. 

By building an infrastructure that supports arbitrarily scalable distributed cloud computing, we can blast through the current constraints shackling game development. The novel approach we are taking at MetaGravity is showing extremely positive results, and this is only the beginning.

Rashid Mansoor, founder and CEO of MetaGravity, explains: “The way MetaGravity works is via causal partitioning. We construct an abstract mathematical space in which things are partitioned based on their simulation relevance and relatedness, allowing us to sidestep and eliminate many of the limiting factors in spatial partitioning.”

Cutting those costs via MetaGravity’s tech will also allow Edge of Chaos to be more independent without pulling resources from other departments such as Art, Animation, or Level Design.

Persistence & Ownership

Players will be able to build and rule their own settlements, engage in warfare and diplomacy, or pursue a myriad of careers from peaceful traders to daring adventurers.

Each player’s actions shape the world’s social and political landscape, leading to a non-linear and dynamic game experience​ that hasn’t existed in the past in the sandbox genre. The game world reacts to each player’s actions, providing a truly individualized gaming experience.

On top of that, Edge of Chaos' modular crafting and building systems will allow a level of customization never before seen in an MMO, resulting in weapons, armor, and structures that exist as unique objects in the game world. Modifications and upgrades are tracked instantaneously, allowing players to optimize items and offer them on a player-driven marketplace.

Visionary game development from scratch

‍