Chris Roberts, the enigmatic leader of Roberts Space Industries, developers of the space sim Star Citizen which has so far nearly doubled its fundraising goals on Kickstarter and their own site has come out with a description of how multiplayer will work in Star Citizen. In this developer blog post, Roberts laments the need for multiple servers to handle large number of players, but explains that Star Citizen will not be divided up into shards, but instead follow a megaserver similar to EVE Online.

While the main universe will allow players to interact freely, localized instances for battles or space station interiors will be dynamically populated by the system based on the other players nearby. If you step into a bar on a station, Star Citizen will first attempt to fill it with friends on the station, then players it deems similar to you, such as those looking for a group. With more and more MMOs abandoning the typical “shards” such as the recent announcement for The Elder Scrolls Online, this seems to be a prudent move, and definitely the direction the industry as a whole is heading in.