Perpetuum looks like a strange mashup of Battletech robots and dropships with Eve-online. Some of its bullet points include real-time flora alteration (planting/harvesting/burning in a mighty conflagration that you might see the tears of your enemies glisten in the flickering embers of your strength) and deformable terrain. The designer in me says those are both a) awesome and b) scary. Letting your players manipulate the world is like begging for griefing. Then again, that may be precisely who they’re catering to. And if the world is big enough, the cost of changing high enough, and the regrowth and change rates sufficient, it may not be an issue. The engineer in me looks at those and begins shaking about all the possible ways it can go wrong and how amazingly complex those calculations might get, particularly in a “one server for all” environment.
But I really miss giant robot games, so I signed up to test.
