PC Gaming

Do you have any sources on this? I am genuinely curious.

I'd ask the same of you. I tried looking into it a bit more, but I couldn't find much information on how they actually split up resources among those 6 servers. I was just listing out some examples of how they could separate the workload between them.

I'm not familiar with Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) beyond what I can find scanning through some twitch streams. The maps seem tiny (big for its time, but tiny compared to Star Citizen). I am much more familiar with other games that are more comparable to Star Citizen's scale (like No Man's Sky, Eve Online, or Elite Dangerous).

In DAoC, I see that there are 4 different "Realms" that make up a gamespace. https://camelotinsider.github.io/albion.html

I'm not sure what's required to go from realm to realm. Looking at the map from that link it looks like there is some sort of separation between them.

I see loading screens for players jumping into caves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt5lbZIdt50&t=70s
Which means that those are most likely handled by a different server.

I also see players being teleported when going into/out of some sort of fort:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOPy3WAlNFk&t=600s

For instance, the player walks up to the door and they can't see any of the players that are outside of the door/fort. Once they teleport outside of the fort, they look back and can't see any players that were inside (player tags/names). I'm certain that if anyone tried to peak in through the windows of the fort they wouldn't see players either.

Server meshing overcomes limitations like that.

So, it seems more likely that some of these 6 servers are dedicated to running different parts of the world and any interaction between those parts are handled with teleporting/loading screens. And then maybe 1 or 2 servers are dedicated to some universal backend database/services that brings everything together.

Most games work hard to disguise loading screens and these separation of boundaries. That's why we're seeing a lot more quick cutscenes between areas, or even animations where you crawl through a tight space and conveniently can't see what was on the other side before doing so. It's the easy way to handle things and that's totally fine.

It's something that Star Citizen doesn't do, which is why you can be inside a space station and look out the window at players flying around, or be inside a massive ship locked in FPS combat while the pilot is taking you through the wormhole that connects one solar system to another.