Indeed, I would even say that EVE chose to be unsharded/monolithic first, and many of the key design choices flow from that, including the fantasy space setting itself.
replyThe monolithic world needs to be big to spread everyone out. And it's easier to create ten thousand "systems" than it would be to create an immersive terrestrial world with a similar scale. Each EVE system is just a bunch of objects floating in a 3D space that you travel between.
Positioning of things in orbit around a point in space is cheap. The issue was probably how much more complicated it would be to make all the missions if things kept moving around. You could end up with things on opposite sides of a solar system that are currently right next to each other. But to me it takes me out of the game when I see stuff like that in the engine.
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