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Metaverses on the Rise = New-Gen MMORPGs?
Bernoully
Member Posts: 174
I was reading through Raph Koster's blog when I saw two related entries: The Second Life competitors materialize? and Korea gets into metaverses.
The whole online virtual world idea has been around for a long time, and surely everyone on the forums know about how Second Life is generating comments from different places. Do you think with SL on the rise, the next few years we will be looking at many more virtual worlds like it? Clones are destined to happen at one point.
Now there's already There, Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin. In the blog entries there are new names not widely heard of yet: the Chinese HiPiHi, the cartoonish Planet Cazmo, the MySpace-ish Kaneva and my personal favourite so far, the Korean Azitro. In long term, do you think one of them will likely start implementing (or player-implementing) minigames, joining the ranks of the pseudo-MMORPGs?
Who knows, the true 3rd generation MMORPGs may just be online virtual worlds with lots of minigames in it.
(P.S Has anyone heard of Colony City? It's a really ancient online virtual world...)
The whole online virtual world idea has been around for a long time, and surely everyone on the forums know about how Second Life is generating comments from different places. Do you think with SL on the rise, the next few years we will be looking at many more virtual worlds like it? Clones are destined to happen at one point.
Now there's already There, Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin. In the blog entries there are new names not widely heard of yet: the Chinese HiPiHi, the cartoonish Planet Cazmo, the MySpace-ish Kaneva and my personal favourite so far, the Korean Azitro. In long term, do you think one of them will likely start implementing (or player-implementing) minigames, joining the ranks of the pseudo-MMORPGs?
Who knows, the true 3rd generation MMORPGs may just be online virtual worlds with lots of minigames in it.
(P.S Has anyone heard of Colony City? It's a really ancient online virtual world...)
Comments
and other meteverses are reletively boring having nothing that makers/creators/artsies can do.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
I agree with you there. If someone could provide SL without all of the pixel-sex... that might be worth something... but you would also have to get rid of all of the lag, griefing, etc etc.
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In the next human generation I predict we will see the majority of retail consumer space deeply embedded within virtual worlds. I suspect we will also see relatively seamless transitions available to users to move from games to movies to television programs, as well as old standards like hangout spots (clubs, bars, etc...).
Right now, the technology is still nascent. Streaming custom content is cumbersome, manipulation of objects in virtual worlds is clumsy, and movement is crude and blocky. Most average citizens simply don't have the computing power to handle a decent 3D world with a lot of serialized content. At the moment, this is a niche community that is slowly broadening.
But online entertainment is where it's at. Why simply observe when you can participate? There's nothing really stopping someone from conquering a planet, having a beer with some buddies, dancing with a hot date, and then fragging a few hundred enemies before bedding down with a raid against the boss of Cliche Castle. The future holds that all of that will be a seamless transition between content without ever leaving your online avatar...just enter the portal to that content.
Of course, as I said in the beginning...this is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-25 years away. It's going to take quite some time for virtual worlds to mature to the point that they can reach the masses in a way that is compelling and powerful. But I have absolutely no doubt that it will happen.
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Second Life is good for deviant cyber sex, and not much else. The Second Life clones will be the same; no game, plenty of cyber sex. Sex has been around ever since the internet, and isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so the SL clones will do just fine. You can log on and have someone design your new furry avatar with a 10 foot penis, and pay them in rl money. Oh what fun.
Absinthe Lovers
While Second Life has its use and is obviously fun for some,
there are a few problems with it for the regular market:
First of all, it holds no story or substance, it's just a bunch of islands wrapped together.
The market desires a non-abstract relation to the game.
You play for fun and want entertainment given to you, not building it yourself.
Kinda the same way as you buy books, you don't write them, if you want a good story.
Second, money... Second Life is known for the fapstatic ability to make cash from it.
The market has no need for Earning money. It is there to spend. The consumer plays games to get AWAY from their job.
One could argue that you don't have to care for money and all that, but the fact is, it's there. And will constantly remind you of reality.
And, third; Sexual content. While most who play the game seem to like sextoys or ripping off other game ideas, the regular consumer doesn't want this. Again the market wants to be wrapped up in a story, taken away to far away lands and be dazzled by the might and magic of the heroes in the lands. (Guess why Fantasy is the #1 concept used.....)
Second Life just can't cater for the regular consumer. Nor can any type of Metaverse.
Too much crap in the cake so to speak.
Played so far: 9Dragons, AO, AC, AC2, CoX, DAoC, DF, DnL, DR, DDO, Ent, EvE, EQ, EQ2, FoMK, FFO, Fury, GW, HG:L, HZ, L1, L2, M59, MU, NC1, NC2, PS, PT, R:O, RF:O, RYL, Ryzom, SL, SB, SW:G, TR, TCoS, MX:O, UO, VG, WAR, WoW...
It all sucked.
Well put... well put indeed.
Crap in the cake... *snicker*
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As much as I'm convinced that life will still go on as it always was for next 12 years or so, if a metaverse sufficiently evolves into what we call "Grand Sentient Program" that hook up every goddamned souls in this planet and control the flow of information in and out of our own input/output devices (brain, eyes, hands, skin, etc) in perfect synchronicity, such metaverse will eventually look indistinguishable from what we call "real world" or this.verse.
But in order to achieve this feat, we might need the help of Agent Smith to put more ads in major news outlets, and advertise in such a way that such world becomes too appealing to resist to any next door average Joe regardless their age, sex, location and profession.
The choice of engine to create such world is still something to ponder about.
But I bet the engine will be very scalable. The popularity of some 3D engines amongst many game developers these days relates to the fact that they are very scalable - the ease with which a system or component can be modified to fit the challenging area of expertise.
Many developers know that it is very important to concentrate their effort in their own area of expertise while minimizing effort in other area that could be handled by someone else. Not only this is cost effective when developing a game but also shorten up the development cycle by not reinventing the wheel.
But it's always exciting to hear that someone, somewhere is trying to bring new ideas on the table.
Breaking from the convention is an equal oath that anyone wishing to be member of this development circle should share.
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Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
The only people playing 2nd life are those that have never played a computer game before. I have never been so bored in my life.
Look up the word "fad", 2nd life fits it to a tee.
A game will have to offer a lot more to interest serious players to get involved.
Those are just for the Western side, who knows how many HiPiHi clones there are in China that we probably can't read.
Don't know how much marketing SL did, but how it seem to some people as "the new and shiny virtual world" is just perplexing. SL came out in 2003, but many more came before it. The earliest virtual worlds were out 1994-5, had the same world-editing features, and still running...