Revealing Playable Worlds technology
Last week, I talked about “metaverse,” the hype around it, and how much of what people dream about is actually stuff online worlds have done for many years now. I ended the article on a bit of a tease, promising that I would talk about what we are doing.
I won’t tease this time.
We have built a metaverse platform.
Wait, did you say “have built?” Past tense?
Oh, it’s not done. We’re probably going to be working on this for years. But I say “built” because, well, we have the basics of this stuff working.
We have a working massively multiplayer server.
Further, it’s a true persistent state world, where everything you do is saved. Worlds change, evolve, and develop based on player actions (or AI or simulation, for that matter). It’s running on the cloud right now.
But it’s not just a server. It’s a network of servers. Whole MMO worlds can bubble up and go away on the fly based on player demand. It’s a heck of a lot more efficient than something like a headless Unreal server.
And you’ll be able to hop between worlds without needing to switch clients. It permits a single, shardless, ever-expanding, ever-changing online universe.
We’ve already got it working with full server-side game logic. Meaning – each world can have completely different gameplay, without needing to change code or take the server down for updates. We’ll even be able to map your controls from the cloud, because when we say different gameplay, we mean it.
This unlocks things that AAA games haven’t been able to do before, like A/B testing. It means that someday, we can let users write their own code for those servers, and they could earn money from their creations.
When you visit different worlds, or even different parts of worlds, everything comes down on the fly to a thin client. We don’t need to patch to add new content. Every world can look completely different – one might be ours, one might be a 3rd party creator, or a branded world, or built by users. For that matter, it won’t eat your hard drive: assets go in a cache, and the cache throws away old stuff you don’t need.
That client might be on any device: phone, console, PC. Because as far as we are concerned, a device is just a window into other worlds. What device you use should not matter.
Basically, we’ve taken our decades of experience and built the platform that online worlds and their players need for the future. It’s scalable, cloud-based, enables full cross-play, and works in a way that is transparent to the people who matter: players. They get an app or game, they log in and they go where they want. And that’s it.
In other words, it makes AAA virtual spaces as straightforward as the Web. In fact, it’s meant to interoperate with the Web. We leverage lots of web technologies in our architecture. Because online worlds can’t stay in silos forever.
So… now what?
Now we are building a game on top of it. We’re reasonably far along on building it, actually. For most of you, that game is what you’ll see and experience.
As we’ve said in previous posts and interviews: We are building a modern sandbox MMO. A game that fulfills the dream of living worlds that we’ve all had for a couple of decades now. It’s just built atop a modern, re-usable, scalable platform. A platform that lets us make a game no one else can make.
But our metaverse platform is plumbing. Important plumbing, but still plumbing. It just happens to be plumbing that very few people on Earth know how to build. (It helps to have built a platform with all the above characteristics before.)
If it weren’t for that plumbing, we couldn’t build the next generation of online worlds. Current engines just can’t do it.
But… we build technology for people. What matters is the way people use the tech.
And if you have dreams of a Ready Player One virtual park full of varied experiences — like so many do — well, it’s pretty important to be able to deliver one world first. Every park needs a first “land,” after all.
Look: saying you are building The Metaverse(™) is silly — that’s a project for many people over many years, and any one company that promises it anytime soon is probably biting off more than they can chew.
- If you want to make online worlds, you better build a re-usable platform that scales with modern technology. It’s the sensible thing to do.
- If you want others to use your tech someday, you better prove that it can deliver high quality content first.
- And if you want people to actually show up, you better provide something fun from day one. That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned from decades of online worlds.
That’s why we decided not to talk about our platform until it was already working. There’s enough hype out there already. Most of you shouldn’t care! Most of you want a fresh experience, not a whitepaper about plumbing.
(Of course, if you happen to be someone who does care about plumbing, well, drop us a line. We do think what we have built is pretty exciting).
It’s all good to talk about metaverse dreams. But we’re practical people here at Playable Worlds. We’re not in this for virtual goods speculation. We’re not in this for acronyms.
We are here to deliver experiences that have not been possible before. Experiences that are honestly kind of overdue.
Technology is about people. And people have been waiting a long time for the dreams of online worlds to start coming true. This tech is just an (amazing, unique, and powerful) enabler.
Your dreams are the goal.
8 Responses to “Revealing Playable Worlds technology”
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Waiting for a new Star Wars Galaxies. Would be cool to have all of the different timelines and fan favourite characters whic you could play in a Star Wars metaverse.p
I struggle to see the value with what you’ve created mostly because it seems to be a similar premise to what Crowfall built. In it, in theory, you’d have been able to create different campaign worlds with unique rules.
Your third point seems to be the most prudent point. One of those worlds has to actually be fun to play in.
So how do you build fun? Also how do you define what it is that players will do in your end game? So many games seem to start designing how you’ll get to the end game. Then because of timelines and money, the end game never gets properly iterated over and fails to provide that fun.
Do you define the end game activity up front? How do you ensure its fun and can keep players engrossed indefinitely?
Oh, it’s very different from Crowfall, where every world is still using the same overall RPG combat game.
In our case, one world could be a fantasy MMO, and another a social hangout, and another anime themed, and another sci fi, and so on.
If you like, think of it as a AAA version of what Metaplace could do — only we’re gonna use it ourselves to make a game, instead of just doing user-generated content.
As far as your second set of questions… I mean, I’ve spent quite a bit of my career defining fun and trying to pin down ways to more reliably generate it. 😀 There’s thousands of words on that on this blog…! But all I can promise is that we are working hard to make the game as cool and fun as we can. Yes, we do think about the endgame from the start — as well as multiple ways to play, from the start. But there’s no way to “ensure” that a game is fun and can keep players engrossed indefinitely. It’s just hard work you plug away at.
Great, now you have me distracted thinking about what you’re building. Will definitely be following this closely.
What hes talking about is really how marketing will happen in the next 5 plus years. I have a patent in South Africa that describes this with marketing. I pushed online games back in 1995 through 1998 when I was the CEO and VP of Marketing and Sales of a game I designed with my partners called WarBirds. It’s still out there btw. We were early pioneers in the internet space and I saw that the 3d web will some day be the 3d web.
2d web will someday be 3d
Sounds brilliant.
A few questions pop to mind though.
“And you’ll be able to hop between worlds without needing to switch clients.”
“online worlds can’t stay in silos forever.”
But having one and only one client means it’s still a bit of a silo, doesn’t it?
What I’d prefer to see is something like a Metaverse “browser”.
Websites are not locked to using one specific underlying “engine”. Well, OK, they do share low-level tech (HTML / CSS / JS, or WebAssembly), but it’s nothing like all virtual worlds being built with the same game engine. There is a single client, but very low level, more like just a virtual machine. Also, not long ago, we had browser plugins like Flash. So practically the browsers could take an address (either typed in, or from a link clicked), check if you had all necessary software (plugins) installed, and if so, launch the site.
Similarly, in a Metaverse browser you could look up a world by name / address or jump into a portal (Metaverse link), and the browser would check if you have the necessary client / plugins / components installed, let you know if not, maybe even help you install them, and finally launch the client / plugins that can take you to that world. All this without requiring that all worlds be built with the same game / world engine, to run on the same one client, and also without locking users to one specific browser built by any one company.
It would be more like transparently auto-switching clients, rather than one client.
I think Playable Worlds would be in a great position to build the first iteration of such a Metaverse browser, and the accompanying open standards.
“someday, we can let users write their own code for those servers”
Any rough ETA for this? Basically I’m looking for tech like that right now. I’d like to build a small world (with heavily customized game / world rules), I have the coding skills and experience, but obviously I couldn’t build all the underlying tech myself (and I don’t have the financial means to build a team).
Also, what are your plans about IP ownership for world content (incl. world-specific code / script) running on your platform but built by others? Would you allow world creators to take their content and move it somewhere else? May sound like a bad business move, but I think for many of them (myself included) fear of getting locked in could prevent buying in in the first place, so ultimately allowing easy exit may have more benefit than harm.
This is exactly what that is.. soon 2d browsers will be 3d browsers , every company will have a spot in this virtual world to market goods and make short clips to sell products.
Ive built and have the patent for these 2d movies to be displayed to every device on the internet, without the use of an app.