Playable World - Upcoming Sandbox MMO (Raph Koster)

"we are going to build a massively multiplayer world where all sorts of players can come together and find ways to regardless of whether they like exploring or adventuring or socializing or player-versus-player (PvP). "

I feel like every Sandbox says this and then they suck at them all because they can't find their niche.

Sounds like some Second Life bullshit.

"Playable Worlds", plural, is the company. The game has yet to be announced. The game is not called Playable World. Probably should edit the thread title as to not be misleading/incorrect.

Teekey said:

Sounds like some Second Life bullshit.

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No, it's a going to be a gameplay driven MMO.

While Koster won't talk in detail about the project Playable Worlds is working on, he is emphatic that it is a game first rather than a virtual social space, a Facebook Horizon-style project, or a descendent of Second Life. And even though the lead investor in Playable Worlds is Bitkraft Esports Ventures and the game will feature player-versus-player combat, it's not really an esports play, either. That said, Koster adds that there is overlap between Playable Worlds and esports in that they are both driven by community.

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Surprising there's a company left willing to try.

As long as they don't allow their plans to become too grandiose. There is still a market for this style of interactive online game.

The thing that always gets me with these new MMORPG efforts is that they always create the wheel from scratch. There's been hundreds of failed MMORPGs in the past. You would think that some of those companies would want to recoup some of their losses by selling or leasing their engines that they spent many years developing to start up companies.

I mean yeah I get the fact that a ton of it will be throw away, but parts of the networking, server, and client code should be re-usable for any MMORPG. Instead of re-inventing the particle system, shaders, etc, use what some other company spent many millions making, and spend your time on creating new art, game rules, and content.

Not all failed MMORPGs are obviously good candidates for this kind of thing, but there are some out there where it wasn't the technology under the hood that caused them to fail, but rather it was the direction of the content, game rules/mechanics, and marketing that caused the game to not succeed.

If I owned a company that spent 50-100 million on a MMORPG that ultimately failed, I would take that fucker and turn it in to a MMORPG game engine that I would lease out to everybody and their dog in order to recoup as much money from it as possible. In fact, I would go one step further, and make it free to use for learning and small projects in order to indoctrinate young developers in college who might then take those skills of working with my engine to a future company that would buy my license for their big triple A game.

I just don't get the whole, hey we wasted 100 million dollars, and failed. Oh well. Fuck it. See ya later guys. You're fired.

Every new MMO is the same exact thing at this point. They should just constantly reskin the same code. Everyone is publishing an open world pve pvp social solo grindy no-grind game with on the rails freeform questing.

One day someone will come up with something new but right now they just jam as many buzzwords in to a concept as possible and they all turn out to be unfun pieces of garbage.