Can High Fidelity & Project Sansar Compete With MMOs Like Worlds Adrift?

I told you about the island creator for Worlds Adrift, now look at some of the fantastic islands beta users have already created and seen incorporated into the single-shard MMO:

To me this captures the magic that made Minecraft so massive, translated into truly massive MMO scale:

Worlds Adrift is a persistent sandbox - every tree that falls and every item crafted will exist and remain where it is forever, until you or someone else interacts with it... Join thousands of players in a shared world at the same time and explore a vast sky of procedurally generated islands... Experience truly emergent gameplay with no set missions or quests in a huge multiplayer sandbox. There's no XP or leveling-up, your progress and skill will be driven by accumulating knowledge and artifacts, not by mouse clicks. With no rules or boundaries, you create your own adventure.

It's important to see upcoming virtual worlds we write about a lot, specifically High Fidelity and Project Sansar, in relationship to MMOs like these that are launching around the same time:

Everything we know about High Fidelity and Sansar suggests they're going to be platforms built on top of virtual worlds, instead of virtual worlds with platform aspects built on top of them. And everything we know about the market suggests that the former have a very limited market (see Second Life, OpenSim), whereas as the latter has a market in the tens of millions. And yet again I fear Second Life's successors are making a categorical mistake that happened in 2006, when its developers were told to stop treating SL like a game or a world -- which only led to the real world largely leaving it behind.

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Comments

[Ciaran Laval]

The comparison may be a tad unfair. Project Sansar is pitching itself as a platform with experiences running on it. World's Adrift is more in the experience category than the platform category.

Improbable is the engine, or maybe platform, running World's Adrift.

There was a good article recently on the Huffington Post from CEO of ROBLOX, David Baszucki, in which he talks about why co-experience is the ultimate killer app for VR and why he believes VR will be bigger than gaming.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-baszucki/why-coexperience-is-the-u_b_10117500.html

[Ezra]

Notch or Mojang couldn't replicate Minecraft's success if they tried.

What Minecraft-like game has come close to Minecraft's success? And if you've forgotten, Linden Lab has already tried to create a Minecraft with Patterns and BlocksWorld.

It's useless to point at Minecraft or WoW or other freak successes and say "hey, do something like that", hundreds try to and fail awfully. We have Minecraft that's way more popular than Second Life and there's a few hundred if not thousands of Minecraft clones that've come no where close to Second Life's success, let alone Minecraft's.

Taking something that's worked (Second Life) and something the company is actually good at (Second Life) and creating a better version is a better plan than repeating the Rod years burning money pretending to be a game company sans designers, writers, artists, musicians, and all the other non-engineer employees Linden Lab doesn't have.

Minecraft having tens of millions of users isn't a market. Talk to me about the #2 game like Minecraft and how well its doing and why Linden Lab should copy that one.

[Connie Arida]

I look forward to diving into this and Sansar after my digital detox.

[JohnC]

I find these Vast bland cartoon VR worlds extremely boring to look at, so I can only imagine they are even worse to explore.They create massive worlds and then realize that they have nothing to fill the vastness with except repeating rocks and trees. Every tiny part of reality is interesting and full of detail. I would rather spend my time in one highly detailed Thoughtfully created sim sized virtual space than walk forever in these awful looking bland lumps of mush. Minecraft is just popular because people like to be creative, but creative on a level scale. In Minecraft everyone can build the same dreadful retro ugly worlds and not feel inferior. Unfortunately mass market VR is going to go retro for a while until the hardware catches up. S we will see a lot of these "Amazing" mind numbing endless "experiences" before we get to see anything that resembles a decent Virtual reality, as in, a created reality that is virtually real.