New World Notes

Fallout Evolved in Second Life: Roleplayers Create Mini-MMO Inspired by Bethesda's Post-Apocalyptic Franchise

Self-portrait by Fallout Evolved player Max Rackham from the SL MMO's Flickr pool

Fallout Evolved, as the name suggests, is a new roleplay region in Second Life inspired by Betheseda's beloved post-apocalyptic RPG franchise. (Direct teleport here.) It's lead-developed by Violetta Daviau, a European fan of the games who wanted to expand on them with a mini-MMO in SL.

“The main difference between Fallout Evolved, a roleplay sim within Second Life, and Bethesda's Fallout games is surely not only the platform but also what it means to the players playing on it," she tells me. "Second Life is a platform that gives space to players to import self-created content themselves and build a world from it for whichever purposes, either for themselves or a community.” 

So the emphasis is less on first-person combat, but social roleplaying:

“Fallout Evolved in Second Life has a far bigger roleplay aspect between players," she says, "which includes their backgrounds, their living in [post fallout USA, also intrigues, threats, daily works and living, and the changing of their surroundings," she explains. "So for example one player currently plays to gather a bunch of townsfolk and scavengers with the goal to build a scrap prison for the town. Conflicts between player characters are solved with either words, or combat for which we offer a level based dice system using a character's stats and perks." 

Fallout Evolved is not the first Fallout-inspired roleplay region in Second Life, I should note -- not only have many others existed for many years, but there are even rumors that employees of Bethesda itself sometimes visit them. In any case, Daviau tells me she's seen quite a lot of enthusiasm for this new mini-MMO since its launch in recent weeks:

Resources for RPGers Who Want to Try Second Life's Many Mini-MMOs

That cool post-apocalypse machinima I wrote about last week was mainly shot live and improvised in Cocoon, a fairly new (and seriously impressive looking) mini-MMO in Second Life. It was created by Ayla Pants (above) who first got into SL specifically because of her interest in RPGs:

"I’m really into games like Fallout and Skyrim, etc., both the roleplay aspect as well as the avatar customization," she tells me. "One day I looked over and my manpanion was searching through the SL Marketplace for a bartender apron.  He had been looking for new RPGs to play online and came across a website for what I believe was steampunk type roleplay in SL.  He’d been on SL a few years before and decided to log back in and give it another try.  My interest was piqued.  I had been aware of SL, but only vaguely and the one documentary I’d seen was old and not exactly a flattering depiction... What I was seeing now on his screen (almost two years ago) was a much different place.”

And so her path was set. Here's some resources Ayla recommends for fellow roleplay gamers who want to explore the MMO possibilities of Second Life:

Linden Lab's First Grid-Wide Games Gets 5000 Players in First 30 Days, And Should Grow With Upcoming Pokémon Go-Esque Hosting Feature

Linden Lab just announced pretty good results from the late September launch of "Tyrah & the Curse of the Magical Glytches" , its first grid-wide game for Second Life:

The game is designed to encourage a grid-wide level of participation and exploration, and already it’s been played by nearly 5,000 Residents. Very soon, we will enable Resident-owned locations to host portions of the game, and we will announce those details when ready.

I was frankly hoping for user numbers in the five figures, but 5,000 in the first 30+ days is a good start. The most popular SL user-developed games have attracted tens of thousands of users -- for instance, a vampire MMO in SL called Bloodlines once boasted nearly 70,000 players in Second Life. However, letting SL users host Glytches content on their locations should encourage many more to get involved. (Somewhat similar to how Pokémon Go encourages real life store owners to host stations on their property to encourage foot traffic from players.)

Another way Linden Lab could get more players:

Visit Tokagoya Highlands, Home to SL's D2-Based Racing Community

On my search for the best vehicles in Second Life, I wound up teleporting to a two sim island called Tokagoya Highlands (click here to visit) devoted to high performance, beautifully detailed racing SL cars created around the D2 system of the legendary scripter called Eight Blinker. Boasting a Japanese-themed city area, raceways, and mountainside roads which are especially useful for drift-based racing, Tokagoya also boasts a supportive community of racers:

Visit in Second Life: Mitsumi-Town, an Ultra-Realistic City Sim Modeled from Google Maps & RL Photos of Tokyo 3 Months in the Making

Click here to visit Mitsumi-Town, an intricately detailed Second Life sim painstakingly modeled after a Tokyo neighborhood. Lead developed by Eripom Moonwall, an SLer who actually lives in Japan and has built up a successful SL weapons business in her spare time as a Tokyo-based financial consultant. Working with two producers, four builders and one "advisor of traffic laws and infrastructures" (as she describes the role), Ms. Moonwall and her team took three months to make Mistumi-Town what it is today. And they're only 70% done, she tells me.

"Our main business in SL is 'gun maker'," she says, "so we always research meticulously before we start building... In this case, a whole month we have researched and referenced a small town in Tokyo, walked around in real life Tokyo towns to take photos and shared them with my staff as base knowledge, and used Google Maps to get more details of city growth."

As she describes it, Mitsumi-Town even reflects recent history of Tokyo from its post-World World II rebuilding period and how it became what it is today:

It's Christmas in Final Fantasy's Midgar (in Second Life)

Yes: Not only is there a full-fledged roleplay area devoted to Midgar from Final Fantasy in Second Life, which has been operating there as a community going on ten years, but now it's Christmas there too.

Pokémon Has Been Playable in Second Life for Over 8 Years -- in Full 3D!

About to catch an Arccanine

Click here to teleport to Ravenlock island to catch Pokémon in SL

The Pokémon franchise has been around in various forms for twenty years, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a team of Second Life users have created a playable version of the game. What is surprising is how long the game has existed, and how ambitious it is -- and how few players even knew it existed, until the Pokémon Go phenomenon. For the last 8 or years, in fact, the three creators have been building and maintaining a full Pokemon roleplaying experience on the island of Ravenlock. Only recently, thanks to the new augmented reality mobile game hit, foot traffic from random visitors in search of virtual Pokémon has spiked.

“On average,” lead creator Mindy Runo tells me, “we get roughly ten new players a day prior to Go. And now it’s about twenty to thirty [a day].”

Welcome NWN Partner Fawns: Free, Breedable Pet Game in Second Life (Partner News)

Fawns is a free-to-breed pet game for Second Life, and I'm proud to announce they're now a sponsoring partner of New World Notes. (No fooling!) Breedables are an incredibly popular (and technically impressive) genre of games in SL, so I'm glad to finally have one as a partner. Created by Daemon Blackflag, Dashing Riddler, and Katharine McGinnis, the same team behind the well-known Fennux breedables, Fawns, as the name suggests, are adorable as hell baby deer, and come with some unique features:

"We didn't want to release a new breedable that would step on our own product's toes, so we created something that literally anyone would feel comfortable breeding due to the low cost of entry - just obtaining a pair of fawns and breeding for free," says Daemon. The team are touting Fawns as "the first major/mainstream breedable to have a completely free method of breeding. Once someone owns a male and a female fawn, they can breed completely for free."

Some other unique features:

Flickr of the Day: Epic Remnants of Earth-ers Group Photo

Last year I told you about Remnants of Earth, the impressive user-made MMO in Second Life played by thousands, now let Voidar show some of its dedicated community members:

Click here to embiggen, and get all the cast credits. Love that looks like the ensemble cast of a badass cyberpunk mini-series you wish you could see.  Voidar's Flickr, by the way, is generally and consistently full of epic like this.

Thanks to Caitlin Tobias for the tip!

Sims-Like Games Make Second Life Seem More Like Second Life (If You Know What I Mean)

Aemyth has a really interesting review of two Second Life-based games which used a heads-up display (or HUD) to turn your open-ended Second Life experience into a simulation game. G&S is medieval-themed, which means your avatar will engage in mining, crafting, carpentry, fishing, and raising animals. Life 2, as the name suggests, is pretty much The Sims in Second Life, tracking your basic needs like hunger, thirst, bathroom trips, and so on -- see the HUD above.

Here's Aemyth's final comparison between the two games: