New World Notes

Watch Why I Think the VR Game Audica from the Creators of Guitar Hero Becomes a Huge Mixed Reality Hit

When the VR game Beat Saber came out, the pitch for it was often, "It's like Guitar Hero meets light sabers".  Well the game Audica is actually made by the creator of Guitar Hero, and it looks incredibly fun. And even moreso than Beat Saber, the gameplay is integrated with the music, so that the player looks less like he's shooting every beat, but orchestrating it like a DJ, along with an incredibly hypnotic light show. Which is another way of saying this would be a great game feature in dance clubs and at parties, right next to the actual DJ --- or perhaps better yet, Audica players themselves can become the DJ, playing the music in a very literal way.

Watch: New Trailer to Dual Universe, the Fully Immersive Metaverse

We talked a lot about Dual Universe last year, the upcoming,  crowd-funded, single shard MMO, with some arguing that it was the closest thing we have to a metaverse -- so you'll want to watch the latest trailer above. Featured features include:

• Terraforming/mining
• In-game scripting
• Flight physics
• Community building
• Full voxel-based editing
• Multiplayer ship navigation

I recently had a long demo of Dual Universe with lead developer J.C. Baillie, which is what led me to call this "a fully immersive metaverse" in the title -- in other words, it's everything we associate with a "metaverse", but integrated within the Dual Universe narrative. More details on that soon, but meantime, here's a bit of what Will Burns says about Dual Universe:

How "Live" Was Marshmello's Fortnite Show Really & Does It Matter?

When Suzanne Vega performed a live virtual concert in Second Life back in 2006, roughly 80 people attended as avatars. She performed via an audio stream from a sound booth with interviewer John Hockenberry, and perhaps most key, there was actual interaction by Vega and the audience -- at one point, for instance, her avatar's guitar had trouble displaying, and she thanked a fan for offering to give her a copy of his. (Watch above.)

While 10 million concurrent players reportedly watched Marshmello perform live in Epic Game's Fortnite last weekend, the only thing that seems to be "live" in terms of real time input by the artist named Marshmello, i.e. Christopher Comstock, is an audio stream (or pre-recorded audio?) going into many thousands of Fortnite servers while copies of the scripted show and his avatar played.

That's all probably hair-splitting, because as Second Life co-founder Cory Ondrejka puts it, Epic took a totally different approach to deploying a "live in-game concert":

Watch What Beta Gamers Have Built For Each Other in PS4's Dreams

Dreams, a PS4-only game from Media Molecule, creator of the user-generated content-centric hit Little Big Planet, has just lifted the beta tester NDA on this new game, "a space where you go to play and experience the dreams of Media Molecule and our community. It’s also a space in which to create your own dreams, whether they’re games, art, films, music or anything in-between and beyond."

To judge by the video above, it's already attracted a core community of talented creators. To judge by this Kotaku write-up from Ethan Gach, a lot of the user creations are fan tributes to existing games and other IP. So it's not a surprise that a link for copyright infringement reporting is prominently displayed on the company site. (Inevitable with any UGC.) And it just looks great -- watch the official trailer below:

Fortnite Follows Second Life's Footsteps Further Hosting "Live" In-Game Concert of RL Popstar Marshmello

First came in-game dance clubs, then came private, user-customizable islands, now right on schedule, Fortnite is following Second Life's footsteps yet again with Marshmello, a rising EDM star, who's reportedly performing live in-game this weekend:

Info is continuously coming out about the event as we speak, but here’s what we know so far. The event will begin at 2 PM ET on Saturday, though it’s not clear how long it will run for. It takes place in Pleasant Park, though you may see the lights/hear the music from anywhere on the map... There’s apparently a cosmetic bundle for the event which will include a Marshmello skin, pickaxe and spray. No word on pricing. There are some leaked animations that show “DJ dancing” for lack of a better term which would appear to be how Marshmello himself will act on stage.

Since Fortnite Battle Royale is run on thousands of separate servers, it's debatable how "live" Marshmello is actually going to be, beyond the lucky 100 (or so) players who get to be in his actual server. The chatter in Reddit's Fortnite board strongly suggests his music files are already embedded in the game client; if that's right, there may be hundreds or even thousands of automated copies of Marshmello's performing avatars synced to canned audio files of his show, to serve such a huge audience. (Fortnite peak user concurrency is a seriously insane 8 million+.)

Hat tip Forbe's Paul Tassi, who says this "has the potential to be a very cool, very unique moment in gaming, a live concert embedded in a game where millions attend in real-time." Millions of audience members are unique, and it's definitely cool, but far as real-time concerts by real world music stars in online games, we need to go back to ancient times (by which I mean 2006) and Suzanne Vega in Second Life:

I Chat With Lawrence Lessig on what MMOs Can Teach Us About Politics IRL

Thrilled to write this interview for Klang Games, creator of a novel MMO called Seed, which has a unique designer on the team:

Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law professor and a lifelong advocate for government reform; he’s argued a case before the Supreme Court, and for a brief time in 2015, even ran for President. Now, however, he’s taking on an unlikely task: Help design a video game... [He] is creating the political structure for Seed, our upcoming game in which players must collaborate (or compete) to rebuild society on a new, untamed planet.

While the esteemed professor might not seem like an obvious choice for this role, this is actually his second stint as an MMO adviser: Back in 2002, he advised a startup creating a then-unknown virtual world called Second Life. His guidance helped make it a cause celebre for a time, attracting academics, theorists, and politicians curious to know what they could learn about the real world through an online simulation.

Lessig sees similar potential in the next generation of MMOs, which enable truly massive numbers of users to participate in the same, evolving environment. “Imagine,” he says, “virtual worlds with colonies with tens of thousands of players. People can say ‘I’m going to learn how to govern [in the real world] by governing a virtual world.’ I’d love to see if we can establish the relevance of that. Because obviously there’s a lot that needs to be learned.”

Much more here.

Eastshade: An Open World Game Where You Create & Sell Works of Art

Eastshade is an upcoming open world game for PC, Mac, and Linux with a pretty cool mechanic: Rather than roam the countryside killing random beasts and bandits to level up, you create paintings to advance:

You are a traveling painter, exploring the island of Eastshade. Capture the world on canvas using your artist’s easel. Talk to the inhabitants to learn about their lives. Make friends and help those in need. Visit cities, scale summits, unearth mysteries, and discover forgotten places!

Based on the trailer (below), the painting process is mostly automatic, the player just selecting the portion of the world that'll be framed within the work. No word if the player can at least choose different art styles (Van Gogh-ish, Vermeer-ish, etc.), so it looks like all your works will look like a missing Caspar David Friedrich. As that suggests, the world is utterly gorgeous in a painterly way -- watch:

Does Rec Room Have 30,000-50,000 Monthly Active Users on Steam Alone?

Above: RecRoom's SteamSpy stats for today

I just had an interesting Twitter conversation with Shawn Whiting, community designer at Against Gravity, the company behind Rec Room; he made some interesting points about my post estimating the monthly user numbers for the social VR platform, based on its Steam stats. As I wrote yesterday:

Rec Room had a daily peak concurrency between 300-500 for most of 2018. That probably translates to around 3000-5000 monthly active users logging into Rec Room via Steam. (As a rule of thumb, monthly actives are 10x the peak concurrency.) 

Without reporting Rec Room's actual user numbers, Shawn pointed me to guidelines from live game back end provider Playfab, and suggested I should be calculating my estimate far more upward:

Watch: Warren Spector Talks Game Design, Underworld Ascendant & System Shock 3, Developing in Unity 3D & Much More

In case you missed it over the holidays, here's game design luminary Warren Spector interviewed recently before a live audience in Sinespace. Among the topics touched, we discuss the new game he worked on, Underworld Ascendant, his much-anticipated upcoming game System Shock 3, developing in Unity 3D, and his skepticism with VR. Here's some highlights with timecodes:

• 4:30: Warren talks about the relationship between Underworld Ascendant and the groundbreaking PC game Ultima Underworld, which he produced in 1992, and discusses the influence of that game on the simulation genre in general.
• 12:05: Russ and Warren talk about how high-end graphics in AAA games are becoming a limit on development — and how Otherside is dealing with this challenge, including the highly stylized look of UA which is inspired by miniatures gaming. 
• 15:20: Warren and Will from his team discuss the advantages of creating immersive worlds in Unity 3D.
• 22:26: Warren talks about Otherside’s development of System Shock 3, how the studio got the license to make the sequel, and what we can expect from the game.
• 25:00: Why Warren is skeptical about VR, which he predicted three years ago had deep “cultural and social problems”. Warren then goes on to talk about VR hype, its future and uses, his own experiences working on VR games back in the 90s — and worrying about your wife coming up from behind you with a baseball bat when you’re in virtual reality.

More highlights (and credits) after the break:

Sign Up to Beta Play GridIron, Upcoming Multiplayer, Physics-Based, Futuristic Football Game -- With Visual Design By SL Star Blueberry!

GridIron is an upcoming indie game now accepting closed Beta testers, and it sounds like it could be a lot of fun:

GridIron is a physics based online only game inspired by American Football. It takes the basic structure in a unique direction focusing on action oriented visceral gameplay in a multiplayer arena. The most unique aspect being that each player on the field is actually controlled by an individual rather than one individual controlling the entire team.

So kind of like Rocket League, but for football and with, you know, space aliens and robots and such. And longtime readers will be interested in this: The lead artist is "Blueberry" (Gizem Mishi Akin), one of Second Life's top fashion designers, so expect the character outfits to come with extra style. Steam keys for the game are being given out soon, so best soon apply to get one here.