Remember, our worlds are effectively created on the fly. They’re run by AIs in every cubic meter. Everything you see is malleable and changes around you, and players can resculpt every inch of it. Heck, every tree and every bush is a mobile object.
Players have invented ice rinks and heat pumps and most recently, even an elevator, using the in-game physics. They’re building crazy stuff. It’s awesome to see. All of this stuff is player built, using one of the three building methods (or all three!): terraforming, block building a la Minecraft, and tile building.
Here's the latest demo video of the Quark engine from MetaGravity, which employs "causal partitioning" (more on that below) to enable single shard virtual worlds with massive concurrency. They're showing off that technology later this year with their own Minecraft server, which they say will be able to handle up 100,000 concurrent players. (You can sign up here to request early access.)
Matthew Chuen, Head of Ecosystem at MetaGravity, says they're also able to handle high local concurrency, i.e. the number of avatars in your immediate vicinity:
"We have successfully handled 5,000 players within a 100-square-meter area with excellent performance," he says. "This is possible because our Causal Partitioning technology is fundamentally more efficient than traditional servers, avoiding the exponential lag that typically makes such high-density scenarios impossible."
Without diving too deeply into the technical details, here's how MetaGravity describes Casual Partitioning:
Above: Most successful AI runs, character type (Wizard-Elf-Chaotic-Male, etc.) the level at which they died, and what killed them
Back in 2021, Meta (still Facebook at the time), sponsored an innovative challenge in AI programming: Create a bot which could win NetHack on its own. If you know the classic roguelike RPG, first created in the 80s, you know how hard that is. I know that from personal experience, because it was one of the very first games I obsessed over as a kid, and first inspired my interest in virtual worlds.
Though it was limited to ASCII graphics, the complexity and depth of the world made it seem real. Unlike say, a chess game, where each individual move is limited to a few dozen options, the moves in NetHack seem unlimited. I wrote about that complexity in one of my very first articles:
With every object, tool, weapon and creature imbued with a wealth of attributes, every situation has endless potential. The cockatrice, for example, could turn you into stone, but that is only the beginning. If you kill one, then pick it up with gloves, you can wield its body like a flail, instantly turning monsters to stone when you bash them with it. (Usenet wags dubbed this maneuver “wielding the rubber chicken.”) If you have a wand of Polymorph and also wear a Ring of Polymorph Control, you can actually turn yourself into a cockatrice, and explore the dungeon in that deadly form. You can even lay cockatrice eggs, too — usable as hand grenades of instant paralysis.
In NetHack, at any point, anything seems possible. Jean-Christophe Collet, a DevTeam member who discovered the game while working for a Parisian Unix company, says he was enthralled by “the sheer complexity of the situations you could get into, and the way that there was no ‘right way’ to get out of them.” Surrounded by Orcs, for example, you could incinerate most of them with your Wand of Lightning, but the blast would likely ricochet off the opposite wall and crisp you, too. You could wear your Ring of Conflict, which would magically compel the Orcs to start attacking each other instead — but then again, wearing it would probably also compel your pet Large Dog to attack you. You’d often get the eerie sense the game was anticipating you and all these uniquely intricate conundrums that no one could have possibly foreseen. Or could they?
AI developers at Oxford, NYU, and other top universities participated. So how'd they do? One of the participants recently shared the academic summaries with me, but the non-academic answer would be:
The cult classic Thief franchise is going VR! Courtesy Eidos (its original publisher) and Vertigo Games, creator of the award-winning creators of VR hits Metro Awakening and Arizona Sunshine, Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is set for release on Quest, PSVR, and on Steam this year.
I'm only surprised a VR reboot has taken this long, because the original games from the early 2000s were all about 3D immersion (both graphically and aurally). By putting the player in the role of a stealthy cat burglar in a steampunk city, Thief made you so keenly aware of the virtual environment (light/shadow, the ambient noisemaking potential of different materials, bored/agitated guards), you felt truly part of the 3D world around you. Done well, it could be a masterpiece of the medium.
And yes, it sounds like Garrett, the franchise's grizzled but lovable anti-hero, is back in some form, and voiced by the original actor, Stephen Russell:
I feel like people in the game/metaverse industry haven't grasped how huge Sky: Children of the Light, the virtual world from Jenova Chen and his studio Thatgamecompany, has become. In 2023 it had over 50 million monthly active users and earned a record for most concurrent users for a live virtual concert; based on recent download/rating numbers, it's likely to have upwards of 100 million MAU now. (I'm checking that with Jenova.)
As a latest sign of its hugeness, the studio produced a feature film inspired by the world, and is debuting it inside the world itself. (Watch the trailer above.)
Speaking of which, I interviewed Jenova for Making a Metaverse That Matters, where he shared some design innovations which helped make Sky such a huge success. Here's an excerpt:
The Seed [player] community is the closest thing we have to people in Rawls’ hypothetical Original Position. Players have a very rough idea what the world will be; some probably have vague plans for what they want to do there, once the game is open. But none yet know what strategic and leadership talents they’ll need to succeed, let alone dominate or successfully survive.
So I was somewhat surprised to see that an early Seed player community, given the chance to choose their political organization, chose... a benevolent dictatorship.
Watch above, with one player insisting, "It's not as evil as people think it is." Well OK then!
Mundi Vondi, CEO of Seed developer Klang Games, tells me that this isn't necessarily because players want dictatorship per se, except perhaps in this early stage of gameplay:
Matt Daly's early first-person explorations of Star's Reach, the sandbox MMO from Raph Koster and his company Playable Worlds, have been so intriguing (as featured here last week), I asked him to expand them in this guest post! - WJA
The whole reason many of us work in Games and Virtual Worlds is because of early experiences with wonder.
I grew up deep in the Quake 2 modder community (Loki’s Minions whereya at). As newly minted teens, my childhood BFF and I weren’t hanging at the mall as much as leading guilds, going to war, and fletching arrows or whatever in Telnet MUDS and M59.
Considering we had just been literally playing in literal sandboxes only a few years before (as literal children), this came quite naturally to us.
We didn’t need or care about revenue models or acquisition funnels. All of that sterile product science would come later in our careers and begin to hide some of the original wonder. But, spoiler: hyper-efficiency, liquid content and AI are creating an allergic reaction amongst player communities that’s bringing wonder back, baby (you won’t believe what happens next! 😲)
When Ultima Online launched in 1997, while we worked on haranguing my dad into buying us a 56k connection, BFF and I would sit at my kitchen table and pore over the cloth map of Brittania (right) that came with the UO guidebook. Our master plan (when we had proper internet and could actually play the game) was to overthrow the isle of Magincia, based only on a couple paragraphs about animal taming (which included dragons). Obviously we inevitably hit the reality of constraints that would prevent two children from taking over an entire island in a game millions would play.
The wonder, however, remained. It's followed me almost 30 years later to a pre-alpha MMO called Stars Reach, where I found a team and community who are leaning into the sloppy, undeniably human imperfection of an actual literal sandbox in search of their wonder.
Stars Reach, Raph Koster's highly ambitious upcoming galaxy sandbox MMORPG, had its successful Kickstarter a few months ago, but longtime virtual world developer Matt Daly writes that a thriving player community has emerged -- even before the crowdfunder. Groups are already evolving and building in fascinating ways:
Stars Reach keeps subverting my preconceived notions of player/community motivation in metaverse / sandbox / MMO spaces.
This is GUNC guild’s little enclave - a communal effort of a bunch of players (guild members and not), terraforming, creating land bridges, planting trees, building (including a GUNCies restaurant), over the course of less than 2 full days… and all of this will be wiped in a week or so.
And they've done many versions of this before, across various planned pre-alpha testing server wipes, for months, before the Kickstarter bandwagon etc, just for the love of building, together.
There isn't even an in-game currency yet, or really much FUNCTIONALLY to do in these built cities yet… so it’s like a little product study trapped in amber, worth observing, because those systems and more will come, and by that point it's a product manager’s job to sort signal from noise, but for now the lack of those systems paints a pretty clear picture.
And it’s not due to the official Discord live chat either, as there are countless builds that have sprung up since the last wipe that have usernames on them I don't even recognize.
It’s been motivating me to document and curate a bit. It’s like the best of the modern artists like Lozano-Hemmer whose work is often designed to decay or disassemble itself.
In a time dominated by product management funnels and bottom line predatory Skinner box monetization models, and on the opposite end metaverse graveyard platforms that have no central thesis, this is pretty refreshing.*
Again, this social building is happening despite (because of?) Stars Reach being in pre-release, and all these user-created builds are regularly wiped from the world servers.
"People still going HARD in the paint building and refining, even though the wave is about to erase their sandcastle," as Matt puts it to me. "It's amazing."
Especially impressive because Raph's world isn't a traditional leveling MMO:
"Games like Rust do periodic wipes. Dune awakening will follow suit I think. Conan has them. But [Stars Reach] doesn't even have the mechanics to buttress that pain -- it's currently just pure building. So its just kind of awesome to see how intrinsically powerful that loop is to certain player types."
Matt tells me Stars Reach user creation is similar to worlds like Rust and Second Life, by the way:
Roblox reached 82.9 million daily active users in 2024 with 80% of those playing the popular game on mobile devices, according to Roblox's annual report.
PC was the second most popular platform at just 17%, followed by consoles at 3%.
Disappointing that Roblox hasn't been able to diversify usage much beyond mobile, which would also lead to a more diversified user base. (I.E., not just mostly kids on their parents phones/tablets.) But by the company's own data, that hasn't happened yet.
After blogging about Palia's design mechanics for growing community earlier this month, and Dr. Ruth Diaz's thoughts on them, I got a chance to join Dr. Diaz on an embedded journey into Palia. Watch our tour above! Though you won't hear me speaking due to a technical glitch, I'm interviewing Dr. Diaz as she explores the world, with our core focus being: What Palia features should open non-MMO virtual worlds learn and try to emulate?
To that question, Dr. Diaz points to the Flow Tree Grove ritual (at around 52 minutes in), where players on the same server meet to harvest these magic-infused trees.
"The Flow Tree Grove Ritual is the most impressive feature in many ways," she tells me. "It takes building a generous culture in the rest of the app, during the rest of the time people play, to make that a regular phenomena, work."
As she notes during the video, Palia players have come up with their own social principles around how to harvest these trees so that they may be shared: "[Palia development studio Singularity 6] have designed this game so cooperatively, that the community has built their own collective rule on how to enjoy something together with delayed gratification."
She even thinks the harvest ritual has become core to MMO's long-term success. "It's like a fruit of the whole Palia tree," as she puts it. "If this gets toxic their game is going under."
For myself, I was impressed by the cooking game (around 18 minutes in) where players are rewarded for working together to cook a single recipe within a certain time frame. That in itself encourages cooperation and community, and then at the end -- well, everyone knows the most fun and the best conversations at a house party happen in the kitchen.
