UK tech startup Improbable is stretching the bounds of the MMO and MMORPG again with its announcement that its SpatialOS will serve as the foundation for yet another game: MetaWorld.
MMORPG vets will recall that Improbable’s SpatialOS is also one of the core components of Chronicles of Elyria; Soulbound said back in June that the platform would help Elyria “get a hundred thousand players spread across the largest geographic area in a video game to date.”
MetaWorld, on the other hand, fancies itself a “new breed of massive-scale, social VR entertainment” where “people can realistically interact in a persistent shared space” — i.e., a virtual world, complete with “camping, fishing, farming, archery, hot air balloon flights, road trips, meditation retreats and more.”
“MetaWorld will place players in nearly 10,000 square miles of virtual environment in the first ever massive, physics-based virtual social space of its kind. The scale of the simulated world, and its networked physics, is enabled by SpatialOS. […] By building MetaWorld with SpatialOS, HelloVR is creating a world where people can build structures using pre-existing ‘MetaBlox’ or using a simple but powerful toolkit, working on their own or collaborating with friends, and know that they will be able to return to them at any time – there are no “world wipes” to free up server space.”
HelloVR says MetaWorld will be playable on the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStationVR, as well as on PC and mobile without a VR headset. The “Pioneer Edition” of the game is currently in closed alpha and is expected to release “later this year,” though you can buy in for $9.99 to $39.99 right now.
