DreamWorld Realities, Inc. says its new MMO, DreamWorld, is “the last game you’ll ever play,” and we’re not sure whether that’s a threat, but it’s definitely a slogan. In its new Kickstarter, the game is billed as an “infinite open world MMO” with “millions of players” in “one single world” made up of “thousands of unique biomes” that players can “sculpt” and “permanently impact” themselves. The Kickstarter (and official website) is a light on details, but it promises deep character customization, no pay-to-win, PvEvP, and PC and Mac support with plans to “expand to every internet connected device with a screen very soon,” which we hope includes those really awesome refrigerators.
“The Alpha Trailer is our roadmap, and over the next 6 months we aim to have everything you see in DreamWorld. An infinite procedurally generated world, a player-driven economy based on creating useful in-game items, unique biomes for endless exploration, mobs and bosses for you to take down, 10 full time devs, hundreds of thousands of players. […] The vision is that DreamWorld is the endgame. Every genre, every style, every game type there has been and will be, all in one world, built by each player, on the back of accessible and powerful modular user interfaces. Think Zbrush, Photoshop, and Sketchup but in-game and easier.”
The game has apparently been in development in eight months with a whopping two and a half developers and has a pre-alpha available to those who’ve recruited more players (and an alpha available for Kickstarter backers). The company is asking for only $10,000 on Kickstarter, and it’s already gotten that much, but of course that won’t go particularly far. In fact, a “superbacker” asked the team how it could possibly succeed on $10,000 when Chronicles of Elyria could not on over $1.4M. Our readers will know that the Elyria story is one of the primary narratives floating through the MMO industry over the last year, particularly relevant to crowdfunded MMOs.
“I can’t speak to CoE’s experience, I’m not sure why they weren’t able to succeed,” a representative for the studio said. “What I do know is that our approach was to get our technology developed first as our foundation so that we knew we could build whatever we came up with on top of it. Garrison has been working as what you could consider an ‘infrastructural’ engineer for Google, Apple, Facebook, and others for the better part of the last decade, and friends and consultants we’re working with have similar experience. We’ve built our base level off of that expertise, so we’re confident in our technology. My job is to put an exciting world and player experience on top of it, and that I can promise we’ll also do in spades! :) We’re also backed by YCombinator, so we’re building community and trying to expand our team faster with Kickstarter!” (It is not clear how much money YCombinator has provided the duo or how it can possibly fund such an ambitious effort.)
Finally, we note that we learned about this game thanks to a paid Facebook ad one of our writers happened to see, not through any outreach, which certainly made us wonder whether this new studio has deep roots in the MMORPG community. You folks know how Kickstarted MMOs go, so you don’t need us to tell you what to do with your own money, but waiting and seeing what happens next costs and risks nothing. We’re including the Minecrafty Kickstarter video down below as well as some YouTuber offerings that show how the game actually looks right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTsOw1XORIE&ab_channel=Tobydoo2
