Over the past few weeks, Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster has been kicking out lots of blog posts about what his studio’s game is aiming to become — in fact there’s been so many of these posts that we’ve started to pool together a list. While we still have no concrete details on what this dream game is actually going to be, we have even more talking by way of an interview with VentureBeat with both Koster and Playable Worlds co-founder Eric Goldberg.
One of the key features of the game is the use of the cloud in order to make the game more widely accessible and offer a wider variety of gameplay features, while also eliminating the need to download large patches. Both Koster and Goldberg call the game “cloud-native,” meaning it operates a bit like Roblox in that the game runs on cloud servers and players can access the game experience on a wide variety of devices. To that point, specific devices Playable Worlds’ MMO can be played on weren’t listed, but Koster did refer to different devices as “windows onto the virtual world” and said that some activities in the game will be better suited to desktop gaming while others are bite-sized and perfect for accessing via a phone.
According to Koster and Goldberg, the cloud-native nature of the game provides new opportunities to create a simulated and dynamic world. Cloud tech will reportedly provide benefits like consistently new places for explorers to find, a chemistry system that allows players to combine things to get something new, changing seasons, and player actions having a large impact like one player missing a shot against another that ignites a forest fire or breaks a dam. To that point, this game’s world is being built as a shard-free shared instance, with a lot of proprietary tech being built to make these cloud-native game concepts a reality.
As for gameplay details, social systems are being eyed as a primary foundation for this new game, meaning that players will have a wide variety of playstyles such as combat, crafting, exploring, or providing “social support,” all of which are tied to the sandbox title’s economy to make everything interdependent. Self-expression and personalization is also considered key pillars for the game, with the devs looking to reward players who engage with things like the title’s IP or its environment and providing ways for a bare minimum of user-generated content.
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