Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds MMORPG has picked up two new executives today: Gordon Walton and Omar Abdelwahed.
Walton will be immediately recognizable to modern MMO fans as he was one of the two bosses behind ArtCraft and Crowfall, whose meek launch last year led to the game being sold off to another studio as the team behind it moved to working on a second as-yet-unannounced title. But of course, Walton’s tenure in the MMO industry was long even before that, totaling 40 years in the industry; in particular, he spearheaded Koster’s older MMORPG sandboxes, including Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online. In fact, MMO players will surely remember that he was the SOE boss who originally pitched SWG’s NGE (as a second game), and then, once he realized the direction would destroy SWG, refused to implement it, which got him fired from SOE (which went on and implemented it anyway).
In any case, he’ll be Executive Producer and Chief Product Officer this time ’round.
Abdelwahed comes with “only” two decades under his belt in technical roles at multiple game companies, including Ubisoft as well as mobile games company East Side Games; he’ll take on the mantle of VP of Engineering for Koster’s title.
We’ve been covering Playable Worlds since 2019, when veteran MMO developer Raph Koster announced he was finally making a new MMO. Since then, he’s raised at least $37.5 million (that we publicly know of) from investors to build a real functioning metaverse platform on which his sandboxy MMORPG will rest – a game to “[fulfill] the dream of living worlds that we’ve all had for a couple of decades now” but ” built atop a modern, re-usable, scalable platform.” At the end of 2021, Koster wrote that his team is “reasonably far along on building” the game, though it’s “at least a few years out.” We don’t yet know what it’s called, either.
Further reading:
• Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds teases housing, planetary governance, and languages for the unnamed MMORPG sandbox
• Raph Koster’s nine Playable Worlds teasers (so far) hint at the MMORPG sandbox you always wanted
• Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds is counting down to… something
• Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds enlists ‘AI-powered’ character platform Popul8
• Raph Koster has been warning about the death of games innovation longer than most MMOs have been alive
• Raph Koster predicts the future of the metaverse is a ‘virtual Machu Picchu’ – that you can leave
• MMO dev Raph Koster disambiguates sandboxes, themeparks, simulation, and stagecraft
• Raph Koster talks about the ‘mission’ of Playable Worlds, his vision of the metaverse, and player ownership
• Crowfall’s Gordon Walton joins Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds MMO and platform
• Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster makes bold promises about his studio’s developing sandbox MMORPG
• Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds scored $25M in investment for his ‘modern sandbox MMO’
• Raph Koster talks metaverse creation and learning lessons from past game design mistakes
• Raph Koster and Playable Worlds won’t announce their MMO until next year
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• Raph Koster’s ‘modern sandbox MMO’ is teasing concept art for the first time
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• Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster on the ‘stuff’ inside your virtual worlds
• Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster is not gonna stop saying the word metaverse
• Raph Koster says nobody wants a metaverse with ‘Fairyland butting up against World War II’
• Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster on why avatars traipsing across the metaverse are a major tech challenge
• Playable Worlds’ lead QA engineer on the industry’s problematic ‘godlike status’ for devs
• Raph Koster’s plan is to build the metaverse tech, build a sandbox MMORPG on it, then open it all up
• Massively OP Podcast Episode 338: No power in the multiverse can stop Raph Koster
• So it turns out Raph Koster is building the metaverse and a sandbox MMO on top of it
• Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster has all but said he’s building a metaverse
• Playable Worlds’ lead designer: ‘Our industry does not thrive on ideas’
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• The folks working on Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds MMO provide clues into what it’ll be
• Raph Koster argues MMOs are much more than ‘a series of kill and fetch quest pellets’
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• Raph Koster touches on the technology and community that will bring Playable Worlds’ MMO to life
• Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds studio raises an additional $10 million in funding
• Raph Koster will give more insight on Playable Worlds’ in-development MMO next year
• Raph Koster’s dev studio Playable Worlds opens a new website and begins the search for game devs
• Raph Koster’s new MMORPG will reward social gameplay, not just hack-n-slash
• Raph Koster’s new MMORPG will be more than ‘just hack and slashing your way through levels’
• Raph Koster is making a new MMO and just raised $2.7M in seed funding to do it
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Source: Press release
