And, just as soon as I finished that list I just posted, I found another social VR space/MMO hybrid called MetaWorld!
Actually, re-found it. I had actually signed up for project updates by email and then completely forgotten about it, and the last project update was quite a while ago, way back in August 2017. It looks like their attempt to crowdfund the platform via IndieGoGo has stalled. I’m not sure if this project still exists, although they have slashed prices on their “Pioneer” packages.
According to their website:
MetaWorld invites you to experience a 10,000 square mile, massively scaled open world in virtual reality. Discover endless activities and adventure, inside a persistent, open world simulation, allowing thousands of visitors to participate simultaneously online.
Join us, and pioneer a first of its kind, vast-scale social VR MMO simulation experience.
Aah yes, yet another blockchain-based social VR space:
If anybody out there has any knowledge about what happened to the MetaWorld project, could they let me know? Thanks.
UPDATE May 12th: Well, I did find some answers in this very informative post to the Oculus subReddit:
Don’t get your hopes up for Metaworld VR. It looks like vaporware.
Updates have been non-existent, emails go unanswered, some have been sent a png and a fake link as “digital downloads”, begging for crowdsource money, and whoever runs their Reddit account just spams review articles, which are likely paid advertising, whenever there is criticism.
Would not send these guys a cent.
It’s worth reading through the whole discussion thread just to find out what happened. The co-founder left the MetaWorld project to found another, smaller social VR space called Community Garden.
And The Road to VR website posted a comprehensive report on the troubled project back in September, and issued a strongly worded Buyer Beware:
MetaWorld is headed into Early Access, which partly excuses it from being an incomplete product, but the inconsistency in messaging around the game’s core mechanics and features ought to leave you worried about the stability of the still unreleased MMO. The game purports to feature a variety of activities including hunting, fishing, camping, snorkeling, sailing, sports, training, RC, drones, and go karts—all well and good—but according to the company, the core gameplay is based around survival. “You’ll have to defend your land against other players as well as opportunistic animals,” the company says.
You won’t find this information conveniently listed on the MetaWorld website though, but rather strewn across various Reddit pages where the creator sporadically posts, oftentimes in cryptic, single-word answers. At the time of this writing, the game’s website only consists of press blurbs gathered from before the IndieGogo campaign was launched and a small marketplace selling the game’s three plot sizes.
…It still isn’t clear how much is truly at stake for landowners or the landless free-to-players at the moment either. Questions like: can animals or other players kill you? If you die, do you lose your items? Can you trade in-game credits back to real cash? Can you craft items, or do you have to buy everything from vendors? The list of unaddressed questions goes on in the game’s largely abandoned discussion board on Steam.
To quell fears around the general lack of communication about the core game mechanics, the studio took to three major VR Reddit pages on Saturday (r/Vive, r/Oculus, r/PSVR), saying that the game won’t only be a wilderness area with cookie-cutter buildings as featured in the promo, but rather a growing framework “we can use […] to create many other worlds. Fantasy, Sci Fi etc.”
“We are building the world as a community, a few square miles at a time,” the company says. “Early pioneers will gather in world and decide on what types of diverse biomes to build. People in the world are discover-able through the UI. We figured out a way to make a huge world that feels alive, rich with things to do. One of our primary goals is to introduce an experience with lots of divergent game play, that you’ll never get bored of.”
For potential customers, HelloVR also had this to say about refunds on the PSVR Reddit page:
“MetaWorld was founded out of passion. Our team doesn’t expect to generate much revenue from the project. Our early access goal is to build a core community that has ownership in the world. Anyone can ask for a refund at anytime by emailing metabot@metaworldvr.com“
Anyone can ask, but it remains to be seen if anyone can actually have a refund—something to keep in mind for digital prospectors looking to settle a virtual frontier that might just as likely turn out to be a barren wasteland.
What is clear now, is that MetaWorld is a dead (or nearly-dead) project. Caveat Emptor!
Great work on the post, one update about Community Garden, it’s actually not small any more. The current world is 10k square miles and I’m working on increasing that number with Improbable’s help. I’ve completed the core tech that allows people to meet from around the world in a large persistent world (shared physics, voice chat with lip sync, etc). Now I’m working on the next steps to make the world more fun. You can try it out on steam right now 🙂
Sorry I meant 10 square miles not 10k.