This is a repost of information I shared with the Unofficial Playable Worlds Discord a month ago - I think with the pending announcement on Friday 6/28/24 some more users would be interested in the writeup!
I was in San Diego in May for a work conference, and as Carneros (PW Marketing Director) has told you, I was graciously invited out for drinks and dinner with some of the Playable Worlds team. We ate at a casual brewery, and I had a great time meeting the folks that came. We chatted about games we’ve been playing lately, what ones we’re looking forward to; general gamer stuff. Once I got over the weirdness of sharing beers with people who helped engineer some very formative experiences in my life, I felt right at home.
Folks talked about games they’d worked on in the past and shared war stories about the hell of getting games Certified for console release. Raph told us about the game breaking bugs he found while testing some Origin Systems games when he was getting started.
At one point I asked a question about Playable Worlds itself, based on the vibe I'd been getting from the art we’ve seen so far. For a moment the team was unsure how to answer, how much were they allowed to reveal? I’m under NDA, but even with it there were limitations!
Carneros and Raph shared a nod, and Raph leaned into telling me all about the MMO’s universe. The history, lore, factions, and the events players will find themselves directly dropped into. It was a well practiced pitch that he’s given to other industry folks before.
The world as described seemed to allow for a very dynamic story. But what struck me the most was how much it allowed for in universe explanations for the more “gamey” kinds of things a player might encounter in an MMO. Developers could establish rules and boundaries, and have those mechanics fully backed up by the game lore, maintaining immersion.
Then Raph, having come right to dinner from an earlier meeting, pulled out his tablet to show off some trailers, screenshots, and test footage. As I watched, the team members leaned in to watch too. When I reacted to different reveals, they grinned as if to say, “Yeah, it’s awesome isn’t it?” They were clearly passionate about what they were working on and so excited to be sharing it.
Gameworld, character models, combat, traversal, harvesting, taming, some structures.
Character creation will be very friendly to roleplayers and those that like to express themselves, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the Star Wars Galaxies character builder.
I got to see the dynamically flowing water that Carneros told us about in one of the Firesides. One of the trailers was of a waterfall, which the team revealed took a lot of different ‘takes’ to get it looking right on video. Because unlike in say, Skyrim, the waterfall is not a static piece you drop on a map with an editor. They used tools (the same ones players could use) to carve out pieces of the terrain and get the water to drain from a lake out over a cliff. Getting it to look right wasn’t a matter of improving the art, it was about getting the angles correct so the water hit the right speed to fall and froth like a majestic waterfall.
I got to see more of the animal taming. It was a bit staggering to see the sheer variety of creatures the game systems will be able to produce. They all had attributes and behaviors derived from high levels of world simulation. Raph said the game will be huge for collectors/sightseers. That’s where the game’s emphasis is, rather than the vertical accumulation of power like in other MMOs.
And to that - I got to see some of how the horizontal progression works. I don’t think I can give too many details here, but it’s very elegant and will encourage players to interact and work together.
All this talk of simulation might lead one to think - okay cool, so it's an impressive science experiment, but is it fun? Well, believe it or not, they’ve been considering that too! Even in the snippets of footage I saw there was a big focus on engaging moment to moment gameplay, from combat to traversal. Even the tools by which players harvest materials seemed to be snappy and responsive. I was told the developers were taking inspiration from anywhere across the gaming spectrum where a mechanic was implemented well. Combat and movement absolutely had some coin-op arcade game DNA in the mix.
Overall, I don’t think anyone here is going to be overly shocked when we finally start seeing details about the game. We’ve been doing a pretty good job piecing together what information we’ve been given + what we know about Raph’s design philosophies. But I personally was surprised by just how in depth some of the features went, and how many edge cases the implementation accounted for. While I watched I kept thinking “Man, if this stuff works in practice once players get a hold of it - people are going to go nuts.” This game is ambitious. People are putting everything they’ve got into it.
Raph said the team actively watches the Discord and have not come across anything we’ve said that makes them go “Oh hey we didn’t think of that.” Our discussions have been a series of confirmations that Playable Worlds has the right audience here, and what they’re making is what we’re all hoping for. To me, that means we need to roll our sleeves up and start pitching bigger, whackier ideas. Really make this team sweat.
If you’ve read Raph’s posts or one of his books, Playable Worlds is very much building the game Raph’s always been working towards. He told me that the technology has been there for a while, but the market finally caught up with the vision. Games like Minecraft and Zelda: Breath of the Wild have proven that the audience is there for simulation heavy sandbox games, and that they don’t have to be that complicated or overwhelming to the player.
I’m always wary when I hear a game is trying to do everything - games that try to please everyone often end up pleasing no one. But Playable Worlds is not trying to *please* everyone, they’re trying to create a game capable of anything the player might want to do. Or more specifically, everything this community and fans of Raph’s games have wanted for decades.
Well how can that work, certainly some game styles will alienate others? Ultima Online got sheep and wolves playing together because there weren’t really alternatives. But then as soon as PvE players could - they jumped ship to Trammel, or EverQuest, or another game. And players have more options than ever before now.
So for this game, players are being handed an immense amount of tools and ways to interact with the world. If there is a style of play that someone doesn’t like, rather than leaving the game altogether they can go somewhere in the game that is more suited to their play style. But everyone will still be sharing the same game world. And all of this seems like it’ll be done in a very immersive lore friendly way like I alluded to before. This is right in line with how Raph has always preferred virtual worlds - players handling things themselves.
Whenever I hear a lot about player freedom I start looking at it through my ‘Griefer PTSD’ eyes and question how it’ll work in practice. And even though the emphasis of the game isn’t on accumulation of power - will some players find ways to abuse the tools they’re given to lock down vital resources? We’ll need to see more about implementation and what options are there before we can really start digging into those edge cases. That’s what testing is for!
Time and the trajectory of the MMO genre have really dulled my hype sensors over the years, but I was so impressed with the team, what I saw, and where it’s all going. I think if anyone has a shot of pulling something like this off, it’s them. Indeed I saw with my own eyes how so much of it was *already* being pulled off. Thanks again to Carneros and Raph and the other folks I met. I didn’t name drop you here in case this kicks up a ton of questions - but feel free to chime in! Hopefully the rest of you get some peaks behind the curtain soon, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
-Signus
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