Everyone complains about MMOs, but nobody does anything about them. The Guardian reports today about Multiverse, a platform for developing your own MMOs….

Everyone complains about MMOs, but nobody does anything about them. The Guardian reports today about Multiverse, a platform for developing your own MMOs.

Now, making a MMO is a massive job. Art assets, customizable UIs, game balance, quest design, encounter scripting and AI… these are all really, really hard things, and while Multiverse may make it easy to make an empty world and run around in it, that’s pretty much the easiest thing to do of them all (and there are already plenty of engines that do just that – the Unreal engines, for example).

The meat will come with what other things they offer. A basic skeletal MMO, with dungeons, combat, magic, effects, avatars, cities and so on that you could then extend through some sort of cut-and-paste mechanism… similar to Neverwinter Nights’ constuction set… where 95% is given and it’s your job to add the 5% that makes it your own… now, that would be worth looking at.

And perhaps that’s exactly what they give… I don’t know… I know other places are working on very similar things, and one of them is mentioned in the article that (alas) I cannot talk about… it’s worth a download to see if it’s anything more than an empty world that would require a concerted team effort to make anything usable.

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