Aug 11, 2017
Worlds Adrift - Bossa_Oli
The text below comes from an article from the "Evening Standard" British newspaper that you can read online here: https://www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tech-gaming/worlds-adrift-is-an-ecofuturist-video-game-utopia-where-knowledge-is-power-a3609531.html. These cool folks visited us and totally embraced what Worlds Adrift is about.
Action and adventure video games are often fuelled by a sense of urgency: complete an objective before the time runs out, kill the enemy before they kill you, reach a checkpoint before you lose your progress.
Worlds Adrift, developed by Shoreditch-based Bossa Studios, is different. Like farming games and simulators, it’s designed to be played at your own pace — an eco-futurist MMO (massively multiplayer online) sandbox with utopian ideals, where adventurers with an ethos of co-operation and collaboration are more likely to succeed.
It was made with Bossa’s Farringdon neighbour Improbable’s revolutionary SpatialOS (the company was recently valued at $1 billion) running on multiple servers for a more vivid experience.
From its art style to its adventurous tone, it was inspired equally by classic Zelda game The Wind Waker and the films of Studio Ghibli. “Rather than have zombies and post-apocalypse, we were looking at stuff like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” explains game designer Luke Williams. “We felt like that kind of adventure style was better than the doom and gloom of everyone fighting to survive.”
[/imgGamers can explore their starter island in their own time, mine resources and construct their own aircraft, then venture off to see what lies beyond the huge storms on the horizon.
It’s this lack of urgency that makes the game feel laid-back and open. “We wanted that chill-out time, when you’re flying between islands. You can sit back and enjoy the view,” Williams says. “In survival games you have that constant ticking — if you don’t eat you’ll die. That forces a lot of hostility from players.”
Rather than denying players the ability to kill each other, Worlds Adrift makes it more valuable to keep other players alive. “Knowledge is like a currency,” he explains. “Players can share and live off each other, you can chat and exchange resources. If you kill someone you don’t get access to what they’ve discovered. They might have something that you don’t have, so it’s far more beneficial to talk to them.”
Nothing demonstrates players’ dedication to working together better than the Cardinal Guild — a group of volunteers who have taken it upon themselves to draw up their own game map.
“We don’t offer a mini-map, so players have to make one for themselves. We’ve even had professional cartographers saying it’s their favourite game because they get to create maps,” says Williams. “They use the compass to map out where they are, fly to a new island and track the speedometer, figure out how long it took to get there, see their compass direction and use triangulation to get exact measurements.”
Making this kind of relative physics possible in such a large-scale shared digital environment is SpatialOS. Every item in Worlds Adrift has weight and momentum, meaning adventurers have to play smartly and try not to crush themselves under trees they chop down.
“We’ve had players say, ‘Can you make it so that if I build an engine it doesn’t roll down a hill?’ And our response is, ‘Don’t put it on a hill then!’” laughs Williams.
Items that players create remain in the game world even when they’re discarded or broken, leaving other users to come and pick them up and use them for something new. “Everyone shares the world, and that player history builds up over time,” says Williams. “Every object has a past, it’s something that someone at some point made.”
Worlds Adrift players have a stake in the world because they helped create it in the first place. Before the beta version of the main game was released, Bossa unveiled the Worlds Adrift Island Creator, and players’ designs are populating the game.
“We have a community member, Synovus, and his islands are just absolutely incredible, from haunted houses to crazy pubs,” enthuses Bossa’s chief marketing officer Tracey McGarrigan.
https://youtu.be/yUrudZjifgk
“People seem to be having fun with the tools we’re giving them — it means you’ve created something that does genuinely offer player freedom. Our community are our second developers. The stuff they’re coming up with is frightening in a way — the level of detail, the number of hours they spend, the creativity they show, the personalities that come out.”
Best of all, while Worlds Adrift is a game where you can spend a lot of time, it doesn’t demand it like more structured RPGs.
“Players who don’t usually play MMOs because they’re so time-consuming won’t have to dedicate a second life to Worlds Adrift,” McGarrigan assures me. Load it up, start exploring and relax.
Follow Ben Travis on Twitter: @BenSTravis
Worlds Adrift is available now in Steam Early Access on PC, from £26.99"
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