Last week, to mark the release of the first version of the Multiverse Platform, Corey Bridges took some time out of his day to talk with me about the company’s ambitious plans. A free product for everyone to develop with, Multiverse hopes to be nothing less than a creativity engine for individuals and groups looking for inspiration.

Below are my notes and some quotes from our conversation, which touched on the platform, Multiverse’s goals, and some creative folks that have already put the technology to good use. And … I even managed not to ask about Firefly. Go me.

The Sales Pitch

Multiverse is a client, server, and tools, and a bunch of documentation. It’s the complete package for building a world. It’s also completely free. As long as project developers aren’t charging, using the product is absolutely free. If world builders want to charge they ask for 10% of the revenue, with the rest going directly to the development house.

Multiverse’s view is that Massive games have many possible uses. Entertainment has obviously been the purpose that has spurred interest in the concept of a massive game, but they’re looking for folks to break out of that mold. Multiverse is perfect for such a situation, as educators, military planners, social engineers, and researchers can make inroads on a project without having to fork over a hefty fee. Even better, the company doesn’t require that they host the database and code. Projects can run independent servers using the system, and (again) not pay a dime as long as it’s a non-commercial endeavor. Multiverse will gladly help you host a server. For a fee, of course.

The guiding principle, though, is flexibility on both the software and social ends. Several of the Multiverse folks are from Netscape (pre-IPO), and they learned an important lesson: “If you build a technology based on open standards, make it relatively easy to use, get it into the hands of indie developers and make it economically feasible to experiment with, the result is true innovation.” Their goal is entirely that: encourage indies to enter into what is traditionally a high-cost commercial endeavor.

Beyond the ‘free tech’ pitch, the other main component to the Multiverse concept is the World Browser. The World Browser is the basic client for any world built on their platform. Whether a free-to-play game or a commercial title, the World Browser will download and install the components required to play. The flip side to this is that developers can use the World Browser to share game elements with other projects. Games can share databases, art assets, economies, game design … it can even extend to having one avatar that you can play across multiple games. (Elves in Space?)

WIP

As a part of the product’s release, they are backing a program called ‘Worlds in Progress’. They’re highlighting two teams in particular, with more folks already working with the product.

Max Gaming Technologies is one of the teams, publishers of the pen-and-paper game Dark Horizons. They’ve always been fans of the MMOG genre, and so they saw within Multiverse the perfect excuse to ‘go for it’. Over the last few months they’ve built up a demo for a combat-heavy vision of the game. Towards the end of the year the game will move to a Beta phase.

The other team in the spotlight is a single-person team called ‘Doomsberg‘ based in New Zealand. He put together a fantasy title with an art style ’somewhat similar’ to World of Warcraft. As a way of showing what he was working on, he posted some screenshots to the Multiverse forums and received a hugely enthusiastic response in return. Bridges likens it to the open source community (though he takes pains to point out that Multiverse is not open source). The result was a number of people signing on with the developer to bring his vision to fruition. He now has several encampments, a city, and the makings of a traditional fantasy Massive game.

The official Multiverse website has not only the World Browser available for download, but a bunch of media covering the various games folks have put together.

Both of the featured games here are going into a Beta phase near the end of this year, and a few Multiverse projects are planning on releasing commercially around the same time.

The Bottom Line

Bridges says it best: “If you’re planning on spending tens of millions of dollars to make an MMO, that’s a Hollywood blockbuster. It has to be a huge mainstream success to recoup the expenses. What we’ve seen is this one genre, the ‘men in tights’ game, as the only successful way to make an MMO. With Multiverse changing the economics, building AAA titles for a fraction of the cost, we’re going to see experimentation and really interesting times for the folks who play these games. What we think is going to happen is not only the current market going to have a lot more choices, but there will be whole new types of users who will find virtual worlds that they may never have interested them before.”

We concluded our discussion by talking a bit about the sheer potential of the medium. Mr. Bridges sees the Multiverse platform as possibly being that ’spark of inspiration’ that move Massive games into the position that blogs and podcasts now occupy: second-generation ideas. Whereas the internet was originally just for web surfing, he says, things like blogs and podcasts have moved things into a whole new realm of interactivity. Multiverse hopes to do the same with Massive games, putting the power of creativity into the hands of not only developers but players as well.

My Take

Though travel and family were the primary causes of this post’s slow posting, I also took the time to go see out these worlds and get a feel for them myself. Given that this blog is generally geared toward the AAA subscription titles we see in gaming magazines and such, I hope you’ll understand if I’m not the best gauge by default for indie projects. I’ve voted on indie games before, but I’m a lot more snobby about MMOGs. (big surprise)

What I saw, though, was generally pretty interesting. That said, I‘ll be honest: the fantasy titles did nothing for me. All of them from Doomsberg to Black Ice Tales, from DarkBane to Islands of War, did absolutely nothing for me. I’ll say this as someone who’s a fan of mainstream MMOGs: indies, just don’t try. Don’t try to do a fantasy game. It’s not worth your time or mine to try it out. Everything you’re going to make is something I can probably find in a commercial game; even if it’s not, my friends are playing commercial games so that’s where I’ll go. Just don’t bother, please.

That said, the non-fantasy games were really interesting. Like, a treat. I really hope that the Max Gaming folks have success with Dark Horizons; it was a hoot and a half just to do a little bit of walking around. Mermaids didn’t work all that well, but get a load of this box text:

Mermaids is in an underwater fantasy world in which players are part of a new generation of an extinct mermaid, or merrow, society. Players must rebuild their lost culture and help restore the environment, while at the same time avoiding the fate that met their ancestors. Ruins and artifacts in the environment provide clues to both their history and culture. Players decipher spells from ancient petroglyph runes that describe hunting and net-making techniques. In conjunction with rebuilding their culture, players must also try to rebuild and regenerate a damaged ecosystem, and learn to interact with it in a balanced and synergistic way.

How can you not want to try something so downright out-of-the-park different? I know I couldn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t.

So hey, if you’re interest like I was, the official website has the World Browser and everything you’ll need to get set up. For a look at all the games in the works right now, the Upcoming Games page is like a hall of wonders.

I really have no idea how much success the Multiverselings will have in the long term, but in the here and now I’m really glad someone is offering this product to interested parties. One day we’re going to see a great game launch out of this platform; I hope I’ve got a Spot check high enough to see it when it happens.