Second Life Opens Public Beta

thehossman writes "A friend of mine works for Linden Lab, and for the past few months he's been hyping their upcoming product: Second Life. I've just been nodding my head, and ignoring him, but last week he logged in and gave me a mini-tour of the VR world (and some things their alpha-testers have helped create) and I was blown away. Now they've announced their public beta, and if you've got a machine that can handle it, I highly advise you to check it out." This is another of the lifestyle-focused massively multiplayer titles that seem to have very big (venture capital?) budgets backing them - can they succeed?

Comments

Second Life, First Girlfriend? Last Job?

[Nathan Ramella]

Why is it nobody has harnessed the MMORPG model to get humans to do something useful. Like parsing, culling data or inputting data to get 'money' in the game.
If somebody would just come up with the right setup, they could get the 'Matrix' harness developed to use people as the engine for their business model.

Marketing people could test new music out in Virtual 'Bars' to see what people like, You could capture all the conversations and find out who's drinking coke and who's drinking pepsi..

And the instant gratification as you talk to someone in a virtual bar and a passer-by auspiciously mentions that the new poster on the wall can be purchased online at the following URL..
-n

Re:Free lifestyle-focused massively multiplayer ga

[Negatyfus]

What about Planeshift? It's a MMORPG in a fantasy setting and uses the CrystalSpace 3D engine.

In-game modeling/scripting

[JackMonkey]

I've been playing the beta for about a week now, and I'm blown away by the possibilities for this game.

Everyone has the ability to 3-D model objects and then script them to do whatever they want in-game. There are a bunch of pre-manufactured objects for you to play with, but you are free to build anything you can dream up. I've already seen guns, planes, pool tables, slot machines, skyscrapers, log cabins...it's really amazing how in-depth this world has already become.

Noise, Noise, Noise

[Chris Canfield]

The fun of Second life, and the major problem with it, is the freedom of creation. You build and script objects in the world, from simple benches to mansions to Soccer Balls to Casinos. The problem arises that the world has all of the beauty and serenity of a graffiti wall. My little house by the hill is surrounded by a dilapidated building consisting of four walls and a triangle, a TIE FIGHTER on a launchpad, a pole-shaped thingie extending several miles into the sky, and a floating billboard for a skin modelling company, among others. There is no stretch of land anywhere unclaimed, and there is very, very little that isn't loud, gawdy, attention-grabbing, poorly made, or some combination of the above.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm attempting to get away from: I live in a loud, attention-grabbing city, and would suspect that most people do too. The gameworld doesn't have the cultural feel of a city, with densely-packed space and open culture, but rather a suburbia with every parcel of land claimed and all of it wasted. But it has the dirty, technological, noisy feel of a city. Very few people bother to plant trees on their land, or go through any other sort of beautification with the surrounding environment. Even the people themselves can look like anything, from tiny little dwarves to pasty-white goth vampires to robby the robot.

It's not necessarily lunacy, but it *is* disconcerting. Without an external area that people go to fight in, ala everquest, there is just no large open space within which one can be alone, or free, or communal. You can hardly sit down without paying attention to who owns the bench. Everything is owned, everything is shouting for attention, and everything looks different than everything else. The old-west themed area is refreshing, following the pre-concieved notions of design and function allows for a user to rest peacefully in a cute little town and recover sanity, but other than that area the game is a big aesthetic mess.

I wish the Second Life people much luck and much success... But, in addition to a tremendous server upgrade and continents more worth of land, they need to deal with issues such as how to regulate freedom such that the activities of one person do not create a form of aesthetic pollution that makes things less enjoyable for their other paying customers. Perhaps pre-set texture sets for given areas? Or single-purpose areas? We will have to see.

BTW, I gave credit card details, and haven't been charged. They do that to prevent people from signing up multiple times, giving the free sign-up currency and the weekly in-game stipend to the primay character.