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An Early Look at the NASA MMO
Big Download is running an article with details and screenshots from the MMO under development by NASA. The game makes use of Unreal Engine 3, and it's titled Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond. A demo is planned for later this year, and in 2010 they expect "the first episodic installment of the game" to come out. Jerry Heneghan, founder and CEO of Virtual Heroes, described it thus: "This game is going to be a fresh look at the future circa about 2035. ... The core of the gameplay is going to be people building up their characters and as you move forward, you will have more options unlock with new places to go, new equipment to use and new things to do. We are not so much focused on interstellar flight and all that entails... the gameplay is actually about being in a habitat on a planetary surface and doing things like mining Helium-3 for fuel, operating a hydroponics facility to grow plants and create oxygen and operating robots and vehicles."
I think it is an outreach thing, which for part of the Government amounts to advertising. Basically they are marketing themselves to future voters.
Maybe there is a lesson in this for other advertisers. Will there be a "Coca Cola" and "Tesla" MMOs in the future?
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Your share of the game's development budget will be measured in cents, unless you're rich. What's wrong with inspiring a generation of kids for that little money? I'd imagine many intelligent people went into aerospace after Apollo and so made our lives better far in excess of what was spent.
Will it have realistic physics? And by realistic I don't mean video game realistic, but actual rocket science physics like Orbiter has.
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Dunno, there are plenty of support staff in Houston who are fired up to the core for life, and I think that part of that fervor comes from exposure to "the astronaut experience" even if they don't get to go into space themselves.