MetaPlace open beta is on
by Krystalle Voecks 
May 17th 2009 at 8:00PM
Filed under: Betas, New titles, News items, MetaPlace, Browser, Virtual worlds
Are you fond of world or story building? Maybe you're thrilled about trying your hand at creating items. Do you have an idea for a great game, but no place - or way - to design it? Are you fascinated by the concept of in-browser-only (not browser/spawn another app like FusionFall or Free Realms) games. Or maybe you're just the type of person who loves to check out new and interesting things created by other people. If any of the above sounds interesting to you then you'll likely want to pop over to the MetaPlace site and check out their shiny new open beta test! MetaPlace, designed to be a place full of infinite possibility where players can meet, game together, and socialize, has been in closed beta for quite some time. We're curious to see how this world evolves, considering Raph Koster's view on avatar rights to their own created property versus other virtual world platforms like Linden Lab's Second Life. Between that and the basic concept for MetaPlace, we suspect virtual world and MMO afficinados alike will be keeping an eye on this.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Thud said on 11:44PM 5-17-2009
User driven/created content?....I'm there!
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Thud said on 2:04AM 5-19-2009
ok...I'm hooked.
I've started to model some objects for my world. I've visited some pretty interesting and inspiring places. I've met some friendly players.
This is quite nice.
Dreamnuker said on 5:54AM 5-18-2009
Well i've been on Closed Beta since October, and i'm really facinated about what i've seen there. This platform is meant to become popular.
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Jay said on 8:26AM 5-18-2009
Looks like Habbo Hotel. Wonder if the pool will be closed?
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onetrueping said on 3:50AM 5-19-2009
After some poking around and some questions, here's the impression I came away with.
The place is meant to be used primarily by those who want to make small worlds or to socialize in a way that doesn't involve waiting for clients to install/update, or find 3-D too nauseating. The client is flash-based (which has its own drawbacks, including the fact that the page is always larger than the browser window and right-clicking doesn't work) and loads fairly quickly. Each area is a separate screen, with a limited maximum size of 40x40 tiles (or 20x20 if you don't feel like paying a fee), similar to the long-running massively social Furcadia. The integration of existing databases and search engines for creation of the "worlds" is a nice touch and makes the whole thing more usable for those who don't want to work from scratch, while the customized Lua scripting language is set up in such a way as to provide a heck of a lot of flexibility. The viewpoint can be manually set, as well as a few rendering options, by the world owner, increasing the flexibility of the tile-based system a fair amount.
The biggest drawback, in my opinion, is the limited number of "worlds" you can create. Since there are no multiple floors in Metaplace, the only way you can make a large, multi-story building is to string together a series of worlds with teleportation scripts. The limited number of worlds makes the practical setup of large areas for activities such as gaming extremely difficult and expensive, requiring the cooperation of a large number of people willing to put up the money to keep up large numbers of worlds for each account, and rendering such large projects vulnerable to members of such projects having differences and splitting.
In other words, great for small games, hanging out, and so forth, but not so much for those who want to do large projects. For them, Second Life is still the place to be.
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