Imagine booting up your computer to play your favorite online game with your friend, except he's in an airport waiting for a flight and you're at home in your office chair. You see a glorious 3-D world from the comfort of your computer monitor, and he sees a two dimensional isometric view from his hunched view over his mobile phone. You use your mouse to click your action buttons and fight monsters, and he just taps the screen with his finger. You're questing together, winning battles together, except you see the world entirely in 3-D and he's seeing it in 2-D.

If you're thinking that this scenario is entirely implausible, you would be wrong. MMO tools developer Multiverse has recently unveiled a sneak peek at their upcoming flash toolset by launching the flash based game Multiverse Battle.

Massively Speaking Episode 22 delves deep in the last week's worth of MMO news! Join Massively's Shawn Schuster, Samuel Axon, and Michael Zenke as they explore the length and breadth of a busy week in the massively multiplayer world. Discussion ranges from WAR to EverQuest 2 patches, back to WAR and on to the launch of Wizard 101. Then we return to WAR, for a side of Age of Conan. Did I mention Warhammer? Tune in for all the latest news from the front.

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Read below the cut for the full show notes.

Yesterday we brought you word that the folks at Multiverse (the developers of the MMO middleware) are in development on an MMO based on Buffy the Vampire slayer. At the same time, news came out the Firefly MMO will now be delayed considerably while they focus their efforts that other IP from writing dynamo Joss Whedon. Yesterday evening we had the chance to speak with Mr. Corey Bridges, Co-founder, Executive Producer and Marketing Director for the company. Mr. Bridges took some time out of his busy schedule at the Virtual Worlds Expo to explain a bit more about the Buffy/Firefly MMO hoopla.

Most interesting, it sounds as though (despite the lack of any announcements about it) there has actually been some forward movement on the Firefly MMO! Mr. Bridges could say almost nothing about it because of contractual obligations with Fox (the owners of the Firefly IP), but what he could say left us with the tantalizing impression we may actually see that Firefly game someday. Read on for all of that discussion, plus tidbits on why they're working on a Buffy title, a bit on what the game will be like, and the interactions between the 2D and 3D game spaces.

Are avatars that you create for the 2D experience be able to step into the 3D version of the game?

CB: That's exactly what we're planning for. We're showing it a little bit at this show, we'll be able to show you some of it in Austin at AGDC. We really want to make sure to show this game to people. One thing that I worry about is backlash from Firefly. We announced that so long ago, and people are going "crap, guys, where is it?" It was really important to us that we not announce Buffy before we were already working on it. Once bitten, twice shy.

Believe me, nobody could beat us up that we beat ourselves up about this. We're not at fault, but there are a lot of dashed hopes here. I wanted us to be in a public beta of Firefly here by now!

In an announcement to press today about the keynote address to this year's Virtual Worlds Conference in Los Angeles, the folks at Multiverse have announced a trio of new and interesting projects. One is a Titanic-related project connected to James Cameron, while another is the main connecting 'space' that will link all of Multiverse's worlds - a project called Multiverse Places.

The third is, apparently, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer massively multiplayer game. Multiverse, if you'll recall, is also the company that holds the license to develop an MMO based on the Firefly television show, another Joss Whedon fan favorite. While the Firefly title has now apparently been 'delayed', it sounds as though the Buffy title is already in development. From the announcement: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A massively multiplayer online game based on the critically-acclaimed Joss Whedon television series. Currently under development at Multiverse, 'Buffy' exemplifies a new era of game design, allowing consumers to play it either as a fully immersive 3D environment or as a Flash-based 2D game."

The full announcement is available below the cut.

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	Be sure to check out our exclusive interview with Corey Bridges of Multiverse for plenty of details on the project!

It's been about a year and a half since Wired reported that the Firefly license would be MMO-ized by Multiverse. Since then, there's been a vacuum of news -- nada. The game is looking vaporware-esque at this point, but MMORPG nevertheless ran a feature article speculating as to what sorts of challenges the developers of the Firefly MMO will face.

The author goes through all sorts of possible approaches, from a Star Wars Galaxies-inspired ground game to an EVE Online-inspired space game -- even a mostly-social, barely-RPG, casual-type experience. We suspect the last of those is the most likely, if the game gets made at all. As the article notes, the project is not likely to have much funding, and while the audience is passionate, it's also small. That was FOX's problem, too. As we know, the challenges don't end there.

One concern MMORPG didn't bring up at all; Firefly was a character-driven series. Its setting was kind of interesting, but the characters were what made it all worthwhile. If Mal, Jayne, Inara, and Kaylee aren't a part of it, will anyone want to tune in? Turning this franchise into a successful MMO seems almost impossible. Regardless, Captain Mal Reynolds said "we have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty." If the folks at Multiverse pull off a Firefly MMO, that quote could be their mantra.

Metaverse development company Multiverse has announced a partnership with Vivox, the voice service provider for virtual worlds and MMOs of many stripes. Being able to provide integrated voice chat, 3D positional audio, presence, speaking indicators, and management tools right out of the box will be a definite selling point for developers who are interested in using Multiverse's platform to create their virtual worlds.

Vivox is keeping influential company -- other partners include Wizards of the Coast, IBM, metaverse developers Electric Sheep Company, and EVE Online's CCP Games. With strong strategic alliances like these, they're quickly rising to the top of voice provider solutions for the industry. Let's hope their grasp doesn't exceed their reach.

[Via Business Wire]

Corey Bridges, founder of Multiverse another player in the increasingly large virtual world space, had a number of things to say to Worlds in Motion about the announcement that Philip Rosedale was planning to step down as CEO and step up as chairman.

A sort of freehand summary would be, "Second Life can't deliver, and Multiverse can. So long, Philip, and thanks for all the fish."

Intentional or not, it comes across as unbecoming smack talk, basically.

Multiverse's Corey Bridges spoke at the SXSW conference about the effects digital distribution and the democratization of advanced development tools will have on the industries of gaming, social networks, and virtual worlds.

Gamasutra put together a great summary of the talk. The thesis: just as they are stripping the entrenched establishments of the music and film industries of much of their oligarchical power, new technologies will transform online gaming and virtual worlds. According to Bridges, virtual worlds are just getting started. "WoW is not a fad," he said, "it's a harbinger." Furthermore, the virtual worlds will be in the hands of indies, not the major conglomerates, and they'll be synergized with social networks.

Bridges also touched on the notion of a more splintered industry made up of smaller projects catering to lots of niche tastes, as opposed to the huge Hollywood-budget productions we see today. A while back someone said that it would take at least a $1 billion super project to take on World of Warcraft. But maybe, as it was with the Roman Empire, the wolves at Blizzard's gate will be countless smaller tribes made up of the so-called unwashed hordes.

Notable Second Life blogger and photographer Vint Falken has highlighted Mike Sutton's tutorial videos on moving Second Life content from Second Life to the Multiverse platform. There is quite a bit of work involved and the workflow pipeline isn't for the faint of heart. Only those with a solid technical aptitude are going to be able to follow the process at this stage. However, it is still in Alpha, and who knows? It could well solidify into a more integrated system over time. Obviously this only deals with meshes and textures - not with scripts or directly with component prims.

No object permissions apply to the system, since it only operates on what the viewer is generating for display on your PC, however, would-be content exporters should respect the rights of content creators and only perform this with allowable content.

In the waning weeks of December, we've already started turning our eyes towards the new year. 2008 is already showing a great deal of promise for the MMO community, with the impending release of Pirates of the Burning Sea, Wrath of the Lich King, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Though most of these titles are still a good ways away from hitting retailer shelves, we've already got a pretty good idea of what's in store, not just in terms of assets and information that's already been released, but also from hands-on impressions and beta testing. In other words, as excited as we are, there probably won't be terribly many surprises as it concerns these titles. They're practically a given.

As luck would have it, those aren't the only titles we'll be drooling over next year – this much we know. There are a number of games in development out there that have shown up on our collective radar screens over the past few months, but only as tiny blips. For the most part, they still represent riddles wrapped up in mysteries with a side of question mark. We've assembled a list of the top 10 MIA MMOs - those mysterious games that represent the future of the MMO... if only we knew what they were.

In the first part of this feature, we'll take a look at the first half of the list.

Matt Stone at ASU Web Devil (Arizona State University's online newspaper) has gotten a hold of some internal emails between ASU officials that indicate that they are testing a secret project (referred to as Myworld or sometimes Snow Crash), among strong suggestions that it's for Google and that it's in beta with a small number of students right now.

ASU is something of a poster-child for Google (who even have an office on one of the ASU campuses), and has been an early tester for assorted Google applications.

Back at the beginning of August, MMO/VW platform developer Multiverse released the 1.0 version of their Multiverse platform. With Multiverse, tools and platform tech is available for any team to build a world, from 3D chatrooms to game-based MMOs.

According to Multiverse, their platform has so far attracted 11,000 registered development teams/individual developers. Twenty-eight of those are featured on the Multiverse site, in both game and non-game genres from chat-rooms to victoriana.

World of Googlecraft? GoogleQuest? Pirates of the Google Sea? No, really. It could happen. Sort of.

Apparently Google isn't satisfied with how massive it is already; the tech juggernaut might be developing a virtual online world. Okay, so it probably won't really be an MMORPG per say, but it could be something similar to Second Life. Rumors of the project have been gaining momentum for a while now, and we here at Massively are laying out all the evidence right here for you to see.