Metaplace Open Beta Launches Today

Last night at the in-game party in Metaplace Central, company-head and project-lead Raph Koster announced that the virtual world / game development platform, Metaplace, will be entering into Open Beta today as part of their “soft launch”. Metaplace, for those of you who are unaware, is a virtual world that allows users to create their own worlds within it. Users can create anything from social spaces, to small puzzle games, to more complex games, and even full-scale MMOs. While the latter most hasn’t been done just yet, there are projects set up to actually complete a game of that scale.

Metaplace runs in a browser. Just about any browser will do, as long as it runs Flash. It is also cross-platform compatible, although there are some problems with 64bit Linux and Flash 10 – really more the fault of Adobe than Metaplace, as near as I can tell. Currently, everything does run in a 2D environment, with the ability to display worlds in isometric, side-scrolling, or top-down view points. The platform is powerful enough that if you wanted to, you could theoretically create your own 3D engine through it, and even your own client software.

The platform takes advantage of being on the web, and certainly has learned it lessons from modern web trends. The web portal is quite powerful, allowing users to search for worlds, try them out, rate them, comment on them, and more. You can find like-minded people and friend them, like you could on any social network, leave comments on their profiles, and play numerous games with them across worlds. Effectively, Metaplace is a full fledged social network centered around the platform, and not a bad one at that.

Worlds themselves can pull in content from various web sources, including RSS feeds, videos, music, streaming media, and more. This integration allows for some interesting world ideas. As for actually building those worlds? Creating a simple social space is a snap and can be done within five minutes. You can spend some time painting the terrain and populating the world with objects, but none of that will take much effort on the part of the user, and no real technical background is necessary to do so.

For more complex worlds, Metaplace offers scripting in LUA to create everything from simple scripts to game systems. Everything from high sea battles, space shooters, classic titles, and more can be created through this scripting process. However, you will have to have an understanding of LUA to actually do this. The language itself isn’t very difficult and should be easy to pick up if you have even a small background in coding/scripting. Still, if you’re not well suited to the task (like me) it can be difficult to create new systems.

That said, the Marketplace is filled with modules, systems, scripts, and objects created by other Metaplace users. If you need something specific for your world and you can’t make it yourself, there’s a chance that someone else already has – the probability of which will get greater the longer the platform exists and users add to it. If you can’t create your own scripts, you can piece together modules to create your full game anyway, without ever having to write a line of code.

That’s what Metaplace is, but how good is it, and does it have a future? Well, I’ve been following the platform since it was first announced back in September of 2007. I’ve been involving in the testing for a long time, and I’ve seen the progress that they’ve made. If they keep up the pace they’re going at, I expect good things by the time it is actually, officially, released. To be honest, I’ve already seen some pretty neat creations already, and while it still has space to develop as an easy-to-use game development platform (admittedly, most everything is still pretty rough), as people learn the platform, develop newer and better modules, and have more time to tinker, I expect to see some pretty good stuff out of it.

It is a rather nice social networking platform with a very strong community, and it isn’t a bad virtual world either. It isn’t quite like Second Life, but it certainly isn’t like any MMO, or even like most every virtual world out there. It is an odd creation, but a very interesting one that is filled with a lot of potential – a fair amount of which is already being tapped into by creative users and a strong development team that has been very close to the testing community.

So, my verdict so far: should you jump into the open beta for Metaplace? Absolutely! I believe it is definitely worth checking out.