Create your own MMO with ReWorld Online
Neverwinter provides players with a tool to create simple daily tasks. They were based on the principle that in order for the scenario to pass, it had to contain a certain number of monsters. As people are famous for their laziness, the most popular were arenas where the game simply threw us hordes of enemies, so that after just a few minutes the player could receive the prize. At the other pole there were long and complex scenarios. Searching for the kidnapped person and evacuating them from monsters? Check. Stealing a powerful artifact on behalf of a mysterious persona, who then brings annihilation to the city? No problem!
Thanks to a simple editor, players gave vent to their fantasy, and thanks to that great stories were created, which are a distinguishing feature against the background of twin titles.
What if we went one step further and let players create not only single missions, but whole games? This is what ReWorld Online is trying to offer. The goal of developers is to make it as simple as possible to create games in technical terms. You will not have to know any language, worry about hosting. You will build the game world simply from the prepared elements, and the whole thing will look like building with blocks. The only thing that will limit you is your own invention and artistic skills, read the interview, in which I had the opportunity to talk to the CEO of the project.
1) What is ReWorld Online about?
I will start with a quote from Ford.
“A customer can have a car painted any color he wants as long as it’s black” ~ Henry Ford, 1909
The quote is well known when it comes to marketing, but today we are at the opposite extreme. A good example is Oakley, which allows customers to customize their glasses on the Internet and make them their unique model.
We are following this path by creating a fully customizable universe from A to Z and will even participate in the creation of the necessary documentation to modify the game. Groups of players will then be able to customize their experience, their universe history, new spells, new races or simply new game mechanics specific to their server. A player could even modify the camera angle to create an experience like Skyrim, in coop with another story.
This is how the name ReWorld comes into its own.
This is about freedom, the liberty to do what you want both in terms of gameplay and in term of world. There will be no classes, the player chose where to spend his skill points, and even experience will be gathered over time so that the player doesn’t feel forced to fight if he want to play like a blacksmith.
2) Where did the idea for such a project come from?
By accident!
I was doing a MBA in business intelligence in Quebec and decided to learn how to code for the future and I decided to learn by myself by creating a game. It became a popular in less than 1 month and I decided to build a team around this idea.
My biggest inspiration is mostly Ultima Online with their private servers that was far better than the official world. So our plan is not really to create another Ultima, but to bring back that feeling of private world with 2019’s technology.
3) Will everyone be able to create their own world?
Yes.
The players will be able to create their own world procedurally. In the future we will create an editor to modify it details per details once the world is created.
We will bring up a ReWorld Community Hub so the community will be able to create their own mods like races, skills, spells or monsters to add in the game. Once the world is created, the players will be able to modify in without starting from scratch.
We don’t have the monopoly of good ideas and even if we are good, a community gathered around an idea will always bring awesome stuff.
4) What will be the opportunities for creators?
There will be many possibilities in the future.
First, ReWorld Online will be a free to play and we plan to get 30% of content created by the community. This is one of the ways we plan to monetize the project and it mean that every creator will earn 70% of the sales.
An artist could create shoes or capes (designs) and sell them in the community hub or in his world. A programmer can create classes, mechanics or new AI.
Or a small team could take ReWorld, create another game and sell it if they want. Every project doesn’t have to be a full MMO, it could be a simple single player RPG experience with a long story!
A sum will be paid to creators to encourage competition and better content. This amount will be distributed pro rata to the hours played in the world in question ($0.50 Adventure and $5 Hero per month). Our team, the content creator and the player will all win with this logic!
5) At what stage of your work are you?
We have started the project 6 month ago with almost nothing. As for today we are coached by the same team that helped Larian Studio in Quebec and Quebec is a great place for video game start-up.
So far we are very strong in the programming side, the combat feel like a MOBA, we are far on the procedural world and a lot of the concepts are ready in details. There is still a lot to do but there is nothing we can’t handle.
We plan to sell a version of the project in February called ReWorld Dungeon, a coop game based on the main project. It will be like our way of doing a Kickstarter campaign but we give a game instead of just asking money.
All the codes will also be used on the main project so it will not slow it down.
After that I plan to hire a bigger team to progress faster and give more content.
6) Do you think that your project will be successful? Why?
I consider ReWorld like a “risky” project. There are no games on the market with our concept so it is hard to really tell if there is a market for that. It is not like creating another WoW copy where we already know that the players want something similar. But this is for the same reason that big companies doesn’t go on the modding way and this is why we have to be the one to do it.
But I have more than 600 hours of gameplay on Terraria and probably as much on Skyrim because of the modding and the comments I see on the other medias even surprise me. People are usually cynical when new projects come out and so far, the players seem happy to see that kind of idea.
As for the success, I really believe that this concept can get very far. This is how we will get back that old Ultima Online’s feeling I’m looking for but we mostly depends on the community and the visibility. I’m glad because these days, they proved us that they want it and that is a huge motivation for our team!
