The Video Game That Will Change All Video Games

Some innovations have the power to revolutionize entire industries. Video games have steadily improved with advancements in technology, but the period of development between the last generation of console and PC games and the current one has slowed down somewhat. The improvements we expected to see are there, but they’re hardly mind-blowing.

Now, an incredible new technology may just be the revolution the gaming world has been waiting for. “The gist of it is, every single thing in the world is an entity,” says Henrique Olifiers, co-founded of Bossa Studios. “Every single thing is a real thing that is there forever, until someone acts upon it.”

This idea of truly persistent objects and worlds has been around for a very long time, but practical concerns have limited developers abilities to implement them. Especially in MMOs, most broken walls will eventually regenerate and bullet holes will eventually disappear. A player may interact with the environment but never truly alter it in a meaningful, non-scripted way.

No more, thanks to the technology that Bossa Studios and Improbable has developed for their upcoming MMO game “Worlds Adrift.”

The massively multiplayer game uses the SpatialOS platform, which harnesses the power of thousands of cloud computing servers to creative massive worlds with truly persistent features.

“With SpatialOS, millions of entities can exist in the same world simultaneously and persistently for the first time,” says Herman Narula, co-founder and CEO of Improbable. “That persistence is important. For a world to feel real, like the Matrix, actions need to have permanent consequences. Put simply, a broken window has to stay broken until it is fixed.”

Worlds Adrift is a massively multiplayer online game with a heavy focus on exploring and interacting with its highly persistent world. Every object can be moved or manipulated permanently.

If a player moves a rock, or leaves an object behind, that object will remain there until another player moves it. This scenario from PC Gamer’s article on World’s Adrift demonstrates the level of persistence SpatialOS allows:

“To demonstrate his point about ‘every thing being its own entity’, Olifiers offers an anecdote. Worlds Adrift is about exploring a fractured planet, and to do so players can build bigger and better airships. These airships are built from resources discoverable throughout the world, and each constructed component – indeed, every single ‘thing’ in the game world – is an object at the mercy of physics.

Engaged in a heated airship duel during a recent playtest, one of two engines on a playtester’s airship was blown off. As the engine plummeted, the weight of the second engine caused the airship to travel lopsided, dramatically impacting the team’s ability to shoot straight.

“‘All the players on that ship went to push the remaining engine overboard in order to straighten the ship, but they had built a ship where the walls were too high, so they couldn’t roll the engine off,’ Olifiers recalls. ‘So they had to point their own cannons at the walls and blow them off, in order to make room to push the engine off.’

“Later on, another player might happen upon the spillage of this encounter. She might not know what happened or when it had occurred – or even that it was the result of a showdown – but that’s the beauty of a persistent world.”