Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
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Category: New World Gaming
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Verve notes an intriguing experiment being showcased at game industry conference Gamescom — streaming a virtual world, Fortnite in this case from within Discord: Nvidia, Discord, and Epic Games have teamed up for an early test of instant game demos for Discord servers, which could theoretically let you immediately try a game without buying it,…
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Originally published on my Patreon — join for free to read more exclusive/early posts! The recent announced end of Dual Universe, a science fiction-themed MMO with incredible potential and ambition, dredged up a question I’ve been pondering since, well, roughly since Star Wars Galaxies was shut down in 2011. Specifically: Why is it impossible for…
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Well this is seriously sucky news: Today, we are announcing the closure of the Dual Universe MMO server. It is with a heavy heart from all of us here on the Dual Universe team and at Novaquark to tell you that the Dual Universe MMO server will be sunsetting on Wednesday, August 27th, 2025 at 14:00…
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MMO game designer guru Raph Koster just updated his venerable blog with a slew of screenshots from the closed beta version of Stars Reach, his upcoming sandbox MMO. (Which had a highly successful Kickstarter earlier this year.) The worlds themselves are created through procedural generation, and then the early player base is using the game's…
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Here's the latest demo video of the Quark engine from MetaGravity, which employs "causal partitioning" (more on that below) to enable single shard virtual worlds with massive concurrency. They're showing off that technology later this year with their own Minecraft server, which they say will be able to handle up 100,000 concurrent players. (You can…
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Above: Most successful AI runs, character type (Wizard-Elf-Chaotic-Male, etc.) the level at which they died, and what killed them Back in 2021, Meta (still Facebook at the time), sponsored an innovative challenge in AI programming: Create a bot which could win NetHack on its own. If you know the classic roguelike RPG, first created in…
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The cult classic Thief franchise is going VR! Courtesy Eidos (its original publisher) and Vertigo Games, creator of the award-winning creators of VR hits Metro Awakening and Arizona Sunshine, Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow is set for release on Quest, PSVR, and on Steam this year. I'm only surprised a VR reboot has taken this…
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I feel like people in the game/metaverse industry haven't grasped how huge Sky: Children of the Light, the virtual world from Jenova Chen and his studio Thatgamecompany, has become. In 2023 it had over 50 million monthly active users and earned a record for most concurrent users for a live virtual concert; based on recent…
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Seed, the highly ambitious MMO long in development, was conceived as a high-minded "rebuild society from scratch" planetary colonization sim, with players even able to create their own constitution. (Pioneering Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig helped develop the political framework for them game, the first MMO he's consulted on since advising Linden Lab on Second…
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Above: Daly in Stars Reach Matt Daly's early first-person explorations of Star's Reach, the sandbox MMO from Raph Koster and his company Playable Worlds, have been so intriguing (as featured here last week), I asked him to expand them in this guest post! – WJA The whole reason many of us work in Games and…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 