A Tiny Team Of Nine Just Gazumped Everyone To The Metaverse With Zenith, An Impressive Fully Playable VR MMO
No need to wait for the future to find out if you're going to like inhabiting a massively populated VR world - It now exists.
With all of the talk about “the Metaverse” and virtual reality I must admit it was all beginning to feel a bit dystopian and, frankly, part of a far flung future I wasn’t sure I wanted. This sense that we’d be waiting a while came from the way Facebook (I’m not ready to call them Meta yet) was using renders of how their Metaverse could look. If Facebook are having to create mock ups then this stuff must be a way away was my feeling…
Apparently a scrappy independent game studio called Ramen VR didn’t get the memo because this weekend they quietly released Zenith, a feature complete massively multiplayer role playing game played entirely in VR (available on Rift, Quest, SteamVR and PSVR). I’m not sure what is more astonishing: That the game was made by nine people (of which only two are game designers) or that it delivers almost everything you’d want from a first Metaverse-like experience and then some. Check out the launch trailer to see what I’m talking about…
This is a glorious example of actions speaking louder than words. At a time when social media is full of scam NFT projects claiming to be building massively multiplayer Metaverses, this little team were quietly actually doing it for real, and here it is!
In my first three hours on Sunday afternoon Zenith let me create an avatar, choose a style of combat (essentially swords or guns), customise my look, run, jump, climb and glide around an expansive world, earn virtual currency by fighting goblins, go on quests, cook food and chat with randoms who were equally astonished by what they were experiencing.
After completing the initial orientation the game spits new players out into a lush grassy environment with a large mountain at its centre and various points of interests circled around it. It’s a nice hub and spoke design that helps keep players oriented, a technique Disney employs for its theme park layouts. The game uses spatial audio so as I began to venture out into the world and approach other players I would hear them making karate chop noises into their mics as they attacked enemies, some were idly talking to their friends or explaining to their spouses what they were doing. At one stage I climbed atop a large rock (by physically making climbing gestures with my hands). As I surveyed the area a group of five ran by and looked up at me, “Hey man, wanna come get some XP with us?” one asked. Taken aback I was uncharacteristically too shy to speak so I simply shook my head which my avatar duly mirrored. “Okay see you later!” said the stranger and the group ran off excitedly chatting amongst themselves.
The comparison to Disneyland extends beyond the world layout, it’s the general atmosphere that felt familiar, that buzz that lifts you up when everyone around you is excited at the same time and not quite sure where to put all their excess energy. I didn’t expect it, but that atmosphere fully translated to virtual reality and has gone some way to dispelling my broader Metaverse scepticism. It helps immensely that Zenith is, at its core, a good game. Most Metaverse mock-ups and promises look to be unfocussed and aimless, the kind of experience that game designers have spent decades learning to minimise and purposefully avoid. Mercifully, you’re never left wanting for things to do in Zenith. Quest givers are easy to find and enemies to fight are never more than twenty feet away, the socialising aspect is icing on the cake rather than the cake itself.
Zenith seems to be finding an audience. The game launched this weekend and almost immediately found itself topping the overall sales charts on Steam. Perhaps this shouldn’t be such a huge surprise given that in 2021 more Quest VR headsets were sold than Xbox consoles, at least based on the publicly available data points…
If you have a VR headset I highly recommend you download Zenith. Its a little rough in places (particularly some of the UI stuff like the world map) as you’d expect from a team of Nine (for comparison World of Warcraft is run by 4,000+ employees) but on the whole its a promising actualisation of the Metaverse concept and a fascinating game that brings back the feelings I first got playing Phantasy Star Online as a teenager way back in 2001, and thats no bad thing.
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